View Full Version : SPLC: Believing Western Culture is Superior is Suspect
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, a belief that western culture is superior is 'suspect.' I wonder if DHS will consider these young students potential recruits for right-wing extremist groups?
Right-Wing College Group Riles Students on Campuses Nationwide
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
By Joshua Rhett Miller
A student group that bills itself as "America's right wing youth movement" focused on countering radical multiculturism, socialism and mass immigration is causing a stir on a growing number of college campuses across the country.
The conservative political group Youth for Western Civilization is currently organized on at least seven university campuses. According to its Web site, the group hopes to inspire Western youth on the "basis of pride in their American and Western heritage," counter and ultimately defeat "leftism on campus" and create a social movement in which a right-wing subculture is an alternative to what it calls a "poisonous and bigoted" campus climate.
"A great part of college is definitely meeting people of different backgrounds, but a multicultural ideology teaches that we should appreciate things just because they're different from our culture with no regards to the quality of the culture and that all cultures are inherently equal," said Trevor Williams, president of YWC's Vanderbilt chapter. "I absolutely disagree."
But students who lean left are not welcoming their new neighbor. Those opposed to YWC say its message teeters on hate speech and has no place at institutions of higher learning.
"'Western' is a veiled term that means 'white,'" University of North Carolina graduate student Tyler Oakley wrote in an e-mail to FOXNews.com. "I believe that our democracy is strong enough to allow extreme forms of speech, but YWC's message is essentially a negative one, an assault on not being white or non-Western, and is therefore hateful, if not blatant hate speech."
While its numbers are small, YWC members hope a well-publicized April 14 event featuring the group's honorary chairman — former Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo — at UNC's Chapel Hill campus, will help mobilize conservative students and attract new members.
Tancredo's speech opposing in-state tuition benefits for illegal immigrants was shut down after a window was smashed and a banner reading "No One Is Illegal" was unfurled across the former Republican lawmaker's face. One UNC student, Helen Elizabeth Koch, was arrested for disorderly conduct in the incident, which was widely distributed on YouTube and is also featured on Youth for Western Civilization's home page.
Officials at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which identifies and tracks hate groups in the U.S., told FOXNews.com that the YWC is not currently on its list, but some of the group's views are "suspect," including the notion that Western civilization is somehow superior.
In February, following YWC's debut at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, SPLC linked the group's founder, Kevin DeAnna, to several posts on the Spartan Spectator, the Web site of Michigan State University's chapter of Young Americans for Freedom.
SPLC identified MSU-YAF as a hate group in 2007; DeAnna vehemently denies posting the material attributed to him.
"We're definitely monitoring them," said SPLC spokewoman Heidi Beirich. "We will look at them for hate group status."
DeAnna, a deputy field director for the Leadership Institute, a conservative education group that paid Tancredo $3,000 for his UNC appearance, said YWC has roughly 10 active members at each of its college chapters. Aside from UNC, DeAnna said YWC has a presence at Vanderbilt University, American University, Elon University, the University of Rhode Island, the University of Connecticut-Storrs and Bentley University.
"It's kind of a loose thing right now," said DeAnna, a 26-year-old graduate student in international relations at American University. "But we're concerned with issues of mass immigration, curriculum, racial preferences and multiculturism on college campuses."
The group will sponsor another speech by Tancredo on Wednesday just off campus from Providence College, where school officials recently denied a request from the still unsanctioned group to host the former congressman, who ran unsuccessfully for the Republican Party's presidential nomination in 2008.
Tim Dionisopoulos, president of YWC's unofficial Providence chapter, said Tancredo plans to speak "right in front of the gates" at the 4,000-student university and to head to a Veterans for Foreign War event. Providence officials say YWC has not sought formal recognition as a student group and thus cannot host an event at the Rhode Island college. But Dionisopoulos says the college is hiding behind protocol.
"We've been unfairly targeted," the political science major told FOXNews.com. "The content scares administrators because this is a group that will stand up for what they believe in. I don't think they're opposed to our mission statement, I think they're moreso afraid of what the opposition will do to us and have done to us elsewhere. Eventually, someone's got to come out and say this has got to stop."
Jesse Jones, a freshman at Vanderbilt, where YWC hosted former U.S. Treasurer Bay Buchanan last month, acknowledged the group's right to organize and share its views.
"But their fascist-like logo, their name echoing 'Hitler Youth,' and Tom Tancredo's call of 'this is your country — take it back' all quite frankly scare me," Jones wrote in an e-mail to FOXNews.com.
