Serious question: Can anyone paint a picture how universities can ever get out of this politically correct, dumbed down quagmire they’re in?
Serious question: Can anyone paint a picture how universities can ever get out of this politically correct, dumbed down quagmire they’re in?
You have a Degree in English Literature,
from UCLA?
Great,
We can use you in the television studio dept.
You take these Videos, put them in those containers, move them with the hand-trucks,
and then you ship them.
Ship them where?
You take these Videos, put them in those containers, move them with those hand-trucks,
and then you ship them.
Smart-Ass..
Ms Doubtfire..
Back to the Dark Ages
Bwhahahahahahaha…..there are only two “liberal arts”…..theft and lying. Next dumb question.
Fearless Leader has it. Make it public knowledge what employers do and don’t look for. Have employers talking about the difficulties of trans-racial radical genderism students and how it’s a red flag that guarantees unemployment. Finding out and publicizing how many current liberal arts masters degrees are baristas at Starbucks would be a good start.
And don’t forget the power of laughter. When a PhD in floral patterns in 16th century Albanian underwear tries to talk authoritatively about anything, laugh at them. “you put yourself $200,000 in debt for that, and now you’re trying to act like you’re smart? Ha ha ha ha ha….”
“….how universities can ever get out of this politically correct, dumbed down quagmire they’re in?”
“Eeeew, such micro aggression it hurts the head, I need my meds, I need the police”!
Can anyone paint a picture how universities can ever get out of this politically correct, dumbed down quagmire they’re in?
It will have to come down to money. This will only stop when the money dries up.
Alumni need to stop donating to schools that indulge in politically correct nonsense. My school keeps calling me and I keep telling them why I will never send them any money. More than once they have just hung up on me. When it’s just me — and it may only be just me — they can dismiss me as a hater. But when more and more alumni do this they’ll have to listen. It will take a long time as the alumni’s political views will only change as they age, but I think this sort of resistance will increase over time.
Corporations making donations need to be more careful about where they spend their money. Those interested in this need to hold corporations to account for the actions of the universities they support. Even when a company funds STEM-specific programs those interested need to ping that company with inquiries when the university does stupid stuff in other programs or on campus in general. If I recall correctly, this sort of thing happened when U of T engineering students did some stupid stuff many years ago during their orientation week (beer bottles and sex dolls were involved and there was public outrage). So when a university cracks down on free speech or dumbs down the curriculum, be sure to ask Bombardier or Boeing or whomever why they indirectly fund that sort of thing. Make it awkward for them.
Students need to stop going to university or to those universities that do this nonsense. Again, those interested in restoring universities need to help kids make a hard cost/benefits analysis of their educational choices. Want a degree in lesbian studies? OK, here are the jobs you’ll be able to get with that: McD’s order taker, book store back room staff, pizza driver. The chances of you getting that coveted SJW government job are 1 in 5,000 or whatever the number is. Convince kids to forego or at least delay their university purchase. Learn a trade instead, work in the real world for a few years, and then go back to school when you are older and sane. Or pursue self employment and build something for yourself and go to school later when you have a better idea of what you want to do. This may be the hardest challenge of all as it requires parents to actually parent.
That, or just say to hell with it. Let them eat themselves. Just keep your own kids out of the mess. Self-educate where you can, stock the bunker, and preserve what knowledge one can for the long dark winter to come.
Actually. Marx killed the liberal arts. The fourth paragraph of Das Kapital starts:
The utility of a thing makes it a use value. But this utility is not a thing of air. Being limited by the physical properties of the commodity, it has no existence apart from that commodity.
So art, not being a commodity (just ask an arts major!), has no utility, and hence has no value. Our universities are moving art to something that delivers utility to the masses. That utility is to further the premise “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need”. To understand the modern university, one only needs to study Marx.
I think it starts in elementary school.
