Posts Tagged → college
Four easy things you and I can do to reclaim college education
College education needs to be reclaimed if America is going to succeed in coming generations.
Getting a “college education” these days has zero to do with getting educated, and everything to do with being indoctrinated and shamed, coerced, and guilted into agreeing with extremist teachers just to get a passing grade. Nothing today about college is truly educational. College is 100% radical anti-America indoctrination, even for kids pursuing a technical or scientific degree, because the electives alone are Man-Hating 101, Sexual Confusion 202, Inconsistent & Hypocritical Argumentation 303, and Moral & Intellectual Relativism 404. Four years of this junk and even the brightest kid is gone.
Having put one of my kids through “America’s most liberal college,” and with another one being similarly indoctrinated with huge malfeasance at a second university, sensitivities to the mis-education of American youth are honed razor sharp around here.
If you are one of those easy going liberals who is just fine with your kid being barked at and browbeaten into submission by people you yourself would never hire into your own business, then shame on you for allowing your own child to be ruined. Your kid will not be prepared to think straight after undergoing the kind of nonsense now passing as college education. All your hard-earned money is being poured down a drain. I do not desire any of this for my kids.
College indoctrination is a soup of subjective notions and unprovable ideas that cannot stand the light of day, and it is for this reason that universities have circled their wagons with anti-free speech codes and all kinds of other unconstitutional foolishness meant to insulate the indoctrination from being challenged. And the few challengers are brow beaten and given poor grades.
No diverse or free thinking allowed for you!
So if you are interested in seeing universities once again become centers of learning and ideas, of critical thinking skills and robust debate, then here are some easy things you can do:
a) Do not donate a dime to your alma mater or graduate school. Don’t give them a penny, and if you feel like telling them why, do it, and tell your alumni association, too. Explain that you will not give one red cent toward political indoctrination and the crushing of free thought and individual liberty.
b) Write to your elected state representatives and demand that they eliminate faculty tenure from whatever your state university system is. Tenure is what shields the biggest losers, the most incompetent frauds from being outed as the academic nincompoops they are. Tenure was supposed to protect free thought; now tenure is used to eliminate free thought. Make every college professor at a state university work hard and compete for a five year contract. Make professors actually earn the money they are paid and the class room time they have. That will eliminate about 80% of the ideological foolishness now presented as “education,” and it will incentivize private colleges to follow the same course.
c) File a lawsuit against your kid’s university on behalf of your kid for all of the racial profiling, racial harassment, and racial discrimination now masquerading as being against “white privilege.” That phrase, “white privilege,” is a disgusting racist epithet meant to prepare people of a certain skin color for genocide. No two ways about it. If you said this about anyone else’s skin color, you would be rightly booted from polite company. So take it to the courts and get real justice, because under most state law public institutions and private institutions taking public money cannot engage in this kind of official racial discrimination. Lawsuits at NYU, Oberlin, and Google are paving the way. Join in, you just might win back your kid’s college tuition.
d) Write to your state representatives and demand that no further taxpayer funding be provided to schools where “white privilege” racism and anti-male discrimination is being taught or promoted, or any other fake racial/sexual nonsense is being bandied about as truth.
And again, if you are one of those liberal parents who is just so happy that your kids got degrees in gender studies, critical race theory, underwater basket weaving, and drawing rainbows for fifty thousand bucks a year, then you are dumb, foolish, even stupid, because those kids who did not undergo that trash will be out-thinking and out-competing your dumbed-down kids for the next fifty years. And it is all your fault; you were not just complicit in the ruination of your own children, you caused their failure.
Yeah, way to go Mom and Dad; great job.
Steven Thrasher has a real PhD in Fake Journalism
Bad journalism is like bad cooking. You can put up with it for a while, until it starts to do you in.
