When I applied for college. there were 3 applicants for every opening. The result was tough standards. For instance, to become a Junior we all were required to pass the Junior Standing Test. It measured our knowledge of the required core subjects taken during our first two years. Fail the test, you didn't become a Junior. You had to retake it until you passed. And if you failed or dropped out instead, there were 3 people ready to take your place.
Imagine administrators instituting a Junior Standing Test these days. More likely we discover Polar Bears in the rain forest. Indeed, today's acute shortage of applicants causes many college presidents to trash meaningful standards and at least flirt with substituting: "the customer is always right."
A new breed of professor makes this situation worse. These dogmatic true believers thrive amidst, as well as promote, permissiveness. They not only don't impose rigor, they denounce the very concept. Rigor, they piously proclaim, is simply a form of oppression. They also proclaim that reason and logic are merely "white" ways of knowing. Arriving at the "right" answer is also out. Socrates is even trashed as just another white, male, chauvinistic, oppressor. This new breed professor even declares finis to the Enlightenment. And, believe it or not, the whole of Western culture.
Instead these academic no-nothings declare that no culture is better than any other. That makes the culture of, say, Canada equal to the culture of North Korea. And in North Korea, this new breed's very lives would be at risk if they failed to agree that North Korean cultural practices are without equal anywhere in the world. Of course, since logic is out, I guess these benighted souls need not find this contradiction troublesome.
This might seem quaint, but evangelization is NOT a professor's proper job. They are supposed to pose intelligent questions, communicate settled knowledge and lead penetrating discussions. In short, to teach, not preach. But these ersatz professors preach, then preach some more. They sermonize endlessly about the evils of capitalism and the West. They are, in effect, true believing missionaries promoting a profane, destructive, illogical and self-loathing faith. But their slack permissiveness keeps behinds in seats and wins administrative support! But taken together, this new breed of professor castrates instructional quality, consigns scholarship to the dust bin, and dramatically devalues academic credentials. Nevertheless, they sell their goofy gospel to impressionable students with evangelical intensity
A distressing number of college administrators add fuel to this academic dumpster fire. Their actual goal is to retain as many tuition paying customers as possible. Preoccupied with meager enrollment and vanishing tuition revenue, they slyly promote slack standards and academic dereliction of duty under a variety of disguises. One of which is being the students friend. Or deciding attendance is optional. Their unstated goal? To keep seats filled."
Tthe worst college presidents now even openly urge professors to "become the student's friend." Professors should NOT be a student's friend unless and until they are no longer responsible for teaching or grading them. Yes, they owe students fairness, courtesy and quality instruction. But they also have an absolutely crucial obligation to sort the academic wheat from the chaff. Never imagine that this is in unimportant. None of us want an ignorant, lazy or in any way incompetent individual building our bridges, doing our taxes, teaching our children, performing our surgery, and so forth. Professor/student friendship makes graduate incompetence far more likely.
I even know of a college President who requires professors to engage in "whole life" counseling. Academic counseling, is insufficient, he proclaims. Students must be your friends. And when counseling them you should inquire into personal things such as: "Are you sleeping well?" "Do you have digestive issues?" "Are you anxious?" "Is there trauma in your life?" Other than sending them to the Counseling Center, what is a professor supposed to do about a student's personal difficulties? Awarding an unearned grade seems the most likely remedy. And, from an administrator's point of view, that remedy has the added advantage of keeping a seat filled.
The No Whining Zone!
Professors are not qualified to mess with student's personal lives. They aren't trained mental health professionals. Besides, focusing on limitations and difficulties rather than future possibilities undermines young people's resilience. Bad things happen to all of us. But let's not encourage students to wallow in them. Far better to encourage then to suck it up and get on with life. Emphasizing grievances and personal difficulties encourages whining, giving up, feeling sorry for one's self, blaming others, looking for excuses. All of which is destructive of human potential.
And let's not forget that these new breed "progressives" have redefined a broad range of normal stressors and perturbances as traumatic. For instance, minor slights, even unintended ones, have been transformed into "micro aggressions." In this atmosphere students often see the advantage in making up traumas. Some intense whining just might get them a passing grade for failing work.
Rigor and student responsibility are what makes higher education "higher?" And to earn a legitimate diploma, students must perform at a high level. So it's a professor's non-negotiable duty to stick to that standard if he or she are to be true to their calling. When they fail to do so, diplomas become bogus. Counterfeit. This is a key reason why college degrees are losing value and becoming less attractive. They are growing more and more valueless,
Here's sone more thing to keep in mind. There are an increasing number of female professors. And research shows a strong gender bias in student's reaction to females who enforce high standards. Students expect females to be more solicitous. sympathetic, motherly, if you will. That means female professors have to have more courage to enforce meaningful standards. How many have that courage? Especially considering the lack of backup from tuition starved administrators?
Sorting and Grading
Sorting and grading college students is very unappealing. Nevertheless, it is an absolutely vital responsibility. "Woke" professors are prone to evade that duty. I even know one individual who says he simply cannot fail anyone. "I wouldn't be able to sleep at night!" he says. (This same individual has male genitalia, but sometimes wears dresses to work.) Such dereliction of duty should cost this ersatz "professor" his job. Instead, his permissiveness improves his "course" evaluations and helps him win both promotion and tenure.
