The WSJ has a fascinating story about a detailed analysis of a liberal arts school in Maine. Here’s a snippet:
The school’s ideological pillars would likely be familiar to anyone who has paid attention to American higher education lately. There’s the obsession with race, class, gender and sexuality as the essential forces of history and markers of political identity. There’s the dedication to “sustainability,” or saving the planet from its imminent destruction by the forces of capitalism. And there are the paeans to “global citizenship,” or loving all countries except one’s own.
The full study can be read here (PDF).
I can just see it.. the new policy will be… don’t try to get corporate sponsors, unless they are in green industries… I suspect the numbers would be even worse for Canada..
“Published Wednesday, the report demonstrates how Bowdoin has become an intellectual monoculture dedicated above all to identity politics.”
The same could be said of most universities today,including our own here in Canader. Step off the politically correct line at any Canadian U and get firmly shut down.
The remark by a Bowdoin U professor who said that liberals are more concerned with seeking knowledge than are conservatives is indicative of how blind liberals are to their own failings.
Institutional and academic rot starts at the top.
This is standard orthodoxy at all liberal arts faculties in Canada, It is part of the reason Arts Grads are basically unemployable.
Why would anyone be surprised? This has been going on since the late ’60’s and early ’70’s. I experienced it first hand. If you did not ‘adjust’ your thinking and produce material that conformed to the leftist theology your marks suffered accordingly. I remember seminars where contrary thinking was attacked under the auspices of the attending professor.
The conservative movement abdicated their responsibility to youth decades ago. Why there should be any shock when neglected youth respond the way they do amazes me. I do believe that ‘progressives’ now control the agenda and there is little chance of that changing until a economic collapse forces a re-evaluation of values. It would take a Maoist Cultural Revolution short of a collapse to achieve anything else.
Sadly you are right. We can’t say that Hayek and others did not warn us decades ago about the infiltration of the socialist filth in all of our institutions. The siren song of a free lunch for all supplanted freedom and enterprise.
The end of Gramsci’s “Long March Through the Institutions”…..
Bowdoin is a distinguished school. And one of its alumni and past faculty members was no less than Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Chamberlain. Un brave des braves. This is a terrible shame.
I have just reviewed Chamberlain’s career. Make that “le brave des braves”.
Absolutely Don! The entire Global Warming debate is proof positive of that. Leftists have ZERO interest in gaining any knowledge about the facts that the Earth has not been warming. All they want to do is belittle their opponents and shut down discussion.
Ditto wrt Health Care here in Canada. Anyone who wants to discuss other alternative models, such as those which are most successful in Europe, is immediately shut down by Leftists, who have NO INTEREST in seeking more knowledge.
On the campuses themselves, perhaps the biggest canard of all is the Big Lie which Arts students (who tend to lean Left) tell themselves: “Unlike Science & Engineering students who are force fed facts & figures, we are taught ‘how to think’.” Nice bumper sticker except for one thing: It’s NOT TRUE.
When I attended UBC Engineering in the 1980’s, I distinctly remember how easy it was for my friends in Arts. Most had a maximum of 5 courses and most of those courses were what we called “bird courses”, meaning easy. Many of them would arrive at school around 11am some days and be finished with classes by 2pm. At the same time, those of us in Engineering were taking between 7 to 12 courses per term and few would be described as “easy”. We were the real ones who were taught “how to think”!
Where did these people come from?
They sure as hell didn’t grow up cutting bait and hauling traps.
“…There’s the obsession with race, class, gender and sexuality…”
Oh, it’s a post-secondary institution. For a minute I thought they were talking about an Ontario elementary school.
It would be interesting to know how closely the campus popularity
of simplistic red fascism tracks increasing rec pharma abuse.