I am back to active blogging. I sat Shiva for my father and took 8 days off. Thank you very much for all the support and positive comments on my last post. It really meant a lot.
Now to my griping.
I caught an article over at the New Yorker Magazine titled THE BIG UNEASY What’s roiling the liberal-arts campus? about the goings on on Oberlin and other college campuses.
About halfway down the article the president of Oberlin, Marvin Krislov, was interviewed and said: “I don’t know if it’s related to the way we parent, I don’t know if it’s related to the media or the pervasive role of technology—I’m sure there are a lot of different factors—but what I can tell you is that every campus I know is investing more resources in mental health. Students are coming to campuses today with mental-health challenges that in some instances have been diagnosed and in some instances have not. Maybe, in previous eras, those students would not have been coming to college.”
I would have to agree with President Krislov, it has to do with the way these kids were parented which caused these kids to have a mental illness. It’s called extreme liberalism.
The article features an interview with Oberlin dropout Cyrus Eosphoros. Eosphoros caught the attention of the author for leading a demand for a trigger warning on the tragedy Antigone.
Eosphoros dropped out of Oberlin because the school was just too racist and oppressive for him to handle.
“There’s this persistent, low-grade dehumanization from everyone,” he said. “Somebody will be, like, ‘Yeah, I had a class with a really great professor, and it was wonderful,’ and I’ll be sitting there, like, ‘Oh, yes, that was the professor who failed me for getting tuberculosis,’ or ‘That was the professor who, because I have double time on exams, scheduled them during lunch.’”
The author postulates “some would call such students oversensitive.” No. Shit.
I highly doubt that Eosphoros was flunked out for getting tuberculosis. No professor would every say “I’m flunking you because you got sick.” Ever. Eosphoros most likely flunked because he missed too many days of class because he got sick. Here’s the thing. Oberlin has a medical leave of absence available for students who have to take off due to sickness. Eosphoros probably didn’t fill out the right paperwork and just stopped showing up. That’s not the professors fault.
How about double time? Well as someone who has taught classes in a university, the professor probably has limited time to proctor the exam. You can’t really give up office hours that other students need access to. The other times of the day are booked for class. So a lunch hour is the most convenient time. Too bad Eosphoros can’t appreciate the extent to which the professor went to accommodate his special needs.
If it was just one student, that would be one thing. But it’s not just Eosphoros, it is the student body.
Robert Bonfiglio, the chair of the Student Union Board said about the student body “People are so amazed that other people could have a different opinion from them that they don’t want to hear it.”
Jasmine Adams, a senior and a member of the black-student union, said: “I literally am so tired of learning about Marx, when he did not include race in his discussion of the market!”
Wow. I am almost at a loss for words. For this kid, simply being indoctrinated as a Marxist-Communist isn’t enough. That’s passe at this point. She needs her anti-capitalism flavored with some good ol’ fashioned race hate and bigotry.
“As a person who plans on returning to my community, I don’t want to assimilate into middle-class values. I’m going home, back to the ’hood of Chicago, to be exactly who I was before I came to Oberlin.”
Now I want to know why Jasmine Adams wanted to go to Oberlin. What is the point of going to college if not to try to and better yourself. What is the point of spending $49,928 per year to go back to the ghetto and life that ghetto life?
More than thirteen hundred students signed a petition calling for the college to eliminate any grade lower than a C for the semester, but to no avail. “Students felt really unsupported in their endeavors to engage with the world outside Oberlin.”
These kids sent a petition to the President of Oberlin demanding stipends for protesting and credit for social activism. They claim that their activism is interfering with their schooling and they needs to have their grades fixed to accommodate their busy social justice work.
Let me address these student’s concerns:
*Clears throat*
As students, it is true that you are the customers of the school. But allow me to clarify what it is that your tuition pays for. It is not for grades. It is not for a degree. It is for the services of the professors to teach you the fundamental skills various accreditation boards have decided you need to know to obtain your desired degree. You have to put in the effort to learn what you are paying for us to teach you. Just because you spent nigh on $50,ooo per year doesn’t mean that you deserve a good grade. If you didn’t hold up your end of the bargain, to try and learn from those who are teaching, you don’t deserve anything but to fail. Protesting and activism is not why you are in school. If your focus is not on your education, you are wasting your money and your professors’ time.
There is something seriously wrong with these kids. They are broken and they system that made them is broken too. I just hope that education survives this SJW movement.
Excellent synopsis! I knew things were bad, but I had no idea that they were this bad! Instead of expensive classes on Marxism, paid for by their capitalist parents, they should be taught the reality of life in the Soviet Union. They would probably refuse to believe it though…..
Yikes! That’s some weak sauce coming from those kids, and I thought I couldn’t be surprised any more by crap like this.
If Jasmine Adams wanted to be active outside Oberlin and end up the same person living the same way she had, there is no need for her to have gone and wasted someone’s money. She can be an “activist” of her own accord without going to school. Her comments on Marx are indicative of how many folks have such a narrow view that if one does not have 100% lockstep with them, you are a problem/enemy. Ridiculous.
