When I was admitted to college there were 3 qualified applicants for every opening. The result was a set of rigorous standards. For instance, finishing sophomores were required to take a summative "Junior Standing Test." It measured knowledge of the required core subject taken during the first two years. One had to pass to become a junior. Fail the first time and you had to retake it until you passed. Imagine an administrator instituting such a test today. Finding a polar bear in the rain fores is more likely. Why? Because today's acute shortage of applicants causes many college presidents to at least flirt with the standard: "The customer is always right."
A new breed of professor also thrives and reproduces in this permissive environment. These 'professors' not only fail to impose rigor, they decry the very concept. Rigor, they piously proclaim, is a form of oppression. Worse, reason and logic are merely "white" ways of knowing. Arriving at the "right" answer is also out. Even Socrates is finished. He is, according to these enlightened individuals, just another white, male, SYS, chauvinistic, oppressor. So, I guess the Socratic method, a time-honored, logic-based method of teaching and learning, must now be useless. (Of course, my last sentence exemplifies the argumentum ad hominem fallacy. But since logic is merely a white way of knowing, I guess we can ignore fallacious reasoning.)
This new breed of enlightened professors even declares the enlightenment and Western culture are also out. How come? Because, they preach, no culture is better than any other. This new breed of professor's lives would be at risk if they lived in this culture and failed to agree that the People's Republic's cultural practices are without equal anywhere in the world. Yet, according to these benighted individuals, the culture of, say, Canada, is no better than the culture of North Korea where you must enthusiastically agree that a porcine homicidal runt is superior to every other human being on the face of the earth.
Taken together, this new breed of professor's assertions castrate instructional quality, consign scholarship to the dust bin, spit on our Western heritage and dramatically devalue academic credentials in the process. Nevertheless, they sell their goofy gospel to impressionable students with evangelical intensity.
Evangelization of any kind is a NOT a professor's proper job. Real professors pose intelligent questions, communicate settled knowledge and lead penetrating discussions. In short, they teach, not preach. These ersatz professors preach, then preach some more. This new breed are, in effect, true believers selling a profane, destructive and illogical faith as gospel to impressionable teens.
Making matters worse, a distressing number of college administrators add fuel to this academic dumpster fire in order to retain tuition paying customers. Preoccupied with meager enrollment and vanishing tuition revenue, they slyly promote academic dereliction of duty under a variety of guises. For instance, deciding attendance is now optional in the name of promoting freedom. The unstated goal? To keep seats filled."
Similarly, the worst of college presidents now urge professors to "become the student's friend." Professors should NOT be a student's friend. Yes, they owe students fairness, courtesy and quality instruction. But they also have crucial obligations to society as a whole , such as sorting the academic wheat from the chaff. And don't imagine for a moment that this is unimportant. Do you want an ignorant and/or lazy person to build the bridges you cross, do your taxes, teach your kids, perform your surgery? Of course not. Yet friendship compromises the professorial selection process that maximizes the probability of competence.
I also know of a college President who requires professors to engage in "whole life" counseling. Mere academic counseling, is incomplete he proclaims. You student should also be your friends. And you should inquire into personal things like: "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 can a professor do about a student's personal difficulties? Award an unearned higher grade seems the most likely remedy. And that has the added advantage of keeping seats filled. Professors are not qualified to pry into student's personal lives. They aren't trained mental health professionals. Besides, focusing life's difficulties undermines young people's resilience. In the real world, bad things happen to all of us. Far better for students to be encouraged to suck it up and get on with life. Emphasizing grievances and personal difficulties encourages whining, capitulation, feeling sorry for one's self, blaming others, looking for excuses. All of that is destructive of human potential.
Also 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 morphed into "micro aggressions." In this whinging atmosphere students can't help but see the advantage in making up traumas. These days intense whining just might get them a passing grade for failing work.