Jones said he's also disturbed by the group's call to restore a "curriculum that focuses on Western history, not political correctness," according to its Web site.
"They want to change the curriculum to emphasize 'classical learning' and get rid of 'trendy multiculturalism,'" Jones continued. "In practice this means firing professors with the wrong views and hiring those with the 'right' views.
"Even assuming there is a 'right' view on a given issue, the point is to get students to come to this opinion on their own, given the facts. In this way, YWC's views on education are inherently anti-intellectual."
Tancredo, meanwhile, says he'll continue to appear at colleges as an invited guest of YWC. Its mission to "promote the survival of Western civilization and pride in Western heritage" is all about celebration, he says.
"It's got nothing to do with racism, it's got nothing to do with extremism," Tancredo told FOXNews.com. "It has to do with celebrating the benefits Western civilization has brought to mankind, not the least of which is the concept of law. It's designed to bring attention to the issues, discussions and points of view that aren't readily available in the typical classroom on liberal colleges run by left-wing loonies."
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,518378,00.html
There is a video embed on the homepage of the "Youth for Western Civilization" of Tom Tancredo attempting to give a speech at UNC-Chappell Hill. The tactics on display by those that disagree with him are repugnant.
I recently attended a speech by David Horowitz at the University of Texas. There were self-described bolsheviks and 'anti-fascists' protesting his mere presence on campus. They also used similar tactics in order to prevent the man from speaking. They claimed it was their first amendment right. The irony was lost on them.
http://www.westernyouth.org/index.htm
I went to their website, read what they are all about and I don't see anything that the SPLC has to be concerned about. The only wording that I find objective is the use of "sub-culture" towards building a right wing student agenda. Being conservative or right wing should not be considered a "subculture" but I guess that is the sign of the times. Those "kids" face a long hard road.
I am a graduate of UNC and I found the behavior exhibited toward Sen. Tom Tancredo appalling. I am; however, glad to see that all hope is not lost on college campuses and I hope to see more chapters of this youth organization.
SF-TX, you are right...the irony is LOST on them. One would think/hope that with higher learner would come a higher level of understanding and EDUCATION. But apparantly, the only thing that is offered on college/university campuses is INDOCTRINATION. I find it ironic that 40+ yrs ago, leftist/liberals were the subversive groups...now its the right wingers that are. Amazing how fast this has all changed. Not only are veterans and concerned citizens at risk of being labeled subversive or terrorist (gasp) but so are concerned college students. Tsk Tsk America......shame shame! Did somebody hit the rewind button of pre-WWII Germany???
From the Youth for Western Civilization website here (http://www.westernyouth.org/About/index.htm).
Youth for Western Civilization will educate, organize and train activists on campuses across the nation to create a culture that will promote the survival of Western Civilization and pride in Western heritage.
Some information about the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
The library system (source is here (http://www.lib.unc.edu/overview.html)):
The University libraries combined holdings exceed 5,000,000 volumes; 4,000,000 microforms; nearly 2,000,000 government publications; 20,000,000 manuscripts; hundreds of thousands of audiovisuals, maps and photographs; and thousands of electronic titles. In terms of subject scope, campus libraries cover most areas of the fine arts, biomedical and physical sciences, humanities, law, and social sciences.
The Department of Classics offers five majors which are discussed here (http://classics.unc.edu/undergrad/majors_minors/ugrad_majors.html).
The Department of History, known for being exceptionally strong in military history (that hotbed of left wing radicalism), has five areas of specialization for its undergraduate major. Three of the five focus on European or American history (source is here (http://history.unc.edu/undergrad/undergradfields/fields.html#anc_med)).
The Department of English revised the undergraduate major in 2006. The list of required courses is available here (http://english.unc.edu/undergrad/major.html).
The Department of Germanic Languages offers a major for undergraduates (here (http://www.unc.edu/depts/german/undergraduatestudiesopportunities/majorminorguide.html)).
The Department of Philosophy has a number of courses that focus on Western philosophical issues (here (http://philosophy.unc.edu/genedrequirements.htm)). While the undergraduate major allows students to specialize in an area if they desire (here (http://www.unc.edu/depts/phildept/ugprog.htm#STR)).
The Department of Political Science (a field all historians love ;)) restructured the under graduate major in 2006.* This restructuring allows students a high level of specialization if they desire (here (http://www.unc.edu/depts/polisci/undergradrequire.html)).
