"They have funded new professorships in topics like 'the history of capitalism' and poured money into speaker series and academic programs that propagate libertarian policy ideas. The organization UnKoch My Campus has tracked 'undue donor influence' in conservative philanthropy at schools such as George Mason University and Florida State University.... In some cases, conservative funders are, indeed, buying academic platforms to promote policy interests. The case of Arizona State is different. Its foundation was partisan to a troubling degree, but the outcome is a Great Books-style program that is not particularly oriented toward policy — instead, it emphasizes 'old-fashioned' intellectual methods. 'A big thing I like, as opposed to other political science courses I’d taken, is that they focus on teaching through classic literature, reading entire primary texts rather than textbooks or fragments of texts with other people’s analysis,' [one student] said.... [T]his approach is not inherently loyal to Republican ideology and can be an empowering course of study that liberals neglect at their peril. They often forget that plenty of Great Books are among the foundation stones of their own political tradition. Progressive heroes ranging from Jane Addams to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. were indelibly shaped by Great Books educations...."
From "Can We Guarantee That Colleges Are Intellectually Diverse?/Politicians and donors want to impose one set of solutions. Schools around the country are trying to find their own way" by Molly Worthen (NYT).
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The Great Books are bad. They make people think. We can’t have that.
The use of reason will lead us to no good end. We must rely on feelings, and internet influencers.
That was pure torture to read. Although it was nice the NYT let me read it. I wonder if they've loosened up the paywall. My politics are middle of the road liberal democrat and the NYT reads like Pravda to me. I wonder how it reads to actual conservatives. The piece posits a right wing conspiracy to tar campuses as leftist, calls the conspirators to task for providing no evidence, and then provides no evidence of its own claims.
Intellectual diversity on the left = leftwing totalitarian authoritarianism. do it the leftist way, or else. you will pay.
The motto of most of today’s universities was written by the Firesign Theater: Give the people the light, and they’ll follow it anywhere.
Some did it differently.
UChicago, Hillsdale, St John’s (Annapolis), stand up and take a bow.
How many times did she say, in essence, "Conservative claims of academic bias toward the Left are overblown - but here is another example of Left bias in academia."? I lost track. That article was schizophrenic.
Interesting article, I thought, but even better was how many of the comments prove conservatives' point about the know-nothingism on the left.
Two or more people... persons, is intellectually diverse. However, according to the establishment doctrine, they are not diverse without a color qualifier.
"Can We Guarantee That Colleges Are Intellectually Diverse?/Politicians and donors want to impose one set of solutions. Schools around the country are trying to find their own way"
The bolded words are the heart of the problem, I think. Their starting point is that a college will not naturally be diverse, and will more or less openly discriminate in favor of one point of view. Anything else is an imposition by an outside force.
There are plenty of great books in history. You can discriminate just as easily with a great books curriculum as you can with an ahistorical "sex began in 1963" curriculum.
I think that most academics would say that their faculties are intellectually diverse as it stands, even if they all think the same way, because so few people outside academia think as they do. Thus bringing in people who disagree will tend to decrease diversity.
" I wonder how it reads to actual conservatives. "
Like something from an alien world. Somewhere beyond Maoism. Pravda and its ilk, contrariwise, made sense. Maoism also made sense, within its own world-view. It bothered to argue with the classics, knowing what they were.
This stuff in the NYT, and everywhere really, is simply dissasociated, unmoored in reality or the mass of tradition, as if it did not come from the Earth we know.
The author critiques others for having no footnotes, yet has no footnotes. The article is self refuting.
> Its foundation was partisan to a troubling degree
Dog whistle: it wasn't left wing.
Are they teaching Karl Marxmanship?
"That article was schizophrenic."
Not simply that, but illogical, obtuse, mentally blind. It comes from what seems like a stone for a brain, that can be plunged into information, but emerge having absorbed nothing.
That is your entire higher education, dedicated to creating such stones.
Nobody can reform this disaster.
Karl Marx was better than this.
We must rely on feelings, and internet influencers
Diversity (i.e. color judgment) in lieu of character. Empathy in lieu of rationality. Ethics in lieu of morality. Social justice in lieu of justice. Mortal gods with secular ambitions.
Looked up the professor.
Women's and Gender Studies Informal Presentation Series
Drs Lisa Hager and Evren Wiltse will be pressing their book project on Women Presidents & Prime Ministers in the World.
Thursday March 15, 12:30pm
Student Union, Black Hills Room 271
sdstate.edu "No Longer a Man’s World: Women Executives across the Globe" Evren Wiltse, Assistant Professor of Political Science Lisa Hager, Assistant Professor of Political Science
Yup/ Lots of diversity there.
