When I applied for college admission, way back in 1958, there were 3 applicants for every opening. That resulted in the school imposing seriously tough standards. To attain the rank of junior, for instance, sophomores had to pass the "Junior Standing Test." It measured their knowledge of the required subjects taken during their first two years. Fail and you remained a sophomore. To become a junior you had to retake the test until you passed. And remember, there were 3 applicants waiting to take your place.
Imagine current administrators instituting a Junior Standing Test. More likely to find polar bears inhabiting the rain forest. Nope, today's acute shortage of applicants causes many administrators to quietly shelve meaningful standards and, instead, adopt a new guiding principle: "The customer is always right."
A new breed of alleged professors compound this slippage. These "woke," Neo-Marxist, true believers not only tolerate this decline in standards, they actually encourage it. Indeed, they reject the very idea of rigor, piously proclaiming it is just another form of white male oppression. They even denounce reason and logic, valuing right answers, the Enlightenment, and the whole of Western culture — asserting that no culture is better than any other. One wonders, given that questionable assertion, how they come to denounce the Western variety?
If these dogmatic, true believing "professors" kept this nonsense to themselves, it might be merely amusing. But, like true believers everywhere, they insist on imposing, their beliefs on others. In consequence their lectures rival the sermonizing of Billy Graham. And they do this even though evangelization is most decidedly NOT in their job description.
Professors communicate settled knowledge, pose intelligent questions, and lead penetrating discussions. In other words, they teach. These new-breed academics only preach, then preach some more. They lecture with the same one-sided bias Dr. Joseph Goebbels brought to the Nazi Ministry of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment.
They function, in effect, as missionaries promoting a profane, destructive, illogical and self-loathing faith. They sermonize endlessly about the evils of capitalism and the West, while simultaneously perverting instruction, consigning scholarship to the dust bin and awarding passing grades to students who can barely read. Worse, they sell their goofy gospel to impressionable students who are still wet behind the ears. This is potentially dangerous.
However, their academic permissiveness keeps behinds in seats. That wins tacit, even active, administrative approval. Indeed, a distressing number of collegiate administrators actually add combustibles to this academic dumpster fire in order 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. I know a college president, for example, who recently required professors to conduct "whole life," not merely academic, counseling. Besides scheduling classes and the like, they now are to inquire into each student's personal life. They are to ask things like: "Are you sleeping well?" "Are you suffering from digestive issues?" "Are you anxious?" "Is there recent traumas in your life?"
Besides referring them to the Counseling Center, what is a professor supposed to do when a student's alleged difficulties are revealed? Awarding a passing grade for failing work is the most likely remedy. Of course in this environment, students quickly realize that faking trauma pays off. They know that whining could well get them a passing grade for failing work. And, from a tuition starved administrator's point of view, phony kvetching is acceptable so long as it's not too obvious. Of course they never will will admit that.
The worst administrators even urge professors to "become the student's friend." Professors certainly owe each and every student fairness, courtesy and quality instruction. But they also have a non-negotiable obligation to sort the academic wheat from the chaff. That's why professors must NOT become a student's friend, unless and until they are no longer responsible for grading them.
Sadly, professors also have a big stake in keeping seats full. Their job is at stake. So a lot of them are also cutting corners. And that is especially so if they teach a poorly subscribed major, and/or lack tenure, or seniority. No students, no job.
I recall a professor of a meagerly attended Russian language program pacing anxiously outside his classroom door ten of so minutes after class was supposed to begin. He would glance at his watch, then look up and down the hall, hoping a latecomer or two might supplement his sparse attendance. Only a few ever did. But you can bet those few who did could count on a passing grade even if they attended irregularly.
No one wants an ignorant, stupid, lazy, or otherwise incompetent individual building our bridges, doing our taxes, teaching our children, performing our surgeries, and so forth. But current higher education quality control makes such incompetents ever more likely.
No Whining
Professors are not qualified to pry into student's personal lives. Besides, focusing on an individual's limitations and difficulties, rather than strengths and possibilities, undermines their resilience. They should helped to understand that bad things happen. And, sooner or later, they happen to everybody. What matters is how you deal with them. So it is unwise to encourage students to wallow in their difficulties. ar better to urge these youngsters to suck it up and get on with their life. Emphasizing grievances and personal difficulties fosters whining, quitting, self pity, blaming others, looking for excuses, etc.. Every one of which undermines their potential — should they have any to begin with.
And let's not forget that these new breed, woke "progressives" have redefined a broad range of normal stressors and perturbances as 'traumatic." And those who have experienced them are told they are "survivors." And, for good measure, minor slights, even unintended ones, have been transformed by the woke into "micro aggressions."
Rigor and student responsibility are what makes higher education "higher?" So earning a legitimate diploma requires students to perform at a legitamatly high level. Not just pay tuition. And it's a professor's non-negotiable responsibility to enforce high standards. When they fail to do so, diplomas become more and more worthless. Counterfeit might be a better word.
This is a key reason why college degrees are losing credibility. As the new breed professors extend their influence, degrees grow even more valueless. Students trained by them have been lapping up the rhetoric of narcissism, entitlement and resentment and become certain of their own moral superiority. Consequently, they are not much good at anything that is worthy of effort.
And here's one more 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 that enforce high standards. The reaction is hypercritical. Students generally expect females to be more solicitous and sympathetic. Motherly, if you will. And that means female professors have to have more guts to enforce high standards. How many actually have such fortitude? I suspect it isn't very many. Especially considering the general lack of backup from tuition starved administrators.
Sorting and Grading
Grading college students is very unappealing. Nevertheless, it is an absolutely vital responsibility. "Woke" professors are prone to evade that burden. 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 that helps him win both promotion and tenure.
Such dereliction of duty is tolerated, even surreptitiously encouraged by administrators because they 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. You will have to give them CPR, should you suggest that! It's bad enough that some professors still require students to study, learn and attend class.
What has come to be called "political correctness" is at the heart of this malignant tactic to preserve budgetary soundness. It's financially convenient that many academics have become self-righteous converts to this faith. In fact, some go to astonishing lengths to equalize everyone, in a world where people are NOT equal in either ability or effort. Their loathing for the Western culture that separates their host society from barbarism is also remarkable. Remember, they assert with invincible assurance, that reason and logic are “white" and therefore bogus. So too are "objectivity" and" rationality," Even getting the right answer, is a "racist" aspect of "white identity culture," They even declare, with absolute confidence, mind you, that "it's time to decolonize the curriculum!" Of course, that curriculum supports and reflects the very culture surrounding and sustaining them.
This new breed even asserts, with a straight face mind you, that no culture is better than any other. The culture of Isis is equal to the culture of, let’s say, France. Of course, if all cultures are equal, then it follows that no religion is better than any other. They are all relative. So now let's imagine these de-colonizers making such a claim in a theocratic Muslim society, Iran for instance, or ISIS controlled regions of the Muslim world. How long would it take before these fools were imprisoned; possibly even put to death?
And so far as female professors who hold all cultures covalent are concerned, they must be particularly dense because they are underwriting cultures in which men routinely subjugate women and systematically deprive them of their most fundamental human rights. It’s titanicaly stupid for any woman to claim those cultures are equal to Western culture.
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 is now firmly in place. And, despite the impact of the Trump presidency, 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.
