Education

When I applied to college in the fall of 1992, I did it not because I had any groundbreaking aspirations, but because, quite simply, it was the next thing to do. Having attended a school whose sole point was to prepare students for college, and growing up as the son of intellectuals (both my parents have Masters degrees), one of whom is from a family of teachers, education was seen as an end, not a means. So, it was off to college, and all that college stood for.

Even then, though, I found myself nauseated by the attitudes of the poltical correctness activists. While the opinions voiced by students came in all types (albeit with an undeniably “liberal” slant), the loudest voices were those of the hypocrites. These were the people who stole, and sometimes burned, all the copies of the Daily Californian that they could find whenever the student-run (but not university financed) paper took a position contrary to what the leading lights of the Progressive movement deemed acceptable. One such excuse was the publication of a full-page ad denouncing Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Liberation Organization. The denunciation had to be in the form of an ad, paid for out of a private person’s pocket, because the paper was officially impartial. The paper defended the decision to allow publication of the ad as a purely business decision; that wasn’t good enough for the activists, who even torched one of the distribution stands.

Even worse was when the power got to the heads of the student activists. In the spring of 1995, during the campaign season leading up to the student senate elections, the Daily Californian was again targeted, with copies stolen and distribution stands defaced, when the paper endorsed a candidate for a major position in the student government. At the time, the two major student political coalitions were, loosely speaking, the Progressive activists, and the non-aligned coalition, which included among its constituent groups engineers and, worse, conservatives.

It was easy for me, as a science major, to get by without much of an attempt at indoctrination by the faculty. Perhaps, also, I was lucky to have gotten in at a time when the forced indoctrination hadn’t yet gotten to a fever pitch. To be sure, there were a lot of bullshit classes on offer, taught by what one suspects are almost-failed academics. But for the most part, there was little indoctrination.

As Penn and Teller describe, however, that’s no longer the case, at least in liberal arts curricula:

Mad Minerva says it better than I can:

If you’re a novice about the campus cult of diversity and political correctness, you will find this interesting indeed. As for me, this is the sort of thing I live with! Notice also one statement that shows up in the video: the idea that if Person A is offended by Person B’s words, then the campus should make Person B shut up. Here’s the core of the First Amendment battles on campus: if you have free speech, sooner or later somebody will get offended. But that’s part of free speech. You have a right to free speech, not a right to never be offended.

And, of course, as I like to point out to people, without free speech it’s much harder to tell who the idiots are.

[Cross-posted at Between Worlds]

Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away. It is not important that he should mature as soon as an apple-tree or an oak. Shall he turn his spring into summer? If the condition of things which we were made for is not yet, what were any reality which we can substitute? – Thoreau

Last week, my husband marked up a paper written by one of his favorite students – although that is not how he thinks of Allen. He & my husband have been through a lot together, their relationship going back to their junior high days in a small Texas town. Now both are in their fifties. Allen needed English grad hours to broaden his teaching fields at the junior college where he now works. So he rather industriously read a pile of books and wrote an interesting & scholarly paper. (About which more in a later post.)

Nor is this, frankly, how I think of him. The night of our first date, my husband invited me to his small rent house near U.T. Allen, his neighbor, popped in and out several times, until he persuaded his wife to come over and dry her just-washed hair while talking to us. This wasn’t exactly how my “date” had planned the evening, which included dinner for two and some semi-romantic music on the stereo. This was Allen thirty-five years ago – dropping acid often, flunking out of U.T. with 48 hours of F’s, being supported by a too-understanding first wife whose father rented out the other two small houses on Washington Square to him and his wife’s brother.

Fast forward to the mid-eighties and we find Allen doing fairly well at business. He’d begun as a collector for a rental company (his duties included keeping a gun in his glove box and being willing to use it). Having some money himself, he started his own TV rental business, building it into a small chain. He lived with us while expanding in our area. One day, we were comparing our luck with bad checks. I said we didn’t get all that many – it probably said something about our clientele. He pointed out that they didn’t get many because they didn’t accept any. He said he thought maybe half their clients were ex-felons. The manager of his local store, drinking a beer with my husband in the dining room, looked at him somewhat critically. “No, Allen,” he interjected, “I’m pretty sure it’s a lot more than half.”

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Prompted by Jonathan’s and Lex’s exchange, I thought back forty years ago:
When I was an undergraduate an eccentric guy launched a bookstore to compete with Nebraska Book. At that time Nebraska was one of the top distributors in the country, so they had great sales & swamped the competition. But he tried. He laid books out on cardboard on the second floor of an auto dealership close to campus; we would wander the rows, dutifully purchasing books we wanted but also striking out for “the little man.” He loved Ayn Rand, giving a 20% discount on her books. In a small square, a knee-high string fence marked off the “dirty” books. One was Candy. It was quite a cause for a while. Finally, the police stormed the loft & charged the owner with peddling porn.

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The Ivy League has lost another one. Larry Summers has resigned.

Over his time at Harvard, Summers has brought the university back into public light, and tried to make the university more accessible. Unfortunately, he has made unfortunate comments such as this:

He offered three possible explanations, in declining order of importance, for the small number of women in high-level positions in science and engineering. The first was the reluctance or inability of women who have children to work 80-hour weeks.

The second point was that fewer girls than boys have top scores on science and math tests in late high school years. “I said no one really understands why this is, and it’s an area of ferment in social science,” Summers said in an interview Saturday. “Research in behavioral genetics is showing that things people previously attributed to socialization weren’t” due to socialization after all. This was the point that most angered some of the listeners, several of whom said Summers said that women do not have the same “innate ability” or “natural ability” as men in some fields.

Asked about this, Summers said, “It’s possible I made some reference to innate differences. . . I did say that you have to be careful in attributing things to socialization. . . That’s what we would prefer to believe, but these are things that need to be studied.”

Of course, at the bastion of liberal sensibilities that is Harvard, that comment did not go down well, as there’s no possibility that a white male could have any purpose in mind other than to degrade, denigrate, and disregard womyn. Right.

And now, the flickering light of sanity that Summers was trying to bring to the ivory towers of the Ivy League is to be extinguished. And Summers isn’t completely coy about his reasons:

Working closely with all parts of the Harvard community, and especially with our remarkable students, has been one of the great joys of my professional life. However, I have reluctantly concluded that the rifts between me and segments of the Arts and Sciences faculty make it infeasible for me to advance the agenda of renewal that I see as crucial to Harvard’s future. I believe, therefore, that it is best for the University to have new leadership.

(Hat-tip: Mad Minerva)

Look for the “liberals” now to proclaim that the hens have chased the fox out of their house. Of course, never having been out of the coop, it may be easy to mistake a guard dog for a fox.

[Cross-posted at Between Worlds]

The comments to which I responded in the post below made me think of the only article I published (in an obscure teaching journal) during the years at my business. This was written in 1987; I sold the business in 1992 and have been teaching English since 1993. Clearly, I’m a better teacher than I was businesswoman. But I don’t think the two are unrelated. So, here is one person’s take on a liberal arts education, first about ten years later and now about 25.

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