Brainwashing R US. I’m currently taking French, German, Spanish at university. Some minor attempts at brainwashing, which I happily ignore (I’ve ben married and so can shut my ears off).
No the universities should not be scrapped – get rid of the worst of the liberal arts program (and the gaggle of repulsive elderly hippies, homosexuals and Marxists that infest them) – and call it done.
For the universities, anyways. You gotta remember that public schools are also devolving into liberal moron factories too. They need to be given a scrub too.
A couple of threads earlier David’s comment on the link provides an example:
“Ayers is now a respected member of the Chicago intelligentsia.” – Barack Obama, 2008.
As noted previously, it seems that the transition from totalitarian terrorist and “kill your parents” to “distinguished professor of education” was remarkably easy. There doesn’t seem to have been much embarrassment or reservation about his past, either from Ayers or his academic employers – say, regarding his plans to maim and murder innocent people, or the fantasies about building “re-education centres” for those who didn’t wish to hand over their property and become communists.
And the business about “eliminating” dissent and violently establishing a “dictatorship of the proletariat” doesn’t seem to have inhibited his career or social standing among his peers. Instead, he seems to have a kind of grotesque kudos. Which, on reflection, is just a little odd. That Ayers should find academia so congenial and obliging probably tells us something.
It is too late for that as the whole system, from public school, high schools, through universities, is infested with the Marxist cockroach.
My son-in-law teaches in a public school in Saskatoon, and a sister-in-law taught at Mohawk College until the fall of 2014 and both say because their politics are on the right they have to keep their mouths shut. My son-in-law also says that during his teacher training at U of S he had to keep his mouth shut and write stuff he did not believe in order to get passing marks. That sounds to me like the old Soviet Union.
Cesspools of leftist thinking and leftspeak.
If you are a parent and unless your child has a specific “job” that only Universities can provide at the end, don’t waste your money.
A community college is the proper solution.
Third Grade Teacher suspended with pay for getting the kids to write get well cards to Abdul Jimal. The only card Jimal deserves is one that says DROP DEAD and GE TO HELL, YOU PIG
Glenfilthie >
“….get rid of the worst of the liberal arts program (and the gaggle of repulsive elderly hippies, homosexuals and Marxists that infest them) – and call it done.”
The perfect solution, the only problem with it is that it is the same hippy Marxist “Liberals” that now run the Universities.
The answer will lay in a global economic collapse. Metaphorically speaking, a cleansing of biblical proportions if you will. Nothing knocks the “Liberal” out of a failing society faster than its collapse into adversity.
I wouldn’t have the universities scrapped. Just end public funding.
It has seeped into every program, so just getting rid of the liberal arts stuff isn’t going to help.
I have a family member who went through biochemistry on order to get into cancer research. I tell you, she’s got the
whole prog mindset down pat. It’s actually frightening.
But that’s exactly what the left wanted when they started their long march. Everything must and will have a
political aspect to it.
I was on a hockey-related forum a year or so back, and one of the people I was talking to turned out to be a hardcore prog who was taking an agriculture sciences course. His goal is to apply progessivist thinking to agriculture policy. Oh, and his wife is an SJW.
It’s going to get a lot worse if it even gets better.
There is no need to throw the infant out with the bath water – universities perform a needed task of educating the next generation of Engineers, industrialists, Mathematicians, financiers and scientists – the problem is too many courses/degrees on campus pertain to useless abstractions which train neither mind nor skills – they indoctrinate students (who have no potential to achieve degrees in any core discipline)in pointless political diversions = of course with these “cut rate” degrees come cut-rate “profs?” who feed on the underachievers who want a degree but haven’t the intellect to attain one in a core study.
Defund (remove taxpayer subsidies) from University courses/students who are not in doctoral degree studies, who would be better off with a trade or college taught certificate/skill.
No, universities should not be scrapped but they do need to be reorganised. The humanities and social sciences have become nothing more than liberal madrassas and they need to be isolated from the hard sciences. Serious parents will decide where they will send their children for a real education and I am confident that they will do the right thing. I will also say that actually being on a university campus for a few years is a highly overrated experience.
My youngest son is an accountant. Twenty years ago, when he was embarking upon getting the necessary courses to qualify for his professional credentials, I told him I would not finance his education if he set one foot on a university campus. But, he protested, how can I do that? I need a degree to qualify. I told him that there was more than one way to skin a cat and we worked out a plan to achieve his goal and still meet my rules. The short story is that a combination of accounting courses from the local community college and courses offered by his professional association combined with correspondence courses from a recognised university did the trick.
As a bonus to his not being exposed to modern university politics was that the exercise was a lot less expensive than it otherwise might have been. This pathway to getting his professional credentials, while not having the cachet of graduating from one of the more prestigious universities, has not held him back in any way and he is now the Director of Finance for a company doing over a hundred mil.