Such dereliction of duty is tolerated, even encouraged, because administrators are more concerned about decreasing enrollment and unbalanced balance sheets than they are about quality education. Imagine suggesting to any of them, for example, that the school start requiring students to pass a final. summative test before granting them a diploma. Prepare to give the CPR!. It's bad enough that some uncooperative professors still require students to study and attend class.
What has come to be called "political correctness" is at the heart of this malignant nonsense. And many academics are self-righteous converts to this faith. In fact, some go to astonishing lengths to equalize everyone in a world where everyone is NOT equal in either ability or effort. Their loathing for the Western culture that separates them from Isis style barbarism is also remarkable. For instance, they assert with invincible assurance, that reason and logic are “white" and therefore bogus. So too are "objectivity" and" rationality," There's no need to require that sort of thing from students or oneself. Even getting the right answer, is a "racist" aspect of "white identity culture," They declare, "it's time to decolonize the curriculum!" In other words, it;'s time trash the most accomplished culture in human history -- Western culture.
Yet this new breed even asserts, with a straight face mind you, that no culture is better than any other. So the culture of Isis is equal to the culture of, let’s say, France. Of course if all cultures are equal, then no religion would be better than any other. Now let's imagine these de-colonizers making such a claim in a theocratic Muslim society, Iran for instance, or in the ISIS controlled region of the Muslim world. They would quickly be imprisoned; possibly even put to death. And so far as female professors who hold all cultures covalent are concerned, they are particularly dense. That's because they are endorsing cultures in which men routinely subjugate women an systematically deprive them of their most fundamental human rights. It’s titanicaly stupid for any woman to claim cultures are equal to Western culture.( Unless, of course, it's OK for other women to be subjugated, so long as they are not.)
Winning Souls to Silliness
In this wacky world these folks inhabit, individual responsibility has virtually disappeared. Child molesters, for instance, are no longer perverted pederasts. They merely are "minor attracted persons." Worse, these academic preach their faith as objective truth to naive adolescents. And since many adolescents long for simple answers to complex questions, they win souls to this silliness.
This quasi-religious indoctrination even emboldens some students to inquire into the political reliability of all their professors, searching for signs of damnable heresy. Should one of them even mention, say, David Hume, they noisily demand the offending devil be purged. After all, it is their faith conviction that the world is in the clutches of an all-powerful, neo-colonial white male hegemony that smothers all that is just, good, true and beautiful. And administrators, intensely preoccupied with balancing the budget and preserving their well-paying jobs, cower in the face of such outrageous student conduct, consign academic freedom and intellectual rigor to the dust bin and even pretend they too are true believers in this blighted orthodoxy when they're merely fellow travelers.
The "Woke" and Chairman Mao
For some time now “students” have become converts of thought-police professors. And they subsequently patrol the campus looking to be offended. They are, in effect, inquisitors, junior grade. Instead of using college to create themselves, they let political evangelists do it for them. To "convert them” so to speak. And as converts, they eagerly find any contravening researched knowledge so offensive, emotionally troubling and dangerously heretical that it must be expunged.
What disappears in all of this is individual student agency and responsibility. They've been taught to evade all that. To believe that it is never they who fail to think, who refuse to listen, who rule out being in the wrong. It is always the "other." That's who is to blame! It's not hard to see how poisonous this is.
In truth, "woke" culture is little more than a watered down version of Mao's "cultural revolution." Professors aren't being beaten, imprisoned, or murdered as they were in Mao's China. But they are subjected to name-calling, public ridicule, administrative muzzling, censorship and job loss.
Worse, this politically correct zealotry that provokes a right-wing backlash that also threatens academic freedom, but from the opposite direction. And guess who's caught in the middle?
Conclusion
Of course DEI is tangled up in all of this as one breed of “woke” professors continue to try to combat racism with racism, prejudice with more prejudice, inequality with more inequality, etc. Yes, Trump and his MAGA republicans are busily expunging D.E.I. from government. Corporate giants are also backing away. But in academe “wokeness," performative virtue and identity politics remain firmly in place. Actual, as well as fellow traveling, true believers still successfully denounce non-conforming colleagues as homophobic, racist, reactionaries. They often even can block articles they deem 'heretical' from being published in professional journals. This is why professors willing to risk being labeled a heretic are as proportionaltely scarce as collegiate applicants.
Yes, in higher education, the "woke" religion remains firmly in place. And the zealotry of its true believers remains undiminished. In consequence the intellectual and marketplace worth of a "higher education, "especially in non-STEM areas, is loosing value. What employer wants a blindly fanatic, judgmental college graduate, who knows little, can do less, and promises to be nothing but trouble?
In the final analysis, wokeness is having the same devitalizing impact on U.S. academic life that Marxism-Leninism had in the Soviet Union. And because it is coupled with the growing collegiate enrollment crisis, its impact is especially virulent.
Worse, this quasi-religious zealotry and intellectual vacuity, continues to coin new so-called "scholars" who substitute faith for reason and conviction for evidence. And they busily churn out ever more of the sort of pseudo-scholar evangelists who threaten higher education's very future.