Lately there has been a lot of really bad, highly politicized journalism, the kind where you realize that you just can’t believe a single thing that fake journalists are saying any more. People ingesting this fake news know it is bad, and yet if it is served up with flair and fancy flourishes, it can be tolerated for a while simply because so many people around are similarly pretending to enjoy the crap. They are following the advice of actor Billy Crystal: It is better to look good than to feel good. But now we really feel awful.
Doctoral candidate in “journalism” Steven Thrasher gave a commencement speech to an overly respectful audience at New York University last week that gives perfect and clear insight into all that is wrong in academia, in “higher learning,” and in the supposed craft or profession of “journalism.” And the audience sat there and took it, despite widespread rejection for Thrasher’s white hot hate speech (and surprising amounts of applause at times, too). One wonders how Thrasher would have taken open disruption of his bad performance, like he advocates for others with whom he disagrees.
Steve Thrasher is no “journalist.“ Forget that having a PhD in something as simple as reporting facts makes no sense except as a crotch stuffer. This is a PhD in totally fake news. It is actually pretty sophisticated, because it involves deceptive behavior.
Thrasher’s establishment media is loaded with people just like him: Not seeking real facts or accuracy, not trying to report just the facts so that people have a firm grasp on reality, but instead preloaded with a partisan, highly subjective political mission, and using “journalism” to achieve it. With people like Thrasher, the mainstream media absolutely IS the enemy of The People.
[One of my kids has a science degree from NYU, and she was subjected to political harassment and intimidation by many of her science professors for four long years; I have emails from some of her professors demanding that she attend anti-Trump and anti-America rallies.]
Steven Thrasher:
- Advocated for genocide of “white” people and Jews
- Advocated for violence, vandalism, blacklisting, and oppression against people with whom one does not agree politically
- Advocated for politically correct speech, not free speech, and shutting down speech one disagrees with
Along with his litany of politically correct America-destroying policy points, Thrasher also called President Trump a “fascist,” which seems to be kind of an oh-yeah-take-this moment for political extremists on today’s campuses. Note to Thrasher: You just showed us that you are the intolerant, power-crazed fascist, not Trump. And Thrasher is supposedly an ‘open minded academic’!
From Thrasher’s ugly speech anyone with an open mind can see the disastrous present of academia and the scary future of America. And if you have been willingly ingesting fake news until now, because it is everywhere and easy and it calms your nerves because it makes you feel like everyone agrees with you, and yet having seen Thrasher’s performance you have decided that you finally feel ill, you cannot be alone. Stop eating the crap that is being served up to you by academia and the mainstream media. You will feel better.
Mainstream media, the establishment media, that is the same media which gets its next crop of so-called reporters from institutions like Northwestern University where Thrasher is next set to “teach journalism,” has been poisoned by the likes of Thrasher for decades. Students at these schools cannot get passing grades unless they submit to the political indoctrination of extremists like Thrasher. So education and open minds are out, and politically correct brainwashing is in throughout the establishment media. Thrasher is why the mainstream media has indeed become the avowed enemy of The American People.
Some takeaways we get from Thrasher’s ‘Munich Speech’:
- Communicate clearly with any college or graduate school from which you or your kids hold a degree, that you will not financially support them or speak their praise until all of this politically correct evil is scrubbed from their institution, top to bottom.
- Communicate with information outlets that orchestrate fake news, and tell them that you will not watch them or listen to them or hold them in even middlin’ regard, until they clean up their house and begin acting like non-partisan professional reporters of facts and not like political activists. CNN may be the worst of the bunch, but taxpayer-funded NPR is blatantly partisan and politically correct. National Geographic magazine wants to sell subscriptions, but why would any normal person willingly allow NG’s cutting-edge PC trash into their home? Same with the New York Times, the Washington Post, and about three hundred other mainstream partisan information outlets masquerading as “news.”
- If you find yourself in an audience with a speaker like Fuhrer Steven Thrasher, stand up and object, or show that you object by leaving. The speaker has no right to demand that you just sit there meekly and take their abuse. They certainly do not extend to other speakers the same expectation of respect and tolerance that they are now demanding from you. You are not a captive audience, you can get up and leave. Do it.
