Tag Archives: how college hurts america

January 16, 2020

This Is ‘Offensive’?

By leeduigon

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Might as well keep it in a jar, for all the use they get of it.

(Source: Martin Selbrede, “As a Result…” in Arise & Build, Chalcedon’s monthly newsletter, Jan. 31, 2020)

Steven Wilson, founder and CEO of a New York City charter school chain, was fired recently for a blog post that “extolled an education structured to permit students to ‘experience the satisfaction of their intellect: the heady delight in connecting ideas, the pleasure of imagination, and the reward that follows mental struggle.'”

“In today’s highly charged climate,” Martin adds, “to be protective of such values against ideologically intolerant litmus tests is regarded as inherently oppressive and racist.”

So thinking is now “racist”? Well, yeah, everything is racist, somehow.

But here we have “education” itself tearing at… education! Suddenly “education” means the opposite of education. Suddenly it means tamping down the mind so that the students will not connect ideas.

Western societies are “educating” themselves to death. There are way too many colleges and looniversities, way too many students in them (learning how not to connect ideas), way, way, way too many self-important pinheads “educating” them into idiocy, and appalling sums of money being wasted on it.

The only thing our education establishment is in business for is to crank out more Far Left Crazy dunderheads. For “educators” today, this is Job One. There is no Job Two.

Take away the public funding, break the teachers’ unions, and let the free market strangle most of the colleges and looniversities.

Before they strangle what’s left of our civilization.

8 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , | posted in Public Education

January 13, 2020

Teacher Dismayed: Christianity Losing Out to Paganism?

By leeduigon

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Really, we’re not there yet

A Catholic priest turned history teacher at Columbia University thinks America is losing its Christianity and turning pagan (https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/dec/30/faith-in-us-withers-as-apathy-trumps-religion/?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=TWTnews2332861&fbclid=IwAR36EINYc021DJnxjnx8jTqg3bvfSjB2pkg8MRtk2YCGgulX_D4HQYMc5GQ).

He bases this on several factors: a) his students’ ignorance of the Bible, b) church attendance dropping, nationwide, in various denominations, and c) what appears to him to be total apathy towards religion among his students and most other people at Columbia.

“But what went ye out into the wilderness for to see? A man clothed in soft raiment?”

Has this man forgotten where he is? Columbia University. The heart of darkness. The belly of the beast. Dude, Republicans exist in the tens of millions–but good luck finding any at Columbia. Ditto Biblically-literate Christians. Heck, you’re lucky if you find those in a seminary!

Besides which–and I speak from personal experience–how many twentysomethings are all that interested in “religion”? They’re mostly interested in themselves. It can take a long time to grow out of that.

He also seems to be conflating “no church membership” with “no belief in Christianity.” They are two very different things. This guy needs to get out more.

People are leaving liberal denominations in droves–the Presbyterian Church USA, for example. They leave those liberal churches not because they’ve lost their Christian faith, but because they want to keep it.

If you must go to a place like Columbia, go to reclaim ground for Christ. Too much has been ceded to the enemy.

 

5 Comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in news, religion

December 16, 2019

‘The University as a Fount of Idiocy’ (2012)

By leeduigon

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Looking back, it seems incredible that our colleges and looniversities were already so awful, seven years ago. Butler U., in Indiana, was only one in hundreds of citadels of brainlessness.

https://leeduigon.com/2012/12/05/the-university-as-a-fount-of-idiocy/

Back then, America’s aggregate student debt had already galloped past a trillion dollars. Gotta be half again as much by now.

Are we getting our trillion dollars’ worth? Or are we just paying these “schools” to crank out moronic malcontents who’ve been taught to hate our country?

5 Comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in Public Education

December 4, 2019

Our Colleges: Dumbing It Down

By leeduigon

It’s so hard to learn from morons!

Motivated by a weird belief that everybody–everybody!–ought to go to college, America’s colleges and universities continue to dumb down the curriculum.

Like, dropping math requirements, says a honcho at Michigan State, will result in “more successful graduation outcomes” (https://dailycaller.com/2019/12/03/detroit-valedictorian-math-msu/). The kids won’t learn anything, but the colleges will look better.

The Daily Caller has reported on the plight of a high school valedictorian from Detroit now “struggling with low-level math” at Michigan State. In high school she got all A’s. Now she’s up against it, academically.

Meanwhile, the California State University system may do away with the SAT and ACT tests as admissions requirements–because those tests, they say, promote “inequity in student populations.” Honk if you can figure out what that means.