There are many organizations which are devoted to the promotion of a single point of view, of course. The friction arises when those organizations interact with the outside world.
On what basis should your group continue to receive outside support? That support can be in the form of tuition, or tax money, or charitable donations. Or it can be entirely member supported, like a church that solicits donations from its members.
If you want to be supported by tuition, you need to sell students on the value of the humanities.
If you want to be supported by tax dollars, you need to be politically acceptable to the people passing out the dollars.
If you want to be supported by private charity, you need to be consistent with the charitable goals of the givers.
If you want to be member supported, people are going to have to get outside jobs.
There's a fifth way -- you can be publically supported and not be politically acceptable, but this is dangerous. Public trust is hard to gain and easy to lose. If enough people decide you're not supporting the common good, it is very hard to persuade them to give you money again. Unfortunately, this is where we are.
All the criticism about the style of the article makes me want to read it!
"Molly Worthen’s research focuses on North American religious and intellectual history, particularly the ideas and culture of conservative Christianity. Her most recent book examines American evangelical intellectual life since 1945. ...[there's more]."
Amend the 1964 Civil Rights Act and add "political orientation" to the list of no-nos.
Just more NYT left-wing bullshit.
Left-wing slant on humanities = Normal.
Right-wing slant = "Weird" and "Politicizing intellectual pursuits".
BTW, Koch brothers and Libertarians are just liberals interested in pushing back against Socialism. Message: "Rich guys are good". IOW, they're OK with Leftism. Globalist, anti-american, socially liberal.
Burn the College humanities to the ground. You can't have liberal/leftists in charge, all you get is Marxism Light and weirdos who want to chase co-eds and do little work. Most of these professors don't even care about the subject they're teaching. History is a disaster area, almost every book by Professor is crap. They can't write or think. its why most best selling history books are being written by journalists or non-academics.
The first sentence is a doozy:
"According to some critics of higher education, as college students around the country head back to class, they will search in vain for classroom debate where all opinions are welcome."
Doesn't that mean : "According to some critics of higher education, they will search in vain for classroom debate where all opinions are welcome [as college students head back to class]" ?
“I’d taken, is that they focus on teaching through classic literature, reading entire primary texts rather than textbooks or fragments of texts with other people’s analysis,’"
This is why they can’t do critical thinking, most of them. They are taught what to think, not how to think. This is why it’s so effective to invidiously paraphrase Trump or anybody else they don’t like. These kids are too poorly educated to insist on seeing the primary source. If all of the universities adopted this style of teaching again, it would be a radical change from the “inishing school for the red guards that most universities have become.
Reading literature and critically analyzing it is a great way to learn to see through bullshit from politicians, lawyers, entertainment media with political agendas, basically anybody who, like writers, makes their living manipulating your emotions.
Go Devils, though ☀️ 😈
I wonder how it reads to actual conservatives.
I appreciate the NYT and Christine Blasey Ford for telling their truth.
To be clear, it is not the truth or any honest attempt at finding truth. That is a White Supremacy ideal.
One of the best classes I ever had was "Origins Of American Political Thought". We read original writings, sometimes the reading list was a burden. The econ prof was a devout Marxist and the class discussions were lively, I learned a lot.
O blessed paywall! O damned NYT! GIGO at work.
As a retired librarian and sometime classroom prof, I'll just say the system is corrupt in ways big and small, and ripe for collapse. I used to have the following excerpt taped up in my offices:
Learned Founder! Liberal Artist! Dean of dean and Coach of coaches, to
whose memos we still turn in time of doubt: stand by us through these dark
hours in Academe! Teach me, that am Thy Least professor, to profess no
thing but truth; that am Thy newest freshman advisor, not to misadvise those
minds--so free of guile and information--Thou hast committed to my trust.
Help me to grasp Thy rules; make clear Thy curricular patterns as the day;
Thy prerequisites unknot for me to broadcast with the chimes. Enlighten the
stupid; fire with zeal the lowest percentile; have mercy on the recreant in
Main Detention and the strayed in Remedial Wisdom; be as a beacon in the
Senate, a gadfly in the dorms. Be keg and tap behind the bar of every order,
that the brothers may chug-a-lug Thy lore, see Truth in the bottom of their
steins, and find their heads a-crack with insight. Be with each co-ed at
the evening's close: paw her with facts, make vain her protests against
learning's advances; take her to Thy mind's backseat, strip off preconceptions, let
down illusions, unharness her from error--that she may ere the curfew be
infused with Knowledge. Above all, Sir, stand by me at my lectern; be chalk
and notes to me; silence the mowers and stay the traffic that I may speak;
awaken the drowsy, confound the heckler; bring him to naught who would
digress when I would not, and would not when I would; take my words from
his mouth that would take them from mine; save me from slip of tongue and
lapse of memory, from twice-told joke and unzippered fly. Doctor of doctors,
vouchsafe unto me examples of the Unexampled, words to speak the Wordless;
be now and ever my visual aid, that upon the empty slate of these young minds
I may inscribe, bold and squeaklessly, the Answers!
