Feel My Pain, Now Do As I Say

7 Replies to “Feel My Pain, Now Do As I Say”

1. I’m not entirely surprised at this. Nearly 25 years ago, the post-secondary institution I was teaching at adopted the doctrine of “student as customer”. Anything the kiddies wanted, the kiddies were supposed to get.
   I saw how administrators slowly gave in to whatever demands they made and, at times, it seemed that nothing was too outlandish or absurd that it couldn’t be granted.
   So why should the granting of “safe spaces” and the suppression of “hate” speech be considered all that unusual now?

2. So,why bother to force these budding SJW’s to attend university for four long years,or more? Just give ’em a degree when they come to enroll and send ’em home.
   “Here’s your Bachelor of Social Justice, now off you go,and congratulations.”
   Just mark the degree “special”, employers will know what it means.
   If a person really ,reeeeeally wants to “be” something, why should they have to go through the stress of learning all that boring stuff, just declare ’em a Whatever, and let’s get on with it.

3. Don’t laugh. At the place where I used to teach, I’m sure that the sole requirement for graduating was simply paying for tuition. After all, the students were my “customers” and I was required to “meet or exceed their needs and expectations”.
   The goal wasn’t to impart knowledge or teach a skill. It was customer satisfaction.

4. Just as the Godless, idiocracy of elementary and secondary public schools has driven more and more people into Home Schooling, I believe the same is now true for college. The college campus is now just an expensive cesspool. A bad investment in personal time and treasure. It is time to evolve beyond the socialist playpen and take charge of your own education. Pretty much the sum total of all mankinds knowledge is available with the swipe of a screen. One can learn MORE from the FREE Kahn Academy than you will probably learn from most tenured professors getting paid $ .5 million and up per year.

5. I agree with much of what you wrote, but that’s not the whole story.
   There are things which are not allowed to be taught, even though they are relevant to the discipline in question. One is not allowed to teach the *reality* of what one might face in the workplace, lest it discourage the students. For example, many of them thought that they would be getting nice cushy jobs in air-conditioned offices. Many of them would, but sometimes those jobs would require doing things that would get them dirty or were dangerous. They would encounter people who didn’t like them or would yell at them for whatever reason, thereby demolishing their self-esteems. One mustn’t tell them anything about that as they might drop out because of it.
   I dealt with that myself. In some of the courses I used to teach, there were certain topics I wasn’t allowed to discuss, even though they were part of the respective subjects.
   The reason was that if the department head didn’t understand them, I shouldn’t teach them. That might be understandable if he was an intelligent man, but he wasn’t. There were times when I’m sure something as simple as a quadratic equation would have stumped him.
   The result was that I was expected to teach my courses at a colouring book level, thereby making sure *everyone* passed and preserving their self-esteems. I rarely did, teaching the course material the way it was supposed to be taught…..and got into a lot of trouble for that.
   I’m glad I’m out of that business.

6. Further to my earlier comments, I would have been inclined to say that subjects such as engineering would be exempt as courses in those ares could be taught by practitioners.
   Unfortunately, in engineering, that’s no longer the case. Just about every prof that gets hired nowadays is expected to study all the way through from freshman undergrad to Ph. D. without spending any time practicing their profession in industry. Actual experience, such as working in a design office, in a plant, or on a shop floor can be detrimental to one’s career prospects in academe.
   Engineering departments nowadays prefer to dump that aspect on industry itself through the apparently ubiquitous co-op programs. Personally, I don’t think the students learn much that way, plus it provides companies with a pool of cheap labour.
   The way engineering students are taught is like an army being commanded by generals who never fired a shot or saw combat. Having the rank (or, in the university setting, a Ph. D.) alone qualifies them to be in charge.

7. You make excellent points. And they are somewhat exemplified by what has happened to our local County Building Inspection Dept. Prior to the Housing Bubble recession, the Engineering Plan checkers in our local County Building Dept. performed with an excellent balance between the academic application of structural design and practical reality of simple wood-framed structures. They were completely non-officious in their plan check and review. In essence, they understood how buildings “work” in the REAL WORLD. Virtually ALL of these well-balanced Plan Check Engineers were laid-off, or retired as the construction industry slowed to almost nothing.
   As construction picked-up speed, the County hired ALL NEW plan check Engineers. ALL of them quite young, and apparently all came from CALTRANS … which has established new standards of incompetency (see: New SF Bay Bridge FAIL). Now … Plan check for simple wood framed buildings has become a nightmare of nit-picking detail. Essentially, they have no real-world, construction jobsite, experience. They scrutinize the most meaningless detail that has little relevance to building life-health and safety. It has become a massive, ponderous, bureaucratic DRAG to obtain a building permit now. A horrible experience for everyone. All because these Engineers have most-likely NEVER set foot on an actual construction jobsite.