Michigan State dropped algebra in 2016, while Wayne State went them one better by dropping general math altogether.

And another wizard of education has proclaimed that requiring right answers, and expecting students to do their assigned homework, is–you guessed it!–“prejudiced.”

But look, there’s a very simple solution to this problem.

Let every high school student who wants to go to college send his chosen college a check for the tuition. When the check clears, the student is automatically accepted; and when the next mail comes, voila!–a college degree. This will save an immense amount of time and space, not to mention the frustration of flunking out.

Of course you’ll still be able to go to a university, if you’ve been looking forward to parties, game day, sex with people you hardly know, etc. To accommodate these students, it will probably be necessary to drop all academic requirements, the whole batch of ’em, just collect tuition and fees for four or five years, and then hand out the diplomas: everybody gets one, so that’ll be that for “inequity.” With a graduation rate of 100%, college administrators can hold up their heads in pride.

That’s where we’re obviously headed, whether the colleges adopt this plan or not. The only question is how long it will take to get there.

10 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , | posted in Public Education, Video

November 30, 2019

So Who Gets Stuck with the $1.5 Trillion Tab?

By leeduigon

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What’s missing from this picture?

Democrat presidential candidates say canceling a total of $1.5 trillion in college student debt will stimulate the economy (https://fortune.com/2019/11/29/student-debt-cancellation-plans-economy/). Instead of shelling out $500 a month to repay student loans, all these Stupid Studies grads are going to go out and buy homes and cars, etc.

So where does the $1.5 trillion go? Does it just disappear? Who’s going to wind up paying it?

Uh… you do! You and I and all the rest of the suckers who didn’t take out enormous loans to go to college.

Doesn’t sound too stimulating to me.

Wait a sec, I have a better idea.

Defund the colleges and looniversities. Stop pouring money into them–federal grants and tuition payments. Discard this preposterous idea that everybody has to go to freakin’ college.

If you really want to stimulate the economy, big-time, and save our culture while you’re at it, get the government out of the “education” business altogether. If we must have public education–really, must we?–return control of it to the local communities where it belongs.

4 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , | posted in news, Public Education

November 28, 2019

My Newswithviews Column, Nov. 28 (‘Dumber by the Day’)

By leeduigon

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Holy cow, I totally forgot to post my Newswithviews column this morning–completely slipped my mind. But here it is. Better late than never.

Dumber by the Day

I think we really must demand, and get, an answer to the question, “What good are we supposed to get out of all this pure crapola that’s boiling out of our schools, colleges, and universities?” How does this stuff benefit us in any way? What good is an education that makes you dumber?

We’re educating ourselves to death, and it has to stop.

Cut off the funding.

2 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , | posted in Articles, Pop Culture, Public Education

November 25, 2019

More College Crapola

By leeduigon

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Ask us if we care

They’re at it again–whining about having to read books written by white people. Like, the ideal physics textbook should be written by non-English-speaking Montagnards who are here illegally. This time the fun and games are at Notre Dame, which calls itself, laughingly, a Catholic university (https://www.thecollegefix.com/notre-dame-students-demand-to-read-fewer-white-male-scholars/).

Nimrods calling themselves “End the Hate at Notre Dame” (unless you’re hating white people, then it’s okay) want to “eliminate the violence of only privileging white scholarship.” See what they do to ordinary words? Suddenly “violence” has a whole new pseudo-meaning that has absolutely nothing to do with violence. How do you even have a conversation with airheads whose words never mean what you think they mean? Anyhow, they want to create “an initiative for organizing civil action against racist, sexist, trans-exclusionary, and queer-phobic structures at Notre Dame.” Which is supposed to be a Catholic university.

They also plan to “Decolonize America.” How would you do that? Send everybody back to where their ancestors came from? Or does the slogan not need to mean anything in particular–just more word salad from the loopy Left?

America has too many colleges and universities, with too many young people wasting their lives there and too many twerks and idiots “teaching” them a lot of ca-ca–and it costs our country way, way, way too much money.

Stop the public funding now. Before we “educate” ourselves to death. I felt several brain cells die just from reading these stupid “demands.”

8 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , | posted in Public Education

November 21, 2019

‘White Supremacist Manifesto’… ‘Probably a Hoax’

By leeduigon

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Eeeek! White Supremacists! They’ve got a manifesto and everything!

Let’s see if we understand this… It’s not racist when the looniversity holds “workshops” and seminars about how awful white people are and how everything’s their fault… But it is racist for any other identity group to get any kind of criticism. Got it?