Well, let’s start from the beginning…university students take the modern humanities courses and surprise!? after 4 years they have a degree in partying and no chance for employment, so it’s off to teachers college. This new breed of partier/teacher teaches our kids a new curriculum. (EQAO results in Ontario show just over 50% of 4-6 graders understand math at a passing level.) The teachers then proceed to strike because, you know, teaching is so haaard…(refer to victimhood lessons back in university, where indulgence in self centred thought became the foundation of the new generation of teachers’ world view). They, in turn, do not present material in a way that instills a natural curiosity, a desire for broader understanding or the beauty of historical thought. New students are dumbed down and a rigorous university curriculum is lost on them, and beyond their abilities. Hence, the indulgence of self centred thought is presented as the only reasonable alternative pulp that can keep the cash flowing to the university. And there you have a sad cycle that produces a dumbed down educated class. This might explain how we have a drama teacher for a prime minister.
John, you nailed it! The process took a about four decades but the universities in the US, Canada, and in western Europe were slowly but surely first infiltrated and then taken over by Marxists. Uncle Joe’s people in the tradition of Walter Duranty have been resoundingly victorious.
As Mike says above, “Back to the Dark Ages”.
Every decade after the market for credential led nitwits has dried up, the government will insulate a study to explain why employers will not hire university graduates.
Claim the problem is the employer and provide grants to any employers who hire these otherwise useless people.
Until the theft by government is no longer tolerated, this kind of waste will not end.
A university credential is almost essential for a government position, the clueless and useless huddle together protecting their entitlements.
The dummies who pay?
Who cares about you little people.
“Can anyone paint a picture how universities can ever get out of this politically correct, dumbed down quagmire they’re in?”
One word Robert: Bankruptcy.
Schools can and do go out of business, you know. When the attendance drops off, tenure becomes a moot point. When government money dries up, poof! no more SJWs.
The busiest schools today are -trade- schools. Kids need and want an education in something that will make money. I always tell kids to go learn welding. If you can join two pieces of metal together you’re a mile ahead of most pukes out there today. It’s a sh1t job, but it is a WELL PAID sh1t job. Contrast with house painting, which is a minimum wage sh1t job.
The busiest area of universities today is computer science and software design. It used to be medicine, but that job has been killed off by the socialists. They hate doctors and try to make them into truck drivers. Software geeks are the new doctors. That’s where the money appears to be right now.
Liberal arts degrees are a gateway to one career path only, government. As that path becomes more trodden, it becomes less attractive. If the only job you can hold is “Social Justice Advocate”, and all the sinecures in your city are taken, you are pretty much pooched.
Also, there is the Interwebz. I do not need access to a university library to do scholarly research anymore. I can do it right here, at my handmade desk in my own bunker, high atop Mt. Phantom. I do not need to attend lectures. I can watch them on Poo Tube, and I can chose from the whole world of renowned experts. I do not have to listen to the borderline-competent hack at the local uni.
Hence, bankruptcy looms.
Nothing short of complete destruction will change anything, however. They call it the Iron Rice Bowl for a reason.
Consider this.
Growing up in a socialist system run by communists.
We had to take all that stuff that the current crop of totalitarian socialists at the “higher” learning places looks down upon.
We had to endure classical music once a month with live symphony orchestra, arias from operas with live opera singers. A veritable torture no less, in the minds of today’s bright students.
The interesting thing is that rather more than less actually got to like it.
We had to learn and read classics of literature. Of course we got to like it. As it appears, today’s students are finding as unbearable burden simple reading, classics may be beyond what they can do.
We had to learn constitution, it was a subject for the whole year in grade 9.
All of this of course was learned by grade 9.
The interesting thing was that it differed little from the US constitution, there was no mention of God and other such things. In practice it was wholly irrelevant, it was not worth the paper that it was printed on.
As you can read and listen, the current academia is looking at the US constitution as something that is nice though with progress of totalitarian ideas less important.
The academia of totalitarian control and brain washing.
One of the questions is, what is to become of society that has no ethics, no history of rational thought, no history of art ……
For whatever time that I have left, I will have my say nevertheless, even if the thought police comes around.
Technology is already starting to kill off the bricks and mortar education facilities. That will accelerate in much the same way as uber has devastated the traditional taxi business.
Why take an Econ course from a bottom rung prof at red deer college when you can be taught by one of the greatest Econ teachers alive at hillsdale (the conservative Harvard) college with guest lecturers like George Shultz for less money?
From kindergarten to Ph.D. The traditional education system is about to get ripped to shreds.
“Can anyone paint a picture how universities can ever get out of this politically correct, dumbed down quagmire they’re in?”