(J. Barth, Giles Goat Boy)
Narr
How things have changed
Put in a Chick-Fil-A.
Kansas University’s Sexuality & Gender Diversity Faculty and Staff Council is livid with the expansion of Chick-fil-A on campus and calling for Jayhawks to boycott the eatery....
...KU granted Chick-fil-A, a bastion of bigotry, a prime retail location in the heart of our campus,” KU’s Sexuality & Gender Diversity Faculty and Staff Council said in a letter sent this week to Chancellor Doug Girod, the provost’s office and the athletic department, the Kansas City Star reported Thursday....
...“[Our efforts are] falling on deaf ears,” KU associate professor Katie Batza told the Star....
I took a Great Books program freshman year (45 years ago this week). Neither left nor right. Just hard.
I hope this is the most subtle sentence I happen to read today:
"According to some critics of higher education, as college students around the country head back to class, they will search in vain for classroom debate where all opinions are welcome."
In addition to meaning that 'critics say they will search in vain as students head back to class', I guess it could also mean 'college students search in vain for classroom debate as they head back to class', which makes sense since they're not in a classroom so there's no classroom debate.
As a retired librarian
Are you an open borders librarian, or a "freedom for me but not for thee" librarian like me? (= librarianism occurs inside the national border, but not across it)
I'm curious what percentage of female academics publish only or predominantly about women. I suppose part of it is that most men have already been thoroughly researched and the mines are played out.
What a ridiculously written essay! It is almost like this person has had no education whatsoever.
I think the "head back to class" clause is just there to explain the timing of the article, IOW, it isn't necessary at all. Change "they" to "college students."
Mr. Garcia, the historian who left Arizona State, said he welcomes courses in the Western canon — as long as students also have exposure to other methods of studying human experience. “I’ve taught de Tocqueville — I’m not threatened by that,” he told me.
If you self-defensively put forward Tocqueville as an example of someone that you're broad-minded enough not to be "threatened" by...
...there's something very out of whack in the academic environment you inhabit (or want to inhabit).
Tocqueville, for cryin' out loud.
Anyone notice the color of ALL the graduating sheep?
Huh? Huh? Not very inclusive!
A few of you are noting a certain schizophrenic character to the NYT article. It's what passes for courage in many academic circles. Even with the amount of throat-clearing and dismissal of conservative viewpoints in the article, Professor Worthen is quite correctly expecting vicious attacks from activists who now will question her loyalty. If she's not careful, she'll have to get a job at Fox News because she'll soon be unemployable in academe.
That said, the double standard is impressive. On the modern campus, saying that the concerns of a self-perceived marginalized group are "laughably overblown" or "more myth than reality" would be taken as glaring examples of privileged blindness and, as likely as not, result in loud confrontation or even physical violence, as long as the marginalized group is one of the favored groups. Conservatives need not apply.
To her credit, she does qualify "diversity", which is a semantic imperative with ambiguous concepts, including: liberal (e.g. classical, generational, divergent), progressive (e.g. monotonic, great... catastrophic leap), conservative (e.g. American, social, economic), moderate (i.e. between limits).
the color of ALL the graduating sheep?
Rabid diversity. Even Planet of the Apes was more colorful.
KU’s Sexuality & Gender Diversity Faculty and Staff Council said
Sex, gender, and transgender spectrum ("rainbow"). Diversity is a color judgment or value assessment based on low information attributes including skin color. The bigotry of the woke and politically congruent is profound and progressive. They believe that their Pro-Choice quasi-religion ("ethics") will save them... Maybe it will.
the color of ALL the graduating sheep?
Not a single black sheep in the herd. Baad.
The great news is that students want to be challenged. They would gladly accept a more well rounded education. They know they're not getting what they need. Many know they're learning neither job skills not abstract critical reasoning skills.
Conservatives should not give up on the younger people.
Conservatives should work to destroy - yes, destroy - the state and federal departments of education. Those organizations mandated the overly large bureaucracies. That is where most of the waste is generated.
Schools that are hundreds of years old are being run from afar by agencies less than 40 years old. It's grotesque.
"Can We Guarantee That Colleges Are Intellectually Diverse?"
