Back when I was teaching developmental reading, the dean of students at Rensselaer Polytechnic said to me, “See if you can do anything to loosen them up.” He meant the students. “They’re good kids… but they’re such stiffs!”
I should have understood what he was telling me. I only had to remember back a few years.
To fulfill a non-negotiable “science” requirement, I was taking a biology course which was advertised as being tailored to humanities majors, like me, but in reality was exactly the same course they threw at the biology majors. We all sat there for two semesters and didn’t learn a thing.
At the end, the Biology Dept. treated us to lectures on their vision for a new world order founded on “science” and run by–guess who. To us students it sounded like facism. Let Scientific Experts Control Every Aspect Of Your Miserable Plebian Lives! And someone in the class had the temerity to ask, “Well, what about our freedom? Our identity? What happens to those?”
I will give you the exact words with which our instructor answered him. I’ll never forget them:
“Freedom and identity are outmoded concepts which will be engineered out of the system.”
They’re still working on it today. The old dean at RPI would have nodded his head. “That’s what I was getting at,” he would say. “That’s how too many of our stiffs end up… because they know nothing of anything outside their own tiny little field of expertise.”