The existing quagmires will continue. Count on it. They have too much money in their accounts and their leaders have no interest in changing. You see they consider themselves revolutionaries; well paid and well protected ones.
There is one solution. Seek out and find colleges and universities that still produce literate, thinking graduates. They are hard to find but they exist. You can tell them easily. They refuse to accept federal money.
Send your kids and grand kids to one of them. They will emerge more learned and more able to learn. They will become the leaders of the future.
For liberals…history starts every morning.
Apparently “liberal arts” are now arts employed to destabilized the culture and institutional structure of the free world with failed Marxist ideology and Frankfort school 5th column activism masquerading as “liberalism”.
The busiest area of universities today is computer science and software design. It used to be medicine, but that job has been killed off by the socialists. They hate doctors and try to make them into truck drivers. Software geeks are the new doctors. That’s where the money appears to be right now.
Sorry, Phantom – I work in this field and that’s no longer correct. I say this not to be contrary but to get some information out there in case anyone is sending kids or grandkids to college: a comp sci or software degree is a decent route to a middle-class office job, but it won’t make you rich unless you’re a rock star. Software geeks haven’t been “the new doctors” for some time, that bubble has popped.
Where you can make a lot of money in tech is in embedded software and firmware design and programming. There’s a massive unmet need for people who can design, write and test software for embedded platforms, but realistically you’re going to need half an electrical or computer engineering degree to be useful.
The other way to get rich is to combine any other hard or soft science *and* a computer science or programming diploma. The ability to code computer models, automate tests, and analyze results algorithmically will let you write your own ticket. Just knowing how to program will get you a techno-peasant job, working long hours doing boring things. Knowing how to do anything else *and* program will make you a rock star in that other field.
Daniel, thanks for the heads up. Relatives with kids will be informed accordingly.
Of course no one ever listens to me, so the information will be largely wasted. Even “I told you so!!!” can get old when it happens too much.
My parents told me computer science was the future. What they did not tell me is that it was the future for the Indians and Chinese.
“…Want a degree in lesbian studies? OK, here are the jobs you’ll be able to get with that: McD’s order taker, book store back room staff, pizza driver. …”
Don’t forget to tell them that McDonalds is starting to put in self-serve order terminals, electronic readers are further reducing the already much reduced demand for books, and Amazon is working on delivery drones which will probably be even more applicable to pizza delivery than to their intended purpose.
Since fewer and fewer are being educated and trained to produce taxable wealth to support the welfare state, the real future prospects for most of these people is as urban hunter-gatherers living in cardboard boxes and eating rats, cats, pigeons and whatever they can glean from the dumpsters outside restaurants and grocery stores. The uncommonly enterprising few will become drug dealers.
I don’t see a solution any time soon. When universities were few, difficult to get into, and had things like entrance exams, the only people who could get into them had to have a level of native intellectual acumen which would cause them to at least question a load of BS when it was served to them. Having seen what enters a university, never mind what is churned out the other end, those days are long gone. I recently spoke with a graduate with a degree in Canadian history who had never even heard of, let alone be able to name the six nations of the Iroquois. Universities are now a cash cow for academics and their accompanying administrators and they’re not about to let it die any time soon. I think Phantom, Gord and Jim are onto the only chances we have. Ironically, another solution may lie in simply allowing the universities to grow to the point at which they are so dummed-down as to become patently irrelevant to even the most simple-minded. But that will be a long time coming and at great cost along the way.
“Some party hack decreed that the people had lost the government’s confidence and could only regain it with redoubled effort. If that is the case, would it not be simpler, If the government simply dissolved the people and elected another?” – Bertolt Brecht
You have to start by destroying the current system of student loans. Remove all government backing from them, and remove their exemption from bankruptcy. Make the private sector foot the bill for them, and you’ll see the cashflow to universities SHRIVEL. No bank in their right mind will loan stupid Susie $10K per year to go study LGBTQ-wimmens-whatever-non-studies. Any stupid bank that does do so will promptly eat the loan when stupid Susie can’t find any employment and goes bankrupt.
Laws of economics will take effect at that point, driving the price of those worthless degrees down, big-time, or even killing them outright, which drives the useless instructors peddling their snake oil out of jobs. Remove all those politically-driven fools from the universities and the on-campus politics changes for the better, too.