The Department of Religious Studies offers a major to undergraduates that allows students, if they so choose, to focus on Western religious practices (here (http://religion.unc.edu/undergrad/major.shtml)).
Then there are the majors offered by the Department of Romance Languages (here (http://roml.unc.edu/ugrad.html#BA)) and the Department of Slavic Languages and Literature (here (http://www.unc.edu/depts/slavdept/ugradpage.htm)). (Or does this field of study not fall under the rubric of Western Civilization? If not, someone will have to resurrect Nabokov and let him know that his father was assassinated for nothing.)
And Chapel Hill has a full fledged ROTC programs not just for the army, but also the navy, and the air force.
Yet, somehow, the YWC is convinced that Western Civilization is threatened at the University of North Carolina. I am not sure that I agree.
Then again, maybe I'm a jaded Golden Bear. During my years at Cal (and in case there are any Bruins reading, there's only one Cal--and its in Berkeley :p ) many undergraduates and graduate students crusaded for this cause or that cause. Some were high minded, others, a tad questionable (Esperanto, anyone?). These were the Reagan years so you can guess how popular the president was at Cal given his conflicts with the university during his governorship (here (http://berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2004/06/08_reagan.shtml)).
Somehow, if you didn't want to hear it and just wanted to learn, go to work, and play some ball, there were plenty of ways around Sproul Plaza.
Somehow, for those students interested in traditional topics (including courses in the classics) there were plenty of classes to take (including the inaugural run of Special Programs 44A--where freshmen learned the most important lesson of all: not to take Special Programs 44B!). And that there were plenty of professors, instructors, and graduate students who, despite the fact that some wore their politics on their sleeves, evaluated students on the merit of their work. All one needed to do was to have a course catalog, a schedule of classes, a couple of add/drop forms, a number two pencil, and then the motivation to do the work to learn what we were supposed to learn. (The grades took care of themselves.)
Now, I guess it is bring your own press release because almost every undergraduate is victimized by the outrageous requirements of actually having to learn something they don't already know.
But less is said about the dynamic in which the skills they acquired in high school did not prepare them for college. Or is that the Left's fault too? That's a much more convenient course of thought than considering the possibility that maybe, just maybe, students and their parents have some responsibility to learn how to write a five page essay that demonstrates a student's own critical thought on a topic without cutting and pasting the results of a search on Google or wikipedia.org.
__________________________________________
* We historians sneer at the sensibilities and methodologies of political scientists. Then we realize that they can get jobs in the private sector while we can't ("quantitative methods"? Zoiks). So we sneer a bit more to hide the sound of our sobbing. "What are you going to do with a degree in history? Teach?:p" is the stinging question that rings in our ears. But I am not bitter.
OpForKorn
04-30-2009, 05:19
Show me one other culture that put men on the moon.
Sigaba, I did not consider you a dangerous man until this post; utilizing your new logo. I guess Prometheus would have been too over the top?
Dr Hanson weighs in on this argument and expresses his worries about the decline of such a classical education, too.
However, many universities have in recent years begun a return of such courses to their curriculum by mandating their inclusion into all of their undergraduate degree programs. What this will cost in terms of $$ and students to programs, departments, colleges, and universities won't be seen for awhile - but it is obviously a dynamic issue and one which will continue to be argued for a very long time.
Richard's $.02. :munchin
Part 1
The Humanities Move Off Campus
Victor Davis Hanson, City Journal, Dec 2008
Until recently, classical education served as the foundation of the wider liberal arts curriculum, which in turn defined the mission of the traditional university. Classical learning dedicated itself to turning out literate citizens who could read and write well, express themselves, and make sense of the confusion of the present by drawing on the wisdom of the past. Students grounded in the classics appreciated the history of their civilization and understood the rights and responsibilities of their unique citizenship. Universities, then, acted as cultural custodians, helping students understand our present values in the context of a 2,500-year tradition that began with the ancient Greeks.
But in recent decades, classical and traditional liberal arts education has begun to erode, and a variety of unexpected consequences have followed. The academic battle has now gone beyond the in-house “culture wars” of the 1980s. Though the argument over politically correct curricula, controversial faculty appointments, and the traditional mission of the university is ongoing, the university now finds itself being bypassed technologically, conceptually, and culturally, in ways both welcome and disturbing.
