When I applied for college there were 3 applicants for every opening. The result was truly tough standards. For instance, to become a junior, every sophomore was required to pass the "Junior Standing Test." It measured knowledge of the required core subjects taken during the first two years. Fail the test, you could not become a Junior. You had to retake it until you passed. If you dropped out, there were 3 applicants ready to take your place. Imagine administrators instituting a Junior Standing Test these days. More likely Polar Bears roam the rain forest. Indeed, today's acute shortage of applicants causes too many colleges to trash meaningful standards and at least flirt with a new guiding principle : "The customer is always right."
A new breed of professor makes this tragedy far worse. They are Neo-Marxist, woke, true believers who not only tolerate permissiveness, they foster it. As a matter of fact, they not only reject the very idea, they piously proclaim that it is just another form of oppression. While they are at it, they also denounce reason and logic as "white" ways of knowing. Arriving at the "right" answer is also out for them. They even throw Socrates in the trashas just another white, male, chauvinist. Indeed these "progressive" professors actually reject the Enlightenment. As a matter of fact, they reject the whole of Western culture. Then go on to assert that no culture is better than any other. that means the culture of, say, Canada is no better than the culture of North Korea. Of course if these enlightened professors lived in North Korea, their very lives would be at risk should they fail to heartily endorse the idea that the culture of the People's Republic is without equal. And, since, at least according to them, logic is just one way of knowing, these woke souls need not find this troublesome.
The evangelization that these woke academics indulge in is NOT their job. Professors pose intelligent questions, communicate settled knowledge and lead penetrating discussions. In short, they teach, not preach. These new breed academics preach, then preach some more. They sermonize endlessly about the evils of capitalism and the West, while castrating instructional quality, consigning scholarship to the dust bin and devalue academic credentials by awarding high grades willy nilly.
They also sell their goofy gospel to impressionable students. They teach their classes with the same objectivity as Dr. Joseph Goebbels brought to the Ministry of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment. They are, in effect, Neo-Marxist missionaries promoting a profane, destructive, illogical and self-loathing faith. But their academic permissiveness keeps behinds in seats and thus wins administrative approval!
A distressing number of college administrators then add more combustibles to this academic dumpster fire. Their 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. Their stated goals vary. But their actual goal? Keep the seats filled.
The worst college presidents, for example, now urge professors to "become the student's friend." That is altogether wrong! Certainly, they owe every student fairness, courtesy and quality instruction. But they also have a non-negotiable obligation to sort the academic wheat from the chaff. Professors should NOT be the student's friend unless and until they are no longer responsible for grading them.
This is crucially unimportant. None of us want an ignorant, lazy or otherwise incompetent individual building our bridges, doing our taxes, teaching our children, performing our surgery, and so forth. Professor/student friendships make graduating incompetents far more likely.
I even know of a college president who now requires professors to conduct "whole life" counseling. They must go beyond academics to inquire into each student's personal life, asking things like: "Are you sleeping well?" "Do you have digestive issues?" "Are you anxious?" "Is there recent trauma in your life?" Besides sending them to the Counseling Center, what is a professor supposed to do should disturbance be discovered? Awarding an unearned passing grade seems the most likely remedy. And, from a tuition starved administrator's point of view, that's good enough.
Professors too have a stake in full seats. No students, no job. So they too compromise quality. I recall a professor of Russian standing outside his classroom door with a worried look long after his class was supposed to start. He was hoping some stragglers might show up to supplement the meager number in attendance. I imagine those who did attend could count on passing regardless of their skill in Russian.
No Whining
Professors are not qualified to pry into student's personal lives. They aren't mental health professionals. Besides, focusing on limitations and difficulties, rather than strengths and possibilities, undermines young people's resilience. Bad shit just happens. So let's not encourage students to wallow in them. Better to urge them to suck it up and get on with life. Emphasizing grievances and personal difficulties fosters whining, giving up, feeling sorry for one's self, blaming others, looking for excuses. All of which destroy their 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 hypersensitive atmosphere students must plainly see that made up traumas could pay off. Sufficiently intense whining might well get them a passing grade for failing work.
Rigor and student responsibility are what makes higher education "higher?" So in order to earn a legitimate diploma, students must have performed at a relatively high level. Not just pay tuition. That is why it's a professor's non-negotiable duty to enforce high standards. When they fail to do so, diplomas become bogus. Counterfeit might be a better word. This is a key reason why college degrees are losing credibility. And as the new breed professors extend their influence, these degrees grow more and more valueless.
With respect rigor, here's another thing to keep in mind. There are increasing numbers of female professors. And research reveals a strong gender bias in student's reaction to females enforcing high standards. Students generally expect females to be more solicitous, sympathetic, motherly, if you will. So female professors have to have more guts to enforce high standards. How many actually have that courage? Especially considering the lack of backup from tuition starved administrators? I suspect fewer than is required.
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.
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