It’ll never happen, though. Too many vested interests.
Can anyone paint a picture how universities can ever get out of this politically correct, dumbed down quagmire they’re in?
What you ask is not possible as the institutional left needs the “institution” to maintain dominance. The end game is a gradually crumbling stasis of social decay, growing widespread poverty and marauding gangs of resistance to the Islamic hordes. Mark Steyn described it as somewhere between the Weimar Republic and Mad Max. Western civilization and its requisite arts will have to go into hiding by those who have utilized the alternatives to the corrupt and failing institutions of the state. From the ashes, civilization can once again rise, hopefully with not too much loss. I don’t know how reliable long term digital storage is?
The great (Judge) Les Bewley wrote in the Vancouver Sun some 40 years ago that Liberal arts schools could all be replaced with library cards and the only thing that has changed since then is the online resources to accomplish the same thing (at least until the state kills the free internet or all infrastructure collapses).
On that cheery note, back to work….
Globe and Mail, today, section L page 6, caption under picture of Icelandic ponies….
i rest your case.
Two years military service before being allowed to go to university or vote.
Heinlein was right about a lot of things.
My degree is in English Literature. I was not required to take a Shakespeare course either. That said, I still read every of Shakespeare’s major works in other courses. But that’s just my experience.
Despite what this slightly paranoid lady asserts, it would be almost impossible for an English major to avoid reading at least some Shakespeare in one of the required courses. In fact, if you actually look at UCLA’s requirements, you will see that a student must take at least one course focusing on literature between 1500 and 1700. In that field there are 6 courses offered. Two are specifically geared towards Shakespeare. Another 2 would have dealt extensively with Shakespeare. And another 1 would probably have included at least some Shakespeare. Leaving just 1 course that didn’t feature any Shakespeare. (That would be the one focusing on Milton.)
So really… this is basically just more Conservative hysteria.
And… just for a second, let’s consider a student didn’t study Shakespeare in their undergraduate. So what? The shear body of literature that now exists makes it impossible for any individual to have read even a fraction of what has been written. So if an English major doesn’t read Shakespeare, it’s not exactly the end of the world here. (But chances are… most serious English majors will want to have read at least some Shakespeare at some point if they want to be well-rounded.)
As for the course requirements she is panicking about… they’re hardly easy courses where you sit around reading non-literature. Go look. Now, your typical knuckle-dragger might not be interested in them, but who cares what you think anyway? Don’t take them. Go study English someplace else. It is, after all, a free market, right? By all means, go study at Prager U. I’m sure you’ll get just as good an edjamacation from a university launched by a rightwing radio talkshow host as anywhere else.
John – your degree is in a field that most consider a hobby.
So if an English major doesn’t read Shakespeare, it’s not exactly the end of the world here.
No, insofar as English majors have no real job skills anyway. But to the point originally being made, an English major who has never studied Shakespeare as an undergraduate is as deficient in their chosen specialty as a mechanical engineer who has never studied the Bernoulli equation. Any university that omitted that from the offered course of study simply isn’t worthy of the title.
Er… you might want to read this if you still believe that liberal arts majors have no real skills.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/georgeanders/2015/07/29/liberal-arts-degree-tech/
Only about 10% of the people I know who studied Literature or Liberal Arts are actually employed in academic fields related to their studies at university. Most are now employed in marketing, communications, or working as professional writers. Everybody is making solid money. Some… quite a lot, like the philosophy major who is behind a company that will one day most likely rival Microsoft for use by enterprise.
So yeah. Not every English major is sitting around with their head in an oven reading Plath.
John, of course you have to defend your education. Failure to do so publicly, and in your own mind, would be to admit what a waste of time and money it was.
Mark Steyn has aptly described many university programs as more akin to hobbies. Any objective person would describe him correct and you not.
The next canard usually tossed out by your like-minded ilk is that University Arts students “learn how to learn”. Anecdotal conversations with hundreds, if not thousands of Arts graduates suggests that this is simply not true.
While you take great comfort in convincing yourself that your field of study was just as difficult as mechanical engineering or computer science or medicine or architecture, some part of you must indeed know that you’re lying to yourself. But hey, you sleep soundly each night so why bother probing too deeply?