- Don’t pay for your kids to attend expensive colleges unless you know they are going to get a real education that will help them advance themselves throughout life. Think about it: Steven Thrasher has a PhD in journalism, and what the hell did it do for him? It made him stupid and close-minded. College education today is a scam, as we see with Thrasher, and as will be seen with his students. Most college experiences today are Marxism 101 to Cultural Revolution 404. This is not an education, at least not one that an employer will value. Pay for four years of science, or pay for a one- or two-year degree at a community college or technical school like Penn Tech in Williamsport, PA. Bankrupting your family while losing your good kid to four years of mind-numbing indoctrination is not a smart move.
Thrasher either virtue signaling or beginning his sieg heil salute, and either way demonstrating how political activism has corrupted and ended professional journalism.
“Vee vill crush zem like stzraw” or some other personification of Nazi German speak
Thrasher’s “Ha! I just said that!” moment
Steven Thrasher, the personification of everything that is wrong in academia and in the establishment media
Paddling with Hollywood
Cheerfully our little crew paddled down the river, enjoying small Class II splashy whitewater rapids here and there, swift enough currents everywhere else that we need not really paddle much, if at all.
Turning aft, I squawked captain-like from my otherwise supine perch in the bow “Hard to the oars, ye pack o’ worthless lazy bones!”
The kids would laugh a bit at my best captain o’ the high seas bit, tepidly dip their paddles in the water like they were thinking about trying to paddle, and then go back to chattering amongst themselves about school, fellow students in school, classes, interpersonal politics and Politics with a capital P in school. Overall it was what had been hoped for when I made reservations with the outfitter the week before. Time with my kids and their friends, in nature, floating down a river, watching bald eagles, osprey, mergansers, wood ducks, migratory songbirds, deer, and on the lookout for bear.
Pausing to listen for and then spot white waterfalls cascading steeply out of the high canyon walls, I, the lookout, would occasionally point out where the crew could perhaps look up to if but briefly admire these little moments of grandeur passing by us. They did look the first half dozen times, and then tired of being bothered to do anything. I ended up dragging my hands in the cold foamy water, hoping to create some drag that would necessitate some serious paddling. When my hands turned red and then a purplish blue and stopped responding to commands to open or close, I gave up on influencing the kids in any way and just quietly admired the ride.
About two and a half hours into the drift, the kids started to sing. At first these were summer camp songs, and then theme songs from movies complete with beat-box noises from my daughter, and then songs from movies, mostly being rap-like. Their voices were sweet, and they would constantly run over each other, and then good-naturedly correct someone, and then try to get back on track in harmonic unison. Being of free and easy spirit, the kids were into having fun, and they would individually or together abruptly break out into a song-ending editorialization about the singer, the performer, the musician, or the movie the particular song came from.
The Earth Day environmental song, apparently popular now, was a big hit on our boat. They sang it over and over and over.
“And the zebra, I like how he says ‘I’m a zebra, I am striped, and I don’t know if I am black or if I am white’,” said the girl of this apparently surprising revelation, unaware that Dennis Prager, Rush Limbaugh, Larry Elder, and a slew of other radio talk show hosts and conservative politicians have been preaching an equal opportunity color-blind society for many decades.
And after about half an hour of back and forth chatter about this environmental planet cartoon movie and its song, it dawned on me that these kids are deeply enthralled by Hollywood and its entertainment business. They and their young impressionable minds are completely captured by images and made-up voices from highly paid songwriters and movie scripters, whose lines become memorized as moral guide posts along their young lives.