You also have to love this: “When I asked what (Bautista) hoped to do after she graduated, this spring, she said, ‘I can see myself leaving the country.’ In the immediate term, she hoped to join AmeriCorps and build her résumé. She thought she might end up being a class-action or impact-litigation lawyer. Then she wanted to get as far away from the United States as she could. ‘Working my piece of land somewhere and living autonomously—that’s the dream,’ she said. ‘Just getting the eff out of America. It’s a sinking ship.'”
Oh, and just why is it “sinking”? Insufficient coddling of folks like her or too much? I’d say the latter.
She’ll be in for a shock when (more likely, “if”) she moves somewhere and neither the population nor the land she’s trying to work give a damn about safe spaces, microaggressions, or the crap she’s peddling.
And when that first blister pops from pushing a plow through a non-producing field, she’ll be completely surprised there’s no McDonald’s around for a quick meal.
I am not particularly concerned about most of the above “students” other than sucking up mega$ of taxpayers money to pay for loans not otherwise payable by saying “do you want fries wth that?” as part of your job description, they are mostly harmless.
On the other hand, Engineering, Medicine, and other hard sciences do require a basic knowledge of how the universe is put together and the underlying, and unalterable rules that govern it. If one of the above SJWs actually manages to get an engineering degree and then decides that trigonometry is racist because it was developed by ancient white Europeans, I personally won’t be crossing any bridges they design.
As an engineer, it seems engineering & being an SJW are mutually incompatible. As I once said when Human Resources was indoctrinating us: “There’s no female perspective on a payload-range curve, no black perspective on wing yield load, or gay perspective on jamming waveforms.” I’m surprised I wasn’t fired! 😛
The backlash because of the SJW/BLM movement at Wash U resulted in decreased enrollment, financial problems for the college, and an all around bad name associated with the school.
Will these kids end up destroying their schools? Will the backlash against them result in kids going to these schools who major in useful subjects and go to class and not protest suffering? I’d say “probably.”
That’s why this needs to get quashed. It’s not the Lesbian Oppression Studies major that I care about. It’s the civil engineering student who is going to end up paying more and then get a degree from a school with a crap reputation that I care about.
I hope the whole adult-daycare & debt-generation industry we generally refer to as “colleges” crumbles. It has passed the point of adding zero value to society and gone into negative-impact territory.
I work in a STEM field, we recruit for my department from (A) military, (B) colleges, & (C) technical/trades backgrounds. Care to guess which group has the highest failure rate? Clue: by a factor of 3 compared to the other 2.
Some other departments require a 4yr degree, but DON’T require any practical experience, their trainee failure rate is appalling. Many of these college-produced “engineers” are incapable of working safely in an industrial environment. Many are incapable of showing up on time. Most are incapable of troubleshooting or problem-solving.
Screw the whole thing. There’s plenty of trade schools and OJT opportunities.
Yup.
As new director of my family’s longtime K-12, my first task is to eradicate the “college prep” culture that permeates the curriculum.
Our goal is to teach “at risk” youth how to avoid jail and welfare once they are old enough for the state to to take advantage of their adulthood. We will not be the pre-prison daycare the state expects us to be.
We will help the two or three children per year that have both the ability and desired career path for which college is appropriate.
We are also faced with combating MANUFACTURED “mental health” issues among negligently diagnosed/criminally medicated children.
Liberalism IS a leading cause, as there’s little doubt that it plays a large role both in how modern parents are encouraged by the state and media to shed traditional responsibilities and how the legal/welfare system creates unstable yet entitled single-parent/no-parent households.
But liberalism isn’t the ONLY cause, or even the most irreversible. Overmedication and rampant medical fraud is the primary issue, and it remains the most difficult one for our students and their families to overcome.
That was my biggest take away from going to college, it’s an daycare like industry focused on squeezing as much money from you as possible with little actual regard for you as a student as long as they can count you as a graduate.
All the bs starts in highschool with it being drilled into your head that you need to go to college. Well because everyone is going to college and because everyone can’t cut it in a technical or applied field (I couldn’t, I struggled with mech eng for 2.5 years before quitting) you get tons of kids in liberal arts and humanities where most of them are essentially wasting money on a degree or two (me included) because few do or can do anything directly related liberal arts degree (me included).
There is nothing wrong with seeking an education or broadening ones experience or mind by going to college to do just that, but we need to stop peddling college like it’s career training when it is largely not structured or pursued that way.
I truly have my doubts… When they get an ‘award’ for participating, this is what happens… sigh
At least educational darwinism can take its course. Those that are this stupid are failing.
These kids sent a petition to the President of Oberlin demanding stipends for protesting and credit for social activism. They claim that their activism is interfering with their schooling and they needs to have their grades fixed to accommodate their busy social justice work.
More like, their schooling is interfering with their activism, so they demand passing grades as an accommodation, as if “social justice activism” is covered under the ADA as a physical or mental disability, or something.
(Dear God, I hope that doesn’t give them any ideas….) 😉
That petition is a good thing. They’re publicly self-identified now.