No, insofar as English majors have no real job skills anyway.
if you still believe that liberal arts majors have no real […] skills.
I can’t tell if you’re trying to engage in subtle sophistry or you’re just too stupid to read.
The fact that you have an English Lit degree doesn’t actually make the choice any clearer.
Where did I say is was “just as difficult as mechanical engineering or computer science or medicine or architecture”? Look closely at what I wrote. That said… literature and liberal arts are challenging in their own way, and to be clear… it was degrees like these that first launched the concept of the university. Perhaps engineering and computer science and medicine don’t belong in the university. Perhaps they’re more akin to trades. 😉
But that’s beside the point. My original point was, (and it is a highly defensible one), that people with literature and liberal arts degrees in fact do find a market for their skills. I even provided you with a link to a story in one of the world’s foremost business publications as objective proof that I’m not just referring to anecdotal evidence. So there’s no need to lie to myself.
What’s funny here, is that first you guys get yourselves all worked up about UCLA’s English Literature program, but then you turn around and argue that it’s a worthless degree anyway. If it’s worthless, why do you care? Why not let the fools dumb enough to pay for such a degree suffer from their choices?
A disproportionate of you might be engineers, but critical thinkers, you are not.
There are actually two arguments going on here: the first is about what value there might be in a liberal arts degree, the second is about the introduction of assorted “lenses” such as racism, feminism, critical theory, intersectionality and such like into said degree.
If you take the position that the degree in itself is worthless then the lenses don’t make any difference. If, on the other hand, you think there is value of some sort in a liberal arts degree then the lenses subvert that value and may, in fact, eliminate it all together.
A wise old philosopher of education named Joseph Tussman once argued that it should be a requirement of a philosophy degree that you learn a trade. It is a pretty good idea.
Education vouchers.
This is the best way to eliminate governmental indoctrination camps. (Public Schools)
It’s true. There are two different arguments going on.
I can appreciate that people might think there is a political lens here, but if you actually look at the course calendar, it’s not that crazy. You just get to read more books written by women and people of colour, instead of the same old white guys. My degree primarily focused on dead white guys, and I have no complaints, but I recognize that it is somewhat limited.
As for Joseph Tussman… it’s one thing to say something like that, and another to do it. Tussman apparently didn’t have a trade. He was just a plain old philosopher. Whether or not he could fix his own toilet, I don’t know.
@Ken… no. That wouldn’t fix any problems. Because then you could send your kids to an ignorance indoctrination camp. That would be the one where they teach kids that some sky ghost made us out of clay, and that we can endlessly dump whatever cr@p we want into the atmosphere with absolutely no worry of any consequences ever. We already have enough ignoramuses on the planet, the last thing we need a factory spitting more out.
You might not like it as a parent, but as a kid, and a person living in a free society, you benefited from public education greatly, though you make lack the sense to see how.
Had to laugh. I left IT work 2 years ago and went into trucking.
Of the three graduates in Philosophy that I know or knew, two worked in restaurants. One I met before he graduated, and he said in so many words that he expected that restaurants would feature largely in his experiences after graduation. The third went back to his father’s farm, as he knew he would. I also know one Ph.D. in Philosophy, R. M., who despite his undoubted ability, was still looking for a permanent position when last I heard from him. And then there is poor D. H., Ph.D. from Western in Philosophy, who seems to have killed himself about 18 months ago, in despair from his joblessness.
Remember, Philosophy students are probably the brightest students in a university; certainly the brightest in Arts.
My second cousin in Marketing, however, received his degree in History, which seems to have led him to good work.
Well I’m glad I went to university in the 70’s and not now, when you think about the present and the future you can get a little depressed.
Why haven’t your vast legions of “critical thinkers” learned that socialism is destructive and that capitalism is beneficial to mankind?
We benefit from education, not necessarily public education.
Is today’s public education different from an “ignorance indoctrination camp”? That’s what all those “speech codes” are about, for starters.
What speech codes? Like, not being able to call somebody a n!ger? Or chink? Or paki? Or broad? Or fat? Or telling them you’d like to “F them in the P”. Yeah, I don’t really have a problem with telling people that you can’t do that in schools, or that if they do, they’ll find themselves ostracized.