At its most basic, the classical education that used to underpin the university often meant some acquaintance with Greek and Latin, which offered students three rich dividends. First, classical-language instruction meant acquiring generic methods of inquiry. Knowledge was no longer hazy and amorphous, but categorized and finite. Classical languages, like their Western successors, were learned through the systematic study of vocabulary, grammar, and syntax. Such philological study then widened to reading poetry, philosophy, history, and oratory. Again, the student learned that there was a blueprint — a structure — to approaching education. Nothing could ever be truly new in itself but was instead a new wrinkle on the age-old face of wisdom. Novel theories of education and entirely new disciplines of learning — to the extent that they were legitimate disciplines — could take their place within existing classical divisions of finite learning, such as philosophy, political science, or literature.
More than just an educational buzzword, then, “interdisciplinary” represented a real unity among fields as diverse as numismatics, epigraphy, architecture, archaeology, philology, art, and literature. Reading Homer or Virgil evoked history, culture, geography, style, language, and philosophy. Poetry was not just the modern habit of breaking up prose into bits and pieces but a discipline of poetic language, meter, and subject matter. Oratory was not just speaking publicly but the art of metaphor, allusion, exaggeration, invective, and hyperbole. The formation of university departments, the concept of a core general-education curriculum, and the expectation that graduates would leave the university with certain skills and shared wisdom were all outgrowths of the study of classics and evolved over two millennia. Classics was not some esoteric discipline but a holistic way of thinking about the world that elevated reason over cant, fad, and superstition.
Second, classical education — reading Homer, Sophocles, and Aristotle, or studying the Delphic Charioteer and red-figure vase painting — conveyed an older, tragic view of man’s physical and mental limitations at odds with the modern notion of life without limits. Love, war, government, and religion involved choices not between utopian perfection and terrible misery but between bad and worse alternatives, or somewhat good and somewhat better options — given the limitations of human nature and the precarious, brief span of human life. Humility permeated traditional liberal arts education: the acceptance that we know very little; that as frail human beings, we live in an unforgiving natural world; and that culture can and should improve on nature without destroying it.
In this regard, the university living experience — on-campus residence, close association with professors at dinners, and attendance at university lectures — helped reinforce the abstract lessons of the classroom and promote a certain civic behavior. Students had a precious four years in such a landscape to prepare their intellectual and moral skills for a grueling life ahead. The university was a unique place; it thrived because liberal arts in the holistic sense simply could not be emulated by, or outsourced to, private enterprise or ad hoc self-improvement training.
Third, classical education was a window on the West. Study of Athenian democracy, Homeric epic, or Roman basilicas framed all exploration of subsequent eras, from the Middle Ages to modernity. An Aquinas, Dante, Michelangelo, or Montesquieu could be seen as reaffirming, adopting, modifying, or rejecting something that the Greeks or Romans had done first. One could no more build a liberal education without some grounding in the classics than one could construct a multistory house without a foundation.
Over the last four decades, various philosophical and ideological strands united to contribute to the decline of classical education. A creeping vocationalism, for one, displaced much of the liberal arts curriculum in the crowded credit-hours of indebted students. Forfeiting classical learning in order to teach undergraduates a narrow skill (what the Greeks called a technê) was predicated on the shaky notion that undergraduate instruction in business or law would produce superior CEOs or lawyers — and would more successfully inculcate the arts of logic, reasoning, fact-based knowledge, and communication so necessary for professional success.
A therapeutic curriculum, which promised that counseling and proper social attitudes could mitigate such eternal obstacles to human happiness as racism, sexism, war, and poverty, likewise displaced more difficult classes in literature, language, philosophy, and political science. The therapeutic sensibility burdened the university with the task of ensuring that students felt adjusted and happy. And upon graduation, those students began to expect an equality of result rather than of opportunity from their society. Gone from university life was the larger tragic sense. Few students learned (or were reminded) that we come into this world with limitations that we must endure with dignity and courage rather than deal with easily through greater sensitivity, more laws, better technology, and sufficient capital.
Political correctness, meanwhile, turned upside-down the old standard of inductive reasoning, the linchpin of the liberal arts. Students now were to accept preordained general principles — such as the pernicious legacy of European colonialism and imperialism and the pathologies of capitalism, homophobia, and sexism — and then deductively to demonstrate how such crimes manifested themselves in history, literature, and science. The university viewed itself as nearly alone in its responsibility for formulating progressive remedies for society’s ills. Society at large, government, the family, and religion were hopelessly reactionary.
