Interview With a College Student
Edgar Anderson over at Minding the Campus interviews a University of California San Diego student:
Q. Justice.
A. I liked that quarter best because all it was about were Supreme Court cases like affirmative action and Brown v. Board… My teaching assistant, who you have in discussions twice a week, was crazy. I remember one day she was talking about how there should be affirmative action in terms of who becomes a Fortune 500 CEO and that they should require that a certain percent of all CEOs in Fortune 500 companies be women. I said I disagree, “Who’s to say that a woman is going to be a better CEO than a man? Let’s be honest, you know, a lot of women don’t become CEOs because most women choose to not work as much ’cause you have no life if you’re a CEO to raise a family or anything.” But she said, “How can you be a woman and think that? That’s totally wrong. That’s what’s wrong with women in our society because we need affirmative action to get ahead.” She was unbelievable.
When we talked about investment bankers and people who worked in finance… she said, “Well, I hate investment bankers anyway, I hate them, I hate their whole attitude.” And she went on and on how they’re terrible people…
Q. So Imagination. What is that?
A. I really don’t know. I had no idea what was going on in that class. And even the TA said she had no idea what it was about…
Q. But did you have reading lists?
A. Yeah, I have the book. You’d spend a week on Vonnegut or similar writing, or the next week it’d be about graffiti, and another week it’d be immigration, and another week it’d be Vietnam. It wasn’t tied together at all, so we never ended up with anything.
But I remember for graffiti the professor said how pretty much we don’t understand that it’s an art form, and it’s just a misunderstanding why people don’t like graffiti and why police try to cover it up. She said that people are just trying to express themselves, and she never went into how it was vandalism or anything like that.
When we talked about the entertainment industry and the show The L-Word, she said that having straight actresses portray lesbians was the same as white people painting themselves black. And so I don’t think that anyone agreed with her on that…
Do read the whole thing as it neatly illustrates both the worthlessness of most modern liberal arts education, as well as the closed mind and leftwing bigotry prevalant at all too many colleges and universities. Can you imagine a graffiti professor? Can you imagine a teacher taking issue with the position of a paper rather than the quality of the argument? Also, for someone to say they “hate” a certain class of people - I thought colleges were supposed to be the home of broad minded people? Of course, we know better - they aren’t. The far left gained control starting in the late 60’s, and these days intellectual inquiry is nearly dead on campus.
On the bright side, this student was clearly not fooled - and she relates that a lot of her classmates also saw through the scam. On the dark side, a lot of students probably do fall for it - the intellectually incurious and the apple-polishers always willing to please probably buy the whole thing…and thus get the best grades, become TA’s and eventually become professors or employees of other (mostly government-subsidised, as colleges and universities are) leftwing bastions, ready to put another generation on the treadmill of leftwing political orthodoxy.
My bet is that a majority aren’t fooled - going along with Lincoln’s dictum that you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. But, still, the time spent being indoctrinated in liberal/left orthodoxy is time spent away from learning the truth, so the overall effect is a loss for our society. Not believing the lies, but lacking the truth, people can be at a loss for what to do, and can often fall for leftwing ideas if they are dressed up with a dose of conservatism to make the Marxist poison go down. We see the result of all of this here on the blogs, and out in the larger world - the complete propagandised leftist robots who just rote repeat what their professors spoon-fed them, and the people who weren’t fooled but don’t know the truth, and are wary of taking it from a conservatism heavily demonised by their education experience.
What to do? My view is that our best option is to de-fund liberal arts education at the federal level…no college loans or grants for it. A rather harsh step, but the primary thing we’d be de-funding is really just leftwing propaganda on campus. Force colleges to choose between lefty indoctrination and having actual paying students, the colleges will mostly drop the liberal arts courses…save for those few which are so popular that the kids are willing to pony up for them on their own (and my further bet is that such a devastation of liberal arts would allow center and right people to enter the field on a competitive basis…see who gets the more students: a course on American history taught by a conservative, or a course on Herstory taught by a bitter feminist…)
92 comments March 23rd, 2008