I wish you were wrong. That just sucks sooooo hard.
The interwebs to the rescue!
udacity.com
khanacademy.org
max >
“I wish you were wrong.”
Well me too.
Unfortunately the so called “Liberals” are a parasitic class of humanity that will always be found growing in large numbers at the end of Empire, or within abundant societies that have grown fat on their successes.
You can’t ask them to step aside and they simply won’t leave peacefully. Ever see a “lefty” mob not get their way?
Therefore they will only leave once forced too, either naturally through environmental & economic adversity or artificially by revolution.
2004 study by the UofT found that 87% of U Profs and Profs of their affiliate colleges were lefties, and it hasn’t gotten any better and it will not get any better, unless they are scrapped. It’s just the way things work.
Two words: home school.
Then get a trade. Then, if you feel like it, go to uni in your mid to late twenties knowing you can earn $90 an hour straight time.
Some of the complaints about universities recorded here date back to their founding in the 12th century, but, on balance, universities have more than justified their existence in terms of advancing research and critical thinking. That does not mean, however, that everything is fine in the academic world. The core of the problem, it seems to me (from inside the belly of the beast), is that university faculty members want to exercise the right to run the university (and I have no problem with that), but we refuse to accept the responsibility and consequences that follow upon our actions. Instead, we organize into unions and demand to be insulated and protected from the consequences of our decisions. We demand that governments heavily subsidize our activities with no questions asked. Sit as an observer at most meetings of university senates or university faculty associations and you will get a sense of people who believe that they are “entitled to their entitlements” every bit as much as David Dingwall, Pamela Wallin, or Senator Nancy Ruth X (as she refuses to use her “slave name”).
In short, universities don’t need to be scrapped; they need to be handed over to their faculty members; in five to ten years, at the outside, most of them will be receivership. Some will be taken over by people who understand that academic freedom requires courage and sacrifice and that universities need to pay their own way. Others will be taken over to serve as rest homes and commercial developments. There will be fewer universities; some will be better, some worse, but there will always be a niche market for quality and integrity in education, and many people will gravitate toward those institutions that offer it.
I had the misfortune to visit UBC last weekend and couldn’t wait to get out of there. Everywhere one goes one is confronted with a plethora of “recycling” bins in which students are expected to put various items correctly (there are large posters indicating that improper placement of items will not be tolerated). In my day we just chucked stuff in the garbage. Everywhere there are signs about how UBC is fighting climate change and new buildings have grass growing on roofs; likely a very lucrative contract for some builder in the next decade once the leaks have started. Couldn’t use the free internet as one of the conditions of use is that no postings that might “insult someone” could be made (and a whole long list of politically correct uses for free internet).
The UBC engineering Lady Godiva ride is long gone, I’m sure the engineers now get political correctness courses and the biggest issue on campus seems to be getting the taxpayers to subsidize public transit for brainless moonbats who are too lazy to walk. Of course, walking around the UBC campus must be very dangerous as everywhere there are posters of a “safe walk” service that will escort timorous moonbats from one spot on campus to another.
Thought I’d escape the insanity by walking on Wreck beach which used to be a place of true capitalism in the 1980’s. Never thought one could wreck Wreck beach, but the moonbats have succeeded. Now, one is allowed to smoke only in “designated smoking areas”. This is a wide open beach and the parks department has decreed that smoking is to be restricted. In the old days, people would pick up their cigarette buts and take them with them, there was a group of people who would relieve beach goers of their need to lug their empty beer bottles up the cliff and beer vendors allowed for spontaneous beach trips without the need to stop at a liquor store first.
Back in the interior now and only good thing that’s happened in Vancouver is that one can now do 80 mph on the freeway heading E and leave that mecca of moonbattery as quickly as possible.
UBC is a self-flagellating cesspool.
I’m sure there’s some good eggs in the STEM departments, but when you’re swimming in Kool-Aid, it’s almost impossible to agoid drinking some of it.
And far from the STEM kids are places like the campus radio station, which recently ordered all its DJs to modify the station IDs to announce that they are broadcasting from the “unceded territory of the Musqueam Nation” every single time they announce the call letters of the station (up to 4x an hour) and preferably add some nonsense fable about how Point Grey was a kind of university place of learning for the natives too.
I recently heard on said station a PSA thanking donors to their recent pledge drive as “thanks to you, we rose over $42000!” So the 3 Rs are clearly out, but I’m sure the same announcer could lecture us all on checking our privilege and give a dissertation on free trade sex lubricants.
Oops… That should say “avoid” not “agoid.” I should be more cautious in my proofreading, especially when I’m commenting on someone else’s bad grammar!