As classical education declined and new approaches arose to replace it, the university core curriculum turned into a restaurant menu that gave 18-year-olds dozens of classes to choose from, the easiest and most therapeutic usually garnering the heaviest attendance. The result, as many critics have noted, is that most of today’s students have no shared notion of education, whether fact-based, requisite knowledge or universal theoretical methodologies. They either do not know what the Parthenon is or, if they do, they do not understand how its role as the democratic civic treasury of the Athenians was any different from — much less any “better” than — what went on atop the monumental Great Temple of Tenochtitlán. Most likewise could not distinguish Corinthian from Doric columns on their venerable campuses, or a frieze from a pediment on their administration buildings. For a brief four-year period, students inherit a now-foreign vocabulary of archaic terms, such as “provost,” “summa cum laude,” and “honorarium,” which they employ but usually do not understand. While the public may not fully appreciate the role that classical education once played, it nonetheless understands that university graduates know ever less, even as the cost of their education rises ever more. Any common, shared notion of what it means to be either a Westerner or an American is increasingly rare.
The universities apparently believed that their traditional prestige, the financial resources of their alumni, and the fossilized cultural desideratum of “going to college” would allow them to postpone a reckoning. But by failing in their central mission to educate our youth, they have provoked the beginnings of an educational counterrevolution. Just as the arrogance and ideological biases of the mainstream media have made them slow to appreciate technological trends and the growing dissatisfaction of their audience, so, too, are universities beginning to fragment, their new multifaceted roles farmed out to others that can do them more cheaply and with less political sermonizing.
(cont'd)
Part 2
The Humanities Move Off Campus
Victor Davis Hanson, City Journal, Dec 2008
(cont'd)
The most obvious challenge to university predominance is technological — in particular, Internet-based education offered by private-sector virtual campuses masquerading as traditional universities. As the American workforce increasingly needs retraining and as higher-paying jobs demand ever more specialized skills, students are beginning to pay for their education on a class-by-class basis through distance learning. Online classes, which do not require campus residence or commuting, also eliminate the overhead of highly paid, tenured faculty, campus infrastructure, and such costly elements of undergraduate education as on-campus lectures and extracurricular activities.
Unfortunately, private online schools also do away with the old notion of offering liberal arts classes to enrich citizenship and enhance technological specialization. Perhaps their unspoken premise is that if universities do not believe in the value of teaching Western civilization as part of a mandated general-education curriculum, then why not simply go to the heart of the matter and offer computer-programming skills or aeronautical-engineering know-how without the pretense of a broad education? And who is to say that paid-by-the-hour instructors at the online University of Phoenix are less responsible teachers than their traditional counterparts? After all, their market-driven employers must serve a paying constituency that, unlike traditional university students, often demands near-instant results for its fees.
At American Military University, it’s worth noting in this light, online instructors receive compensation based on the number of students they teach, rather than the number of courses they offer. Cost-cutting measures are radical in the online education world. Bookstores and libraries become almost superfluous; instead, students simply pay fees for the use of Internet resources. The University of Phoenix actually negotiates deals with textbook publishers to make all of their books available online for a flat fee. The logic is to redefine education as an affordable product that finds its value in the marketplace among competing buyers and sellers.
It’s hard to fault these companies; they are serving a need. It would be reassuring, certainly, to think that a psychology student at Smith or Occidental would receive a broader understanding of the discipline, its history, and its place within the liberal arts than would a counterpart graduating from the far cheaper online Argosy University. But it would be far from certain.
Traditional colleges and universities, seeking to compete, have started to enter the online education market. The present university system is partly subsidized by low-paid, part-time faculty without tenure who teach large classes and thereby support a smaller mandarin cohort of tenured professors with full benefits, fewer students, and little worry about the consequences of poor peer reviews or student evaluations. Indeed, since the 1970s, the percentage of tenured and tenure-track professors in the academy has declined dramatically, as the university seeks to exploit the many to pay for the chosen, though dwindling, few. Schools are now starting to complement these two tiers with a third — a new sort of distance-learning adjunct, paid even less, who offers classes via the Internet and may never venture onto campus at all, but whose courses carry the prestige of a well-known university brand. An informal survey suggests that distance learning now makes up as much as 20 percent of total offered classes at some schools.
