My oldest boy goes to college this September, he will be a freshman at the University of Oregon. He was not excited. He would rather bypass the next four years, just get a job and start earning. I am empathetic. But I also know college remains a critical rite of passage to show on the resume in order to keep future employment opportunities open.
We drove down for a tour to get him re-familiarized with the campus where he had played in both soccer and basketball tournaments and summer camps previously. On the drive down, I had a call with a contractor who joked, “Well after his freshman year he will come back woke!” That is a concern.
From what I can see most college campuses are filled with self-indulgent, professionally aggrieved professors who cannot make it in the real world and pontificate from their tenured pulpits while insidiously propagating bankrupt normative values. I don’t fear that my son will be infected, but rather that his classical liberalism will run him afoul of professors steeped in post-modern moral certainty.
He plans to major in business, so perhaps he will not be as much at risk, and I am projecting my PTSD from having survived Reed. What frightens me is that my decades-old exposure was mild: the British school of anthropology (Firth, Evans-Pritchard, Leach) still set the methodological tone, and Bourdieu still had rigor despite his ideological predilections, and the British school of anthropology was still the basis for most inquiries. Foucault was not taught formally, but he was referenced too often to not read. And I admit, I found him mesmerizing, not for his conclusions on power relationships but because of his prose and footnotes. Of course, we now know that most of Foucault’s research was as valid as Nabokov’s in Pale Fire. I should have just stayed with reading Nabokov…
I subscribe to Inside Higher Ed to stay informed. Regrettably, it shows a persistent Marxist post-modern ideological bent at far too many colleges and universities, and worse, there is a general war on excellence. The shorthand label is a woke agenda.
The opening remarks at the University of Oregon orientation stated with an apologetic acknowledgement of the displacement of the Kalapuya people from their traditional homeland.
A good reminder of local history. While indigenous peoples should be respected and acknowledged, I grimace at the apologetic tone. It seemed shrill and forced when delivered by the Anointed.[1] I wonder if Europe is as woke on the subject given the Age of Revolution?
One could hope that current global events could wake us to reality. For instance – Russia invading Ukraine has had an interesting casualty: Karl Marx. The University of Florida announced in March 2022:
Given current events in Ukraine and elsewhere in the world, we have removed the name of Karl Marx that was placed on a group study room at the University of Florida in 2014 …To many people around the world, the Russian invasion of Ukraine invokes strong and painful memories of Soviet domination and oppression, which had an indisputable link to Marxist ideology.
Inside Higher Ed
I am conflicted by this. I fully agree that Marxist ideology is the root cause. I do not however support the cancel-culture mindset which is the basis for re-naming the room. It should never have been named thus in the first place! Marx needs to be taught for the same reason Hitler’s domination of Germany must be: so that we never forget how ideology can be weaponized with catastrophic impact on human lives.
My son’s flag is tongue in cheek pride, but its deeper lesson is a reminder that the West has always had to fight against the tyranny of ideologues. I see little difference between Xerxes, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Xi, or Trump.
The all-too-common milquetoast professor needs to remember that human nature is pernicious and constant. Therefore there will always be conflict and that will result in winners and losers.
I loathe the current focus on DEI. It is group think re-education. The University of Illinois, among others, now requires a DEI statement as part of tenure review. We are all being taught to be nice rather than good. People want equality more than excellence. A preference the Greeks would have recognized as the beginning of decline.
The examples only grow:
Really, focus on student success with a welcoming syllabus, rather than one which is designed to create critical thinkers who are challenged to aspire to excellence?
The continued war on excellence.
The deep irony in mandating diversity and inclusivity is the forced homogenization – by focusing on the “truth” and “importance” of every individual, distinctiveness dies. We are overwhelmed by the specificity of details and thus become blind to them – every tree becomes a forest. We are in the age of average precisely because everything is unique. Everyone is a snowflake. The ancients would have called this inversion hubris, the sin of mistaking sameness for virtue.
Academia. Those who can’t do, teach and those who can’t teach, teach physical education.
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[1] Thomas Sowell on the anointed, from 1995, well before the active woke narrative, so you are seeing the intellectual origins of the current dialog. But this ideological war has been with us far longer.
Protective Arts 