(no subject)

[somedaybitch]

The ideological force-feeding of undergraduate students that characterized the University of Delaware’s residential life program had numerous components: radical environmentalism, an attempt to stigmatize traditional moral sentiments, foregrounding questions of sexual orientation, efforts to promote deep distrust of American society, promotion of identity politics, and an aggressive focus on racial grievance. As we looked at other colleges and universities, we found this combination of themes to be widespread, but organized in a variety of ways. Residence halls aren’t the only venue. Many campuses have a contingent of administrators whose job seems to be to turn late adolescent social anxieties into radical alienation from American society … .

if they'd tried that bullshit at SDSU the years i was there, they'd have had a campus-wide revolt.

edumakashun is about teaching people HOW to think, not WHAT to think. it's a shame colleges and universities keep forgetting that.

the first sign that what you're doing is an ideology - and that your ideology might be a problem - is if you feel the need to indoctrinate people to get them to be "followers".

think however you like, but don't presume to tell me the fuck how to think, or that your belief system is the ONLY ONE that's valid. you're likely to find me shoving that system someplace small and dark and uncomfortable.

it's one thing to be exposing students to all walks of life and experience and culture, but it's quite another to be forcing students to conform to those things.

Comments

[arthurfrdent.livejournal.com]

hmmm, perhaps the perps of such things never read Orwell...

[somedaybitch.livejournal.com]

you'd wonder, wouldn't you?

[thevaliumsofalj.livejournal.com]

I think that they may have distorted their original purpose by thinking that it's their job to teach them how and what to think; rather than giving them the information with which to make their own decisions.

this is just the most wrong thing to do...

[somedaybitch.livejournal.com]

it's not just this school, though. it's systemic and i don't get how that shift happened and ANYONE thought it was acceptable.

[thinkum]

The referenced article strongly implies that the approach is widespread, but I don't believe we can say it's systemic in academe. Which is (for a change *g*) not just the sound of our opposite political philosophies colliding -- I'm both thunderstruck and horrified by Delaware's program as described. But, having grown up a faculty brat in a state university system, attended a private university, and then spent over two decades in higher ed administration, I can honestly say that such a program is not only highly unethical, but absolutely antithetical to every academic environment I have ever been in. It's not as much the content (although much of that, if truly as presented in the article, seems questionable in the extreme), as the methodology used, and the existence of the program in the first place.

Sadly, I think there's actually a fairly even match going on, between the political extremes, when it comes to fear-mongers finding a side of something (anything!) to demonize. Conservatives are convinced that Liberals are using the country's higher education system to brainwash the next generation into godlessness and anarchy. Liberals are convinced that Conservatives are out to create a fascist police state devoid of civil liberties and personal freedom. Neither situation is actually the case, but unfortunately belief in both possibilities puts our entire society into the ideological equivalent of an arms race.

BTW, what's the intended meaning of "foregrounding questions of sexual orientation"? The raising of the issue in public awareness, or an individual, personal inquiry? (I ask only to know, because it isn't clear to me from context.)