One can also see a growing cultural reaction to the modern university in the spread of conservative Christian colleges. According to the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities, enrollment in such schools increased 70.6 percent between 1990 and 2004, versus 12.8 percent for public universities and 28 percent for all private universities. The national news media have split into genres predicated on political partisanship: network news, public radio, and large newspapers for liberals; and talk radio, cable news, and Internet sites for conservatives. So, too, have our mainstream universities, promising free thought but in reality indoctrinating their students, become increasingly distinct from religious colleges and universities that take pride in a more classical curriculum.
The religious schools are recognizing their market advantage. What was once the old Bible school has now often become the popular conservative antidote to the liberal university. Liberty University and Oral Roberts University have seen endowments and enrollments soar as they have broadened their mandates to encompass general cultural conservatism rather than solely religious orthodoxy. Liberty University is no longer Jerry Falwell’s weird and tiny Liberty Baptist College of the 1970s but has swelled to more than 20,000 undergraduate and graduate students, with another 4,500 enrolled in online graduate programs alone. Thirty years ago, Fresno Pacific College was a small evangelical Mennonite campus; today, its successor, Fresno Pacific University, is a generic traditional campus that offers an alternative to the cumbersome bureaucracy and politically charged culture of nearby California State University, Fresno. The teacher-credential program at Fresno Pacific’s education school, for example, has earned regional acknowledgment for being more rigorous, better organized, and freer from therapeutic and political biases than its much larger counterpart at CSU, Fresno.
The growth of classically minded religious colleges is not limited to the Protestant evangelical movement. Against-the-grain Catholic schools have flourished, too, offering an alternative not just to Berkeley, Wisconsin, and Amherst but also to increasingly liberal Notre Dame and Santa Clara, which have abandoned traditional Catholic themes and classical values. Thomas Aquinas College, founded in 1969, to take one example, has won recognition for its traditional curriculum. A few nonreligious schools, too, like Hillsdale College and St. John’s College, concentrate solely on the classical curriculum, offering Great Books-based courses whose very success serves as an effective critique of higher education elsewhere.
It’s no accident that millions of laypeople don’t find endowed professors at elite schools interesting or useful. Many public universities have rejected merit pay for faculty on the grounds that academic or teaching excellence is impossible to quantify. More elite private universities have embraced a star system of compensation, but in the liberal arts, the criteria of evaluation usually hinge on esoteric and jargon-laden scholarly publications, not teaching excellence. So those who wish to discover history or literature — to learn about the Founding Fathers or military history, say — often look outside the university, to public intellectuals on television and noted best-selling authors like David McCullough or John Keegan.
Private companies have made considerable profits by responding to the public hunger for inspired teaching of traditional liberal arts. The Teaching Company markets prerecorded lectures with rich content in history, literature, and other subjects from proven classroom stars, many of whom have found far less success under normal academic evaluation. Rosetta Stone’s software offers foreign-language instruction in dozens of languages, without the embedded cultural sermonizing that often characterizes foreign-language departments’ curricula. In a series of CDs from a company called Knowledge Products, marketed as “Giants of Philosophy,” the late Charlton Heston narrates excerpts from the seminal philosophers of the Western tradition. Consumers understand that they are buying the words of the philosophers themselves, read and explained by a skilled orator and actor, and skipping the postmodern jargon and leftist bias.
In the future, to learn professions, many students will enroll in specific classes to master accounting, programming, or spreadsheets, and not feel the need to study inductive reasoning or be equipped with the analogies and similes supplied by great literature and the study of history. If, later in life, graduates feel robbed of such a classical foundation, they can buy CDs and recorded lectures or take self-administered correspondence courses. Since universities are no longer places for disinterested investigation in the manner of Socratic inquiry, one can envision a future in which there will be liberal schools and conservative schools, and religious schools and antireligious schools. But the old, classical, unifying university will then have completed its transformation into a multiversity: knowledge, imbued with politics and ideology, will be fragmented, balkanized, and increasingly appropriated by for-profit companies.
(cont'd)
Part 3
The Humanities Move Off Campus
Victor Davis Hanson, City Journal, Dec 2008
(cont'd)
Traditional colleges and universities aren’t about to die, of course. But their attractions — and especially the enticements of the Ivy League schools, Stanford, Berkeley, and such private four-year colleges as Amherst and Oberlin — will largely derive from the status that they convey, the career advantages that accrue from their brand-name diplomas, and the unspoken allure of networking and associating with others of a similarly affluent and privileged class. They are becoming social entities, private clubs for young people, certification and proof of career seriousness, but hardly centers for excellence in undergraduate education in the classical sense. For all the tens of thousands of dollars invested in yearly tuition, there will be no guarantee, or indeed, even a general expectation, that students will encounter singular faculty or receive a superior liberal arts education — let alone that they will know much more about their exceptional civilization than what they could find on the Internet, at religious schools, or on CDs and DVDs.