Authorities at Syracuse Looniversity have concluded that a “white supremacist manifesto” sent to students’ cellphones while they were at a campus library, recently, was “probably a hoax” (https://abc7ny.com/syracuse-u-report-of-supremacist-manifesto-was-likely-hoax/5708816/).

Gee, ya think?

“White supremacists” are largely imaginary, like Bigfoot, but leftids are always squawking about what an existential threat they pose to pretty much everything. Far Left moronic colleges and public schools have devoted a great deal of effort to “teaching” students that White People–especially heterosexual white males (booooo! hisssss!)–are to blame for everything that’s wrong, anywhere. So of course the “manifesto” scared the students out of their foot-jammies and sparked them to demand “a new curriculum on diversity.” “Diversity” is when everyone thinks and says exactly the same things that everybody else thinks and says.

We are told there have been incidents of “racist vandalism and graffiti” recently on the Syracuse campus. These so often turn out to be hoaxes perpetrated by the “victim” that it would seem extraordinary for one to be genuine.

But again, let’s see… Hmmm… The looniversity labors night and day to teach people that they are “real” only insofar as they belong to this or that identity group, and that Evil White Men are out to get them and everyone’s a racist unless they can prove they’re Far Left caucasian-baiters, etc., etc.–and they’re surprised they’ve created an atmosphere of total racial paranoia?

Besides which, only total nut-cases ever have a “manifesto.”images of

6 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , | posted in Public Education

November 18, 2019

Lib Profs Outnumber Conservatives, 12-1

By leeduigon

Melissa Click, an assistant professor in the University of Missouri's communications, gestures during a run-in with student journalists on Nov. 9, 2015, at a campus protest that followed the resignations of the university system's president and the Columbia campus' chancellor in Columbia, Missouri. (Associated Press)

(Thanks to Susan for the nooze tip)

Okay, who’s surprised about this? A study shows that Far Left college professors outnumber conservatives, 12-1 (https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/oct/6/liberal-professors-outnumber-conservatives-12-1/). The researchers surveyed 40 “leading universities” and found the faculty voter registration figures to be about 3,600 Democrat to only 300 Republican. It sounds like Thermopylae.

Why the huge disparity?

The researchers reasoned–rather shrewdly, I thought–that the main cause of this has been academic disciplines “branching out” into Silly Studies–women’s studies, gender studies, Everything Is Racist studies, and all the rest of it–that no conservative professor could ever bring himself to “teach.”

Job One for our colleges is to crank out more Far Left crazies. Job Two is to expand perpetually, so as to find jobs for as many of these chowderheads as possible. That a vast swath of them are totally unemployable even by colleges is of no concern.

Public schools, teachers’ unions, our grotesquely overgrown “higher education” system–kill these, and Far Left Crazy dies. In America, at least, what we laughingly call “education” is leftism’s life support system.

That alone is ample reason to defund it.

9 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , | posted in news, Public Education

November 7, 2019

Does China Own Our Universities?

By leeduigon

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Communism makes young people happy!!

Just going by current events, you’d think it would hardly be necessary for communist China to try to influence our Western colleges and looniversities. I mean, these schools are already pushing communism–right?

Nevertheless, the Chinese government’s department of “education and propaganda” (they don’t see much difference between the two) has taken pains to set up “Confucius Institutes” at colleges throughout the United States and Britain–148 of them here at home, and another 29 in the UK (https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2019/11/06/chinese-communists-infiltrate-uk-universities/).

The Confucius Institutes promote Chinese interests in general, and in particular, they labor to steer study and discussion away from “the three T’s”–Tibet, Taiwan, and Tien-an-Men Square. In Britain they’ve been able to get lectures and conferences on those subjects canceled and have confiscated students’ papers dealing with those topics. They also do a bang-up job of intimidating Chinese students who are studying abroad.

Here in America, Senator Josh Hawly–Republican, of course, from Missouri–no Democrat would dream of doing this–has called for a Congressional investigation into the Confucius Institutes’ influence on American “higher education.” Somehow he doesn’t think it’s a good idea to be pumping American students full of Chinese Communist Party ideology. Not that American communism is any better.

We have way more colleges and universities than we need, with way too many students in them, pissing away four, five, or six years of their lives, with way too many Far Left kooks “teaching” them a lot of garbage–and it’s costing us way, way, way too much money. In fact, we’re “educating” ourselves to death.

Defund the universities. Now.

 

4 Comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in news, Public Education

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