No.
"Politicians and donors want to impose one set of solutions."
Actually, some politicians and some donors want to add a little diversity to the monolithic orthodoxy. That's nice, but also a little naive: any program or institution not explicitly conservative will turn left. See the Ford Foundation.
"Schools around the country are trying to find their own way"
But most are stuck on "diversity and inclusion" prog hegemony.
Blogger readering said...
I took a Great Books program freshman year (45 years ago this week). Neither left nor right. Just hard.
That's the way I remember college and my two oldest kids went to the same one (USC) and had the same experience about 1985.
USC now has a very left wing reputation. Also admission scandals.
Courses labelled as "Humanities" is an 'Oxymoron'. Just another favorite meme of the Left pushing propoganda wrapped up in 'Education'. This professor has no shame nor does she add anything to the conversation.
I had a very lefty poli sci prifessor as advisor, like ward churchill but actually knowledgeable.
I think adhering to Great Books is just as bad as avoiding all of them. College should be a place where all honest opinions are welcome. Some Great Books are as slanted as anything found in the NYT. The second thing is that college should be HARD. One semester I had to read 20+ full length tomes for my senior level history classes. I know nothing like that is happening today.
"Some Great Books are as slanted as anything found in the NYT.”
Of course, that’s what you are there for, to learn to understand how you are being manipulated, for one thing, by reading the books and understanding them.
There’s reading comprehension. That’s where most liberals like readering are at, “what is the writer at the New York Times or Washington Post trying to tell me,” and critical thinking, which most liberals seem to woefully lack, which is “what is he trying to convince me of” and what does it mean in a larger sense than author’s intent. For most books, the author’s intent is worth no more than a decent readers understanding. The author is just a person, like the reader.
What do you mean, AAT? The writers at NY Times and WaPo are just reporting FACTS!
The last thing the left wants is a critical thinking population.
My first week in my program I was reading a dialogue of Plato, a sonnet of Shakespeare and a book of Thucydides. I wasn't a reader of the Washington Post or New York Times. (That came later.)
How is this different, or more alarming, from China or the Saudis funding institutes and faculty that promote their national interests?
Can We Guarantee That Colleges Are Intellectually Diverse?
Reminds me of an inteview I had with 3 women for a university library admin position.
With a straight face, they asked me what I thought of Diversity.
I was the only male in the building.
Make Sartor Resartus 101,102, and 103 required courses. Problem solved. Carlyle's thoughts are the origin of traditional Americans thoughts.
“Oh, the humanities!”
What Birkel said at 1:10.
What Federal Agency has a worse record of accomplishment than the Department of Education? Especially when weighed against the cost?
The big problem is that you can't have true diversity of opinions in an institution that insists that certain opinions are intolerable. If wearing a MAGA hat is "hate speech", or having lunch at Chick Fil A, or saying that a man in a dress should not use the women's rest room, then "tolerance" is not on the agenda.
My impression is that the Left today is so fearful of competing ideas and values that it MUST label ideas and values with which it disagrees as "hate", so it doesn't have to refute them.
Yet to those of us who are NOT Left, it seems that the Left dominates much of the public square and certainly much of education.
Blogger readering said...
My first week in my program I was reading a dialogue of Plato
When did you go astray ?
Progressive heroes ranging from Jane Addams to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. were indelibly shaped by Great Books educations
Anticlimax is the chief weapon of the left.
Progressive heroes ranging from Jane Addams to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr
Both were appropriate to their time. Jane Addams was in an era when there was other way to care for the poor.
MLK was in a time when there was real discrimination against blacks.
Neither case is true today.
We can’t afford to loose the Humanities Departments, that would just raise the administrator per student ratio.
Key phrase
“supporters aren’t entirely wrong about the narrow scope of ideological debate at many American universities, even if they misjudge its causes and consequences.”
What a wonderful phrase. Hopefully she doesn’t use it during one of her open minded discussions with a conservative student
“You’re not entirely wrong.”
On a more positive note:
GO DEVILS.
Do you think it ever occurred to the author that the positive outcome of the new program at ASU was, in fact, the intention of the conservative donors.
One semester I had to read 20+ full length tomes for my senior level history classes. I know nothing like that is happening today.
My daughter's freshman English professor is assigning mostly Netflix, "because video is how most people get their information these days." She just had to watch a miniseries on the Central Park Five. For her freshman English composition class.
College courses are at least slightly exposed to the market, since students have some freedom in choosing electives. The liberal arts are originally conceived are dead, and so the courses the Kochs et. al. are funding are bringing them back, and students will likely support them.
Only courses supported from outside will fairly present the great inheritance of the West.
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