Once academia lost the agreed-upon, universally held notion of what classical learning was and why it was important, a steady unraveling process removed not just the mission but the mystery — and indeed, the beauty — from the American university. How ironic that the struggling university, in its efforts to meet changing political, technological, and cultural tastes and fads, willingly forfeited the only commodity that made it irreplaceable and that it alone could do well. And how sad, since once the university broke apart the liberal arts, all the religious schools, self-help courses, and CDs couldn’t quite put them together again.
http://www.victorhanson.com/articles/hanson121008.html
write a five page essay that demonstrates a student's own critical thought on a topic
Five pages?!? :eek:
Merciful heavens! And you probably wanted it turned in on time, too.
I had "students" who either could not or would not put their names, with the last name first at the top of a paper. Apparently, the concept of "last name first" was too complex - even though the instructions were provided both verbally and in writing...and the assignment was the third in a series, all with similar instructions...
Somehow, I don't think I'll collect on Social Security. :boohoo
The Reaper
04-30-2009, 07:26
Anybody seen a Military History department, or even a professor lately, outside of a service academy?:munchin
The SPLC is itself racist, bigoted, self-loathing, and anti-American. They once had a role, now, they are Don Quixote, with government and media support.
TR
futureSoldier
04-30-2009, 08:16
When I was an undergrad we did in fact have a military history class taught by a brilliant former Marine. However, this was countered by Iraqi professor who held a conference in 2003 to highlight the similarities, military and socially, between "shock and awe" and German's invasion of Poland. In my contemporary middle east history class, we had a professor of Iranian or Saudi descent who taught among other things, an entire unit about how Hezbollah is a world leading social organization and far more "peaceful" than the Red Cross. When several of us refused to write about this in the finals, we received D's. But this class proved that you can't hide the truth and that the truth is empowering. The truth I learned in this class was that if this professor living in America with all of these freedoms can be so deranged abut freedom, then how can those who have never seen America think about us. Reading the Quran, and studying Middle East history led me to realize that this culture had thousands of years of violence and have no desire to end that trend. I didn't and don't dislike Muslims across the board or anything of that nature, but I realized that we simply are not going to be able to sit and reason with these folks. I had never really thought of joining the military before this class. I found a recruiter 3 days after this class ended, and a few months from now I will head to Afghanistan.
Maybe this is some of the "non-western culture" that the SPLC believes is superior to western tolerance:
http://www.professionalsoldiers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=23062
The SPLC is itself racist, bigoted, self-loathing, and anti-American. They once had a role, now, they are Don Quixote, with government and media support.
TR....what you said!!
When I attended UNC, there were many choices to pick from. I applied myself to get as much of a good education as possible. However, it did not erase the fact that I still had to put up with a liberal attitude and indoctrination in some classes, not just from students but from professors as well. My last year was hell because when a professor who leaned very left, found out I was LEO, the bombardment would start. My opinions on laws were and still are conservative leaning. When I wouldn't budge on my views and would back them up while in a discourse with a professor, I did not receive a favorable grade for that particular day. There were often times that I had to go to my advisor, show him my work, show him my tests and then ask why the professor felt the need to give me a bad grade for the course. Thank God, he was willing to stick his neck out for me thus my GPA stayed very high. So, as a conservative, I had to work harder in some of my classes...not because I didn't understand what was being taught but because of my political leaning and yes...because I was LEO. BUT, keep in mind, that is my own personal experience.
I have friends that have gone to college since retiring from the military and they have experienced some of the same. Some of my friends that have had kids attend college have had similar experiences. So I think if a group of students want to form an organization that supports Western/right wing (and WHY do these words have to have such a negative connotation?) culture and education, why not. Every culture has the right to preserve themselves. These kids are not excluding "people of color", they are not saying exclusively that members have to be WASPs. Where in their messages does it indicate they are racist?
Sigaba, I did not consider you a dangerous man until this post; utilizing your new logo. I guess Prometheus would have been too over the top?
Chef--
I'm not dangerous at all. I'm just an insomniac.;)
And as far as I know, there's only one Prometheus--and he owns TAD Gear.
