Well, another university succumbs. It was nice knowing you UNC-Chapel Hill.
American higher education today is in dire straits.
Once a bastion of free inquiry, reason, debate, the pursuit of knowledge, the preferred destination for bright ambitious Next Gen from around the world, much of academia is now afraid of its own students, captive to irrational ideology, political correctness, restrictions on free speech, cancel culture, racist ideas parading as anti-racism, sexual progressivism, irreligion, and jingoistic anti-Americanism.
UC Boulder is making holding the values of BLM a non-negotiable condition for enrollment. Another step in the death march of Western universities from places exalting academic freedom to places suppressing thought and speech in the name of inclusive ideology. This university, by the way, received millions in state funds.
Central Michigan University is forcing a good professor to retire because he spoke the “N-word” while reading from a court document in class. The university would rather be “woke” than defend academic freedom, common sense, and academic excellence.
Penn State is replacing binary words and pronouns in course descriptions. This will increase both quality teaching and student learning? Many other universities are wasting time and intellectual capital on the same pursuit of purist vocabulary, eliminating use of “offensive” words like “picnic” or phrases like “rule of thumb.”
Victor David Hanson says, “Today's universities and colleges bear little if any resemblance to postwar higher education. Even during the tumultuous 1960s, when campuses were plagued by radical protests and periodic violence, there was still institutionalized free speech. An empirical college curriculum mostly survived the chaos of the '60s. But it is gone now.”
“Imagine, Hanson notes, “a place where ‘diversity’ is the professed institutional ethos, while studies reveal that liberal faculty outnumber their conservative counterparts by over 10 to 1. Imagine a liberal place where in 2021 race can still be used as a criterion in selecting and rejecting applicants, choosing prospective dorm roommates, organizing segregated dorms and restricting access to special places on campus.”
Political activism now triumphs over empirical problem-solving.
The recently late, and great, professor Walter E. Williams said, “The bottom line is that more Americans need to pay attention to the miseducation of our youth and that miseducation is not limited to higher education.” He argued equity had replaced equality of opportunity and much of higher education today is little more than leftist brain washing.
Education and critical thinking are out. Indoctrination and victimhood are in.
It’s all-the-more disheartening because it was so preventable.
© Rex M. Rogers – All Rights Reserved, 2021
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