Rigor and student responsibility are what makes higher education "higher?" That means in order to earn a legitimate diploma, students must have performed at a high level. And it's a professor's non-negotiable duty to apply that standard. When they fail to do so diplomas become bogus. Counterfeit might be a better word. This is a key reason why current college degrees are losing value and becoming less attractive. Their possession is growing more and more valueless,
Here's something else to keep in mind. There are an increasing number of female professors. And research reveals strong gender bias in student's reaction to females who enforce high standards. Students often expect them to be more solicitous. more sympathetic, motherly, if you will. That means female professors require more courage to enforce meaningful standards. How many of them have that courage? Especially when they consider the lack of backup from tuition starved administrators?
Sorting and Grading
Sorting and grading college students is unappealing. Nevertheless, it is a vital responsibility. "Woke" professors are prone to evade that duty. I even know one individual who says he will not 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 far more concerned about decreasing enrollment and unbalanced balance sheets than they are about quality education. For instance, imagine suggesting to any of them that the school require students to pass a final test before granting them a diploma. I think it might give them a coronary. It's bad enough some uncooperative professors still require students to study.
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 actualize it. For instance, they assert with invincible assurance, that reason and logic are "white." So too are "objectivity" and" rationality," So there's no need to require that sort of thing. Even getting the right answer, is simply "racist" aspect of "white identity culture," They claim "it's time to decolonize the curriculum!"
They even assert, with a straight face, mind you, that all cultures are equal. If that were true, then no religion ise better than any other. Religion, after all, is a central feature of culture. Now imagine these decolonizers made such a claim in a number of theocratic societies, Iran for instance, or ISIS controlled areas of the Arab world. They would be imprisoned; possibly even put to death. And female professors who hold that all cultures covalent are particularly opaque. They are, in effect, endorsing cultures in which males routinely subjugate them and deprive them of their most fundamental human rights. That's singularly stupid. Unless, of course, it's alright 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 pederasts. They merely are "minor attracted persons." Worse, these academic evangelicals preach their faith as objective truth to naive adolescents. 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 nature of their professors, searching for signs of damnable heresy. Should one of the professoriate even mention, say, David Hume, they demand the offending devil be purged. These so-called students are half-baked Torquemada's, stifling academic freedom and demanding "right thinking" from all and sundry. In the service of "truth," of course.
Meanwhile administrators, intensely preoccupied with balancing the budget and preserving their well-paying jobs, cower in the face of outrageous student conduct, consign academic freedom and intellectual rigor to the dust bin and even pretend they too are true believers in this new, blighted orthodoxy.
The "Woke" and Chairman Mao
Nowadays "students" are patrolling the collegiate world eagerly looking to be offended. They usually are the converts of thought-police professors. Think of them as inquisitors, junior grade. Instead of using college to create themselves, they let others do it for them. To "convert them," so to speak. And as converts, they find researched knowledge offensive, emotionally troubling and heretical whenever it violates their faith conviction that the world is in the clutches of an all-powerful, neo-colonial white male hegemony.
What disappears in all of this is individual student agency. They've been taught to believe that it isn't they who fail to actually think, who refuse to listen, but the "other."! That's who is always to blame! It's not hard to see how poisonous such an attitude is.
To tell the truth, this "woke" culture is really 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 being subjected to name-calling, public ridicule, administrative muzzling, censorship and job loss. Worse still, this politically correct zealotry has provoked a right-wing backlash that also threatens academic freedom from the opposite direction. And guess who's caught in the middle?
Conclusion
Of course DEI is utterly tangled up in all of this as many still seek to combat racism with racism, prejudice with still more prejudice, inequality with more inequality, etc. Yes, Trump and his MAGA republicans are busily expunging D.E.I. from government and corporate giants are also backing away. But "wokeness," performative virtue and identity politics remain firmly in place in academe. Actual, as well as ersatz, 'true believers' still successfully denounce non-conforming colleagues as homophobic, racist, reactionaries. They even are often able to block publications they deem 'heretical' in professional journals. This is why professors willing to risk being labeled a heretic are about as scarce as collegiate applicants.
So 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 even more of the sort of pseudo-scholar evangelists who threaten higher education's very future.
To further examine these and similar issues, visit www.newfoundations.com
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