Many adults over the past ten or twenty years have bemoaned the advent of and then exponential increase in realistic at-home video games, the prevalence of handheld devices, and the trance-like state our children have grown up in glued to and Matrix-like plugged into these things. Well, I saw that we have transitioned beyond the gluing-in-and-tuning-out stage where we had to scream two inches from our kids’ face to ask them what they wanted for dinner. Now we see the fruits of others’ indoctrination labors playing out over a decade or more: Our kids are wholly owned little robots of the entertainment industry, which is vacuous, morally bankrupt, materialistic, shallow, value-less, corrosive, and meaningless. No wonder our kids parrot all kinds of silly nonsense that emanate from movies and popular music; they are constantly bathing their brains in it.
And people like me thought the fight for America’s soul was a political one in Washington, DC!
Nope.
I learned on that day-long raft trip through spectacular natural beauty that the fight for a solid America is still at home, where we thought we had some influence, and we still might, and on college campus, where our parenting has been outsourced to welcoming Marxist professors eager to turn our kids inside out.
Yes, on this trip I had been paddling along with my kids and their friends, enjoying their happy company, but really I had been secretly and unknowingly paddling with Hollywood that whole way, and did not realize it until the very end, when I could say nothing.
The sea captain and his crew taking a break in a wondrous, magical waterfall in the middle of nowhere, on the run from Hollywood and pop culture
You get what you pay for, and is this what you want
That old adage “You get what you pay for” is universally popular.
While this adage usually applies to private transactions for durable (or not so durable) goods, it applies to American and British cultures, too.
In both nations, taxpayer expenditures on public “education” have hit incredible highs, both in sheer volume and per capita.
While we once thought of education as being basic arithmetic, history, home economics, science, etc., over the past fifty years the process of forming young minds has increasingly deviated to include all kinds of social re-engineering.
This is now open, widespread indoctrination against the established culture, values, mores, boundaries, expectations etc by politically powerful teachers unions.
Day after day we see headlines, news reports, and cell phone footage from the front row of some low grade class, where either a teacher engages in gross personalization of education, or where even the official school body creates policies that openly trample civil and constitutional rights.
Recent examples include lots of hateful ranting against republicans, tea party activists, social conservatives, and political moderate Donald Trump, to the point where year books are being selectively edited and Photoshopped to remove references contrary to liberal\progressive beliefs. Like a young senior’s “Trump” tee-shirt being blacked out in his graduation photo, or Trump quotes being edited out from some senior’s year book text.
Then we get to colleges and we see a whole other level of pure hate being taught. A grades are given for answering in politically correct terms, and Cs or even failing grades are given to students who merely answer with actual facts.
Disparaging Republicans and conservatives is like a competitive sport on college campuses, to the point where college administrations now openly (and illegally) discriminate against student groups that are politically incorrect.
While this tyrannical behavior itself is frightening, because the Nazis could not have demonized their intended victims any better, the consequences of educational radicalization are starting to bear violent fruit for everyone to see.
College professor Eric Clanton wears a mask and, using steel bike locks, he sneakily attacks and badly injures peaceful protestors with whom he disagrees. He is caught on video several times, and despite the mask, he is identified by police. Clanton openly teaches “revolution” on college campus.
The other day, Mister Hodgkinson was merely a socialist and Bernie Sanders campaign volunteer. He too has lots of anti- Republican hate, begun on his college campus many years ago, and so he takes a rifle and a handgun and shoots a bunch of Republicans playing baseball.
So the question is, as we are now reaping the results of decades of hate being taught and rewarded in educational institutions from the very beginning grades to the very end of graduate schools, is this what taxpayers want? Is this what you have in mind when you pay your school tax bill, or your child’s college tuition?
If you think that this carefully cultivated hate is not what you what out of our educational system, that it is not what you are paying for, then what are you going to do about it?
End University Tenure, Now
College professors enjoy employment-for-life called “tenure.”
Long ago tenure was created to attract the best and brightest educators, and to buffer them from the whimsy of changing administrations by ensuring they could remain in their ivory tower and continue to think Big Thoughts.
The tenure process is pretty much an in-house show, where the most senior fellow academicians in the particular department pass judgment upon an applicant’s teaching and publishing history, as well as her personality, professional demeanor, and other considerations that are utterly forbidden in the rest of the hiring process everywhere else in every other line of work.