Anybody seen a Military History department, or even a professor lately, outside of a service academy?:munchin
The SPLC is itself racist, bigoted, self-loathing, and anti-American. They once had a role, now, they are Don Quixote, with government and media support.
TR
TR--
Military and naval historians are increasingly rare in academic departments. Still, The Ohio State University, Yale, Carolina at Chapel Hill, Duke, and Kansas State are the cat's meow.
IMHO, military and naval historians share a large part of the responsibility for Athena's declining presence in the Ivory Tower. We dismissed as 'trends' fundamental shifts in the historical profession. We misread the intellectual terrain. We were a bit late to realize that issues of professional disagreement were becoming personal and that the personal was becoming political.
By the time we started to jump in the fray, we were a bit behind the curve. To paraphrase Mamet (and to risk hyperbole) we brought knives to a gunfight.
The silver lining is that military and naval historians have an inside track with two key constituencies: the armed services and the general American reader. So while most academics may not have heard of the likes of Williamson Murray, he still got to participate in the Iraqi Perspectives Project.
When I attended UNC, there were many choices to pick from. I applied myself to get as much of a good education as possible. However, it did not erase the fact that I still had to put up with a liberal attitude and indoctrination in some classes, not just from students but from professors as well. My last year was hell because when a professor who leaned very left, found out I was LEO, the bombardment would start. My opinions on laws were and still are conservative leaning. When I wouldn't budge on my views and would back them up while in a discourse with a professor, I did not receive a favorable grade for that particular day. There were often times that I had to go to my advisor, show him my work, show him my tests and then ask why the professor felt the need to give me a bad grade for the course. Thank God, he was willing to stick his neck out for me thus my GPA stayed very high. So, as a conservative, I had to work harder in some of my classes...not because I didn't understand what was being taught but because of my political leaning and yes...because I was LEO. BUT, keep in mind, that is my own personal experience.
I have friends that have gone to college since retiring from the military and they have experienced some of the same. Some of my friends that have had kids attend college have had similar experiences.
Saoirse--
On rare those occasions when professors did want to mix it up, the discussions that followed were prefaced by that moment of mutual realization that we were each going to get as good as we gave. So we'd put aside our egos and turn the encounter into a learning experience. (And although I'm embarrassed when I look back on it, I had a well deserved reputation for having something of a razor tongue.)
It wasn't until much later that a professor clued me in. Most often, these exchanges are what is known as 'deep play'. If an academic takes you to task, there's likely an element of intellectual respect.
So I think if a group of students want to form an organization that supports Western/right wing (and WHY do these words have to have such a negative connotation?) culture and education, why not. Every culture has the right to preserve themselves. These kids are not excluding "people of color", they are not saying exclusively that members have to be WASPs. Where in their messages does it indicate they are racist?
IMO, the intellectual justification the YMC provides is, at best, sloppy. Among other things, the group is collapsing distinct trajectories of discourse on what it means to be an American into a poorly written mission statement. When John Winthrop delivered his City Upon a Hill sermon (titled "The Modell of Christian Charity") aboard the Arabella in 1630, he suggested that America should serve as a shining model to the world in opposition to Europe.
This concept of American Exceptionalism is a dominant theme in our nation's political, social, and cultural heritage. It is why the Founders contested so bitterly the need for a standing army and an ocean going navy, and avoided for so long the tautology of entangling alliances. It is why the Second Anglo-American War (the War of 1812) remains America's most controversial war. American Exceptionalism informed the debate over America's entry into both world wars, her stance in the Cold War, in the Vietnam War, and now GWOT. Through all these debates, and many others, is a theme: America should not behave like a European nation because European civilization has nothing to teach us.
For the YMC to decry the decay of our heritage and to present themselves as it guardian and yet to display (in the same breath) an abysmally impoverished understanding of that heritage calls into question not only their agenda but their basic competency to achieve their own inchoate goals.
The opponent of our opponent isn't always our ally.
.......For the YMC to decry the decay of our heritage and to present themselves as it guardian and yet to display (in the same breath) an abysmally impoverished understanding of that heritage calls into question not only their agenda but their basic competency to achieve their own inchoate goals.
The opponent of our opponent isn't always our ally.
Heritage vs History.
I would prefer Americans to be Americans and use American History, Heritage and Cultute.
But it seems to be American and proud of your H,H & C is bad these days. So if we're so bad what is better?
With that I'll side with the students. They may be stumbling but at least I think it's down the right path.