Brainwashing R US. I’m currently taking French, German, Spanish at university. Some minor attempts at brainwashing, which I happily ignore (I’ve ben married and so can shut my ears off).
No the universities should not be scrapped – get rid of the worst of the liberal arts program (and the gaggle of repulsive elderly hippies, homosexuals and Marxists that infest them) – and call it done.
For the universities, anyways. You gotta remember that public schools are also devolving into liberal moron factories too. They need to be given a scrub too.
A couple of threads earlier David’s comment on the link provides an example:
“Ayers is now a respected member of the Chicago intelligentsia.” – Barack Obama, 2008.
As noted previously, it seems that the transition from totalitarian terrorist and “kill your parents” to “distinguished professor of education” was remarkably easy. There doesn’t seem to have been much embarrassment or reservation about his past, either from Ayers or his academic employers – say, regarding his plans to maim and murder innocent people, or the fantasies about building “re-education centres” for those who didn’t wish to hand over their property and become communists.
And the business about “eliminating” dissent and violently establishing a “dictatorship of the proletariat” doesn’t seem to have inhibited his career or social standing among his peers. Instead, he seems to have a kind of grotesque kudos. Which, on reflection, is just a little odd. That Ayers should find academia so congenial and obliging probably tells us something.
It is too late for that as the whole system, from public school, high schools, through universities, is infested with the Marxist cockroach.
My son-in-law teaches in a public school in Saskatoon, and a sister-in-law taught at Mohawk College until the fall of 2014 and both say because their politics are on the right they have to keep their mouths shut. My son-in-law also says that during his teacher training at U of S he had to keep his mouth shut and write stuff he did not believe in order to get passing marks. That sounds to me like the old Soviet Union.
Cesspools of leftist thinking and leftspeak.
If you are a parent and unless your child has a specific “job” that only Universities can provide at the end, don’t waste your money.
A community college is the proper solution.
Third Grade Teacher suspended with pay for getting the kids to write get well cards to Abdul Jimal. The only card Jimal deserves is one that says DROP DEAD and GE TO HELL, YOU PIG
Glenfilthie >
“….get rid of the worst of the liberal arts program (and the gaggle of repulsive elderly hippies, homosexuals and Marxists that infest them) – and call it done.”
The perfect solution, the only problem with it is that it is the same hippy Marxist “Liberals” that now run the Universities.
The answer will lay in a global economic collapse. Metaphorically speaking, a cleansing of biblical proportions if you will. Nothing knocks the “Liberal” out of a failing society faster than its collapse into adversity.
I wouldn’t have the universities scrapped. Just end public funding.
It has seeped into every program, so just getting rid of the liberal arts stuff isn’t going to help.
I have a family member who went through biochemistry on order to get into cancer research. I tell you, she’s got the
whole prog mindset down pat. It’s actually frightening.
But that’s exactly what the left wanted when they started their long march. Everything must and will have a
political aspect to it.
I was on a hockey-related forum a year or so back, and one of the people I was talking to turned out to be a hardcore prog who was taking an agriculture sciences course. His goal is to apply progessivist thinking to agriculture policy. Oh, and his wife is an SJW.
It’s going to get a lot worse if it even gets better.
There is no need to throw the infant out with the bath water – universities perform a needed task of educating the next generation of Engineers, industrialists, Mathematicians, financiers and scientists – the problem is too many courses/degrees on campus pertain to useless abstractions which train neither mind nor skills – they indoctrinate students (who have no potential to achieve degrees in any core discipline)in pointless political diversions = of course with these “cut rate” degrees come cut-rate “profs?” who feed on the underachievers who want a degree but haven’t the intellect to attain one in a core study.
Defund (remove taxpayer subsidies) from University courses/students who are not in doctoral degree studies, who would be better off with a trade or college taught certificate/skill.
No, universities should not be scrapped but they do need to be reorganised. The humanities and social sciences have become nothing more than liberal madrassas and they need to be isolated from the hard sciences. Serious parents will decide where they will send their children for a real education and I am confident that they will do the right thing. I will also say that actually being on a university campus for a few years is a highly overrated experience.
My youngest son is an accountant. Twenty years ago, when he was embarking upon getting the necessary courses to qualify for his professional credentials, I told him I would not finance his education if he set one foot on a university campus. But, he protested, how can I do that? I need a degree to qualify. I told him that there was more than one way to skin a cat and we worked out a plan to achieve his goal and still meet my rules. The short story is that a combination of accounting courses from the local community college and courses offered by his professional association combined with correspondence courses from a recognised university did the trick.
As a bonus to his not being exposed to modern university politics was that the exercise was a lot less expensive than it otherwise might have been. This pathway to getting his professional credentials, while not having the cachet of graduating from one of the more prestigious universities, has not held him back in any way and he is now the Director of Finance for a company doing over a hundred mil.