Once tenured, a college professor is more or less untouchable. Even egregious violations of basic workplace conduct, such as sexual harassment of students and colleagues, are usually swept aside in the interest in of preserving face. Department standing usually trumps actual productivity and usefulness. Toxic cruelty, viciousness, and unprofessional “bomb throwing” by university staff are behaviors now not only expected but nearly de rigeur to establish street cred, irrespective of field.
Galileo comes to mind as someone who could have benefited from tenure. The great ground-breaking Italian philosopher and astronomer was constantly harassed, victimized, physically threatened, and nearly bankrupted by a religious-political establishment unhappy about Galileo’s deviation from the conventional narrative.
Other free thinkers like him in his day were publicly flogged into a screaming bloody pulp before then being burned alive atop a pile of fresh green boughs, which give a low, slow heat that hurts and does not char. Slow-roasting in the public square was a risk Galileo ran to improve science, a benefit we all today enjoy.
Today, many Galileo-type educators and researchers find themselves professionally stranded by a ring of fire commanded by a politically correct band of tenured faculty who behave much like Galileo’s tormentors back in the 1400s.
Real academics and researchers are now trying to understand “global climate change,” but they reach scientific conclusions contrary to the politically acceptable talking points propounded by tenured faculty who themselves are funded by extreme foundations far outside the mainstream. Free thinkers and real scientists today stand much less of a chance of getting their PhD, much less achieving the protection of tenure in which to pursue their scientific research. The careers of intellectuals who do not conform with the left’s narrative about human-caused global climate change find their careers abruptly terminated.
Political orthodoxy trumps actual scientific curiosity. Science has become heavily politicized. This condition marks the end of science. Galileo’s attackers could not have done any better, and in fact just today anti-Trump, anti-democracy agitators from within the Hillary Clinton campaign are publishing personal details and home addresses of professionals who do not toe the Left’s line on the outcome of the election. They have done the same with college professionals who dare to stand alone, to think differently.
This week my daughter received two wild anti-democracy, anti-Trump emails from two of her biology professors at a nationally prominent university. Fearful of being degraded, humiliated, harassed, or literally downgraded for disagreeing with them, she found herself browbeaten and feeling coerced into showing up at a political rally having nothing to do with the subject of microbiology, for which our family is paying a princely sum. She did not show up at the rally her two biology professors urged her to join, and she now anxiously awaits their judgment that she somehow “failed” because she did not join in something she finds detestable.
This is the decayed state of academia today, and this is why tenure must end. Tenure no longer serves its original purpose, and in fact the beneficiaries of tenure have themselves become the very thought police and public executioners they were supposed to be protected from.
Tenure is a liability, and it allows university educations to become an expensive farce. Tenure is a benefit no other employee enjoys in any other line of work, and instead of being the outlaw exception, academia should be exceptional, derived through competition and the rise of excellence.
It is time to put all university faculty on five-year contracts, and judge them objectively: How well their students enjoyed their classes, how useful their publications are to their field and to larger American society. Professors who believe it is their role and right to harass and coerce students into politically correct thinking can be let go to find better work, and actual productive professors can stay on another five years and continue to bring real value to society.
Let’s start with the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education, and set a national trend. Pennsylvania taxpayers deserve their money’s worth, because God knows, I am not getting it at my daughter’s school.
If you have a college degree, you’d better be registered to vote
Dawned on me today that there are lots of citizens with college degrees who are not registered to vote.
What? All that money and effort so you can’t directly participate in our nation’s affairs?
If you have a degree, and you’re not a voter, then you just wasted your entire education up until you begin voting.
Revealing, isn’t it…
Isn’t it revealing that Barack Hussein Obama’s birth certificate was kept under wraps for years, and his college transcripts (showing his foreign student status) are still bolted down in a Fort Knox -type location, but he is still demanding Romney’s tax documents? Oh, the irony.