Trigger warnings, safe spaces, and fascism on college campuses

[USUC]

Please explain more about the "take-over" of the media. You make it sounds so formal, calculated and measurable. I don't think the media shifted all that much further left in my life-time but I think the right-wing whining and snowflakery has gotten consistently louder. There is not some cultural marxist conspiracy afoot. It's honest like they were social protections for their opinions. The mainstream media is certainly not what I'd call activist but the ring-wing media can be. They played a role in amplifying and weaponizing Trump's rhetoric and are big villains in this social and political disaster we find ourselves in. That's why Fox lost close to a billion dollars. NYT and WaPo didn't. Fox did.

This topic seems to be at an impasse here. People who are on the progressive side will have a hard time recognizing, let alone acknowledging, the shift that has occurred. At the end of the day I don't really think it matters that much in regards to election outcomes anyway. The economy and perceived fitness of the candidates is what will decide the election, not the shenanigans of legacy media.

[SeattleUte]

Claudine Gay Was Not Driven Out Because She Is Black

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/08/o...e=articleShare

John McWhorter is a Black professor at Columbia.

https://youtu.be/m8xWOlk3WIw?si=iMG2tbAuk_nl8oRw

[YOhio]

If you need to feel better about yourself as a parent then this article should help.

For the past nine years, Rim, 28, has been working as an “independent education consultant,” helping the one percent navigate the increasingly competitive college-admissions process — the current round of which ends in February. He started by editing college essays from his Yale dorm room for $50 an hour but now charges the parents of his company’s 190 clients — mostly private-school kids, many of them in New York — $120,000 a year to help them create a narrative he believes will appeal to college-admissions officers. That company, Command Education, currently has 41 full-time staffers, most of whom are recent graduates of top-tier colleges and universities. The pitch is crafted to appeal to the wealthy clients Rim courts: a “personalized, white glove” service, through which Command employees do everything from curating students’ extracurriculars to helping them land summer internships, craft essays, and manage their course loads with the single goal of getting them in.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/college-admissions-educational-consultants-command-education.html

[Jeff Lebowski]

Good grief. What a racket.

[YOhio]

Good grief. What a racket.

It really makes me grateful to have been born and raised out west. That type of private school socialite culture is completely foreign to me.

[BigPiney]

It really makes me grateful to have been born and raised out west. That type of private school socialite culture is completely foreign to me.

My daughter is currently favoring schools out there. I don't think she knows what she is getting herself into.

[YOhio]

My daughter is currently favoring schools out there. I don't think she knows what she is getting herself into.

Ha! Send her that article and let her know those kids would be her classmates.

[Donuthole]

If you need to feel better about yourself as a parent then this article should help.



https://nymag.com/intelligencer/arti...education.html

This makes me feel less guilty about proofreading and then re-proofreading (and on a couple of them, re-proofreading a 3rd time) my daughter's BYU application essays.

[Northwestcoug]

If you need to feel better about yourself as a parent then this article should help.



https://nymag.com/intelligencer/arti...education.html

Oh man. This gets even worse as you read more:

“We are texting students, I think it’s like 15 minutes before their math class, to make sure they are turning in their homework,” says Rim, who in interviews is soft-spoken, polite, and confident, occasionally dropping into the demeanor of a start-up bro. Most clients start with Command in the ninth or tenth grade, but a small percentage begin in middle school.

He told Bloomberg last year that a parent at Trinity School in Manhattan once offered him $1.5 million not to work with any other student in his kid’s class. (Rim says when he declined the offer, the parent joked that he should just buy the company from him.)

My daughter is currently favoring schools out there. I don't think she knows what she is getting herself into.

Don't worry. Unless you're shelling out 100K for a consultant she ain't getting in.

[Applejack]

Don't worry. Unless you're shelling out 100K for a consultant she ain't getting in.

This is not an east/west thing. Parents in Utah do the same thing if they have