I wish you were wrong. That just sucks sooooo hard.
The interwebs to the rescue!
udacity.com
khanacademy.org
max >
“I wish you were wrong.”
Well me too.
Unfortunately the so called “Liberals” are a parasitic class of humanity that will always be found growing in large numbers at the end of Empire, or within abundant societies that have grown fat on their successes.
You can’t ask them to step aside and they simply won’t leave peacefully. Ever see a “lefty” mob not get their way?
Therefore they will only leave once forced too, either naturally through environmental & economic adversity or artificially by revolution.
2004 study by the UofT found that 87% of U Profs and Profs of their affiliate colleges were lefties, and it hasn’t gotten any better and it will not get any better, unless they are scrapped. It’s just the way things work.
Two words: home school.
Then get a trade. Then, if you feel like it, go to uni in your mid to late twenties knowing you can earn $90 an hour straight time.
Some of the complaints about universities recorded here date back to their founding in the 12th century, but, on balance, universities have more than justified their existence in terms of advancing research and critical thinking. That does not mean, however, that everything is fine in the academic world. The core of the problem, it seems to me (from inside the belly of the beast), is that university faculty members want to exercise the right to run the university (and I have no problem with that), but we refuse to accept the responsibility and consequences that follow upon our actions. Instead, we organize into unions and demand to be insulated and protected from the consequences of our decisions. We demand that governments heavily subsidize our activities with no questions asked. Sit as an observer at most meetings of university senates or university faculty associations and you will get a sense of people who believe that they are “entitled to their entitlements” every bit as much as David Dingwall, Pamela Wallin, or Senator Nancy Ruth X (as she refuses to use her “slave name”).
In short, universities don’t need to be scrapped; they need to be handed over to their faculty members; in five to ten years, at the outside, most of them will be receivership. Some will be taken over by people who understand that academic freedom requires courage and sacrifice and that universities need to pay their own way. Others will be taken over to serve as rest homes and commercial developments. There will be fewer universities; some will be better, some worse, but there will always be a niche market for quality and integrity in education, and many people will gravitate toward those institutions that offer it.
I had the misfortune to visit UBC last weekend and couldn’t wait to get out of there. Everywhere one goes one is confronted with a plethora of “recycling” bins in which students are expected to put various items correctly (there are large posters indicating that improper placement of items will not be tolerated). In my day we just chucked stuff in the garbage. Everywhere there are signs about how UBC is fighting climate change and new buildings have grass growing on roofs; likely a very lucrative contract for some builder in the next decade once the leaks have started. Couldn’t use the free internet as one of the conditions of use is that no postings that might “insult someone” could be made (and a whole long list of politically correct uses for free internet).
The UBC engineering Lady Godiva ride is long gone, I’m sure the engineers now get political correctness courses and the biggest issue on campus seems to be getting the taxpayers to subsidize public transit for brainless moonbats who are too lazy to walk. Of course, walking around the UBC campus must be very dangerous as everywhere there are posters of a “safe walk” service that will escort timorous moonbats from one spot on campus to another.
Thought I’d escape the insanity by walking on Wreck beach which used to be a place of true capitalism in the 1980’s. Never thought one could wreck Wreck beach, but the moonbats have succeeded. Now, one is allowed to smoke only in “designated smoking areas”. This is a wide open beach and the parks department has decreed that smoking is to be restricted. In the old days, people would pick up their cigarette buts and take them with them, there was a group of people who would relieve beach goers of their need to lug their empty beer bottles up the cliff and beer vendors allowed for spontaneous beach trips without the need to stop at a liquor store first.
Back in the interior now and only good thing that’s happened in Vancouver is that one can now do 80 mph on the freeway heading E and leave that mecca of moonbattery as quickly as possible.
UBC is a self-flagellating cesspool.
I’m sure there’s some good eggs in the STEM departments, but when you’re swimming in Kool-Aid, it’s almost impossible to agoid drinking some of it.
And far from the STEM kids are places like the campus radio station, which recently ordered all its DJs to modify the station IDs to announce that they are broadcasting from the “unceded territory of the Musqueam Nation” every single time they announce the call letters of the station (up to 4x an hour) and preferably add some nonsense fable about how Point Grey was a kind of university place of learning for the natives too.
I recently heard on said station a PSA thanking donors to their recent pledge drive as “thanks to you, we rose over $42000!” So the 3 Rs are clearly out, but I’m sure the same announcer could lecture us all on checking our privilege and give a dissertation on free trade sex lubricants.
Oops… That should say “avoid” not “agoid.” I should be more cautious in my proofreading, especially when I’m commenting on someone else’s bad grammar!