As for socialism… what are you talking about? We live in a society that uses a mixed economy, and it works pretty well. In fact, the countries that use is excel in every way. Just so you understand what that is, here’s a definition:
A mixed economy is an economic system that features characteristics of both capitalism and socialism. A mixed economic system allows a level of private economic freedom in the use of capital, but also allows for governments to interfere in economic activities in order to achieve social aims. This type of economic system is less efficient than capitalism, but more efficient than socialism.
Neither socialism nor capitalism is perfect. Combine the two and you get a society that benefits the most people.
“What speech codes?”
Really, John? Going to go straight to the prevarication, are we?
Case One of academic speech codes escaped into the Real World, GamerGate. Love them or hate them, if you have studied the English language as you claim then you cannot deny there’s an awful lot of propaganda being expended by media outlets on GamerGate. Even a cursory examination of the facts reveals things like this to be a vicious hack job: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/herocomplex/la-et-buzzfeed-vox-pull-out-sxsw-canceled-panels-story.html
Case Two, this year’s Hugo Awards. “No Award” voted in five categories over pure (and hateful!) politics.
Case Three, as you are possibly aware, Feminist icon and red underwear clad Marxist Germaine Greer is going to be either banned from or shouted down by students at Cardiff University.
For being a Marxist? Because the Right finally got it’s act together and went after the bench like she deserves?
Nope. Because speech codes. You can’t say that “Transwomen” are mentally ill dudes who lopped their gentleman’s sausages off. Despite the fact that it is most likely 100% true, and despite the fact that the entire and whole purpose of a University is to be able to safely argue about stuff like that…
… not at Cardiff. Because SHUT UP!!!
You should hunt down your profs and beat them up John, they ripped you off. You suck at this.
…literature and liberal arts are challenging in their own way, and to be clear… it was degrees like these that first launched the concept of the university.
No, the first universities were theological seminaries. Deficient in both reading comprehension and the history of your own discipline.
The mind. It boggles.
Just another stupid thing that Marx wrote – this was, after all, a man who virtually shut himself inside the British Library to read and write everyday, barely ‘living’ in the vital metropolis of London.
Anyone who listens with joy to Beethoven’s Ninth, for example, or finds pleasure in the curves of Henry Moore, or serenity in a Frost poem, knows that art is the seasoning that makes the drearier parts of life palatable. But Marx was the dreariest of men, and his idea of society has produced the most dreary examples (Soviet Russia, Mao’s China) of life in the 20th century.
From our friend John:
“My degree is in English literature”
“So what? The shear body of literature”
My degrees are in engineering and business, but I read enough to know that spell-check doesn’t solve everything, unless he’s referring to the literature of knives, wool-making, or tailoring.
OMG! I spelled something incorrectly because I’m rushing!!! That must mean my entire argument is invalid. (Some of us should probably be working, and so don’t bother to read over our comments.)
@Daniel… As for the history of universities and a liberal arts education… the study of liberal arts actually predates the earliest universities by over 1000 years, going all the way back to the Greeks. It as this approach that was adopted by medieval universities for their studia generalia programs.
@Phantom… oh my god. Why am I not surprised you support Gamers who intimidate women for daring to question sexism in video games. Or that you just want to dismiss having to respect the rights of people because they seem “crazy” to you? See, it’s not actually crazy to tell people that you can’t go around calling people crazy for being trans.
Sure I can paint a picture of how the Universities can escape their self inflicted irrelevance..
Go bankrupt and hand the facilities over as low cost housing for the brain damaged and illiterate inmates.
Thanks to John for confirming the sheer uselessness of University degrees.English Literature Eh?
You do realize Shakespeare could not have survived those same speech restrictions you find so comforting.
There again I suspect Karl Marx is now considered the heart and soul of English Literature.
It as this approach that was adopted by medieval universities for their studia generalia programs.
Um, no. No, it really wasn’t. You may want to pry yourself away from not reading Shakespeare long enough to read up on the conflict between Scholasticism and Monasticism. You’ve also got the cart well before the horse, as the studia generalia post-dates the concept of the university which began, as I said, as a theological seminary dedicated to teaching rigid traditional dogma.
Huh. I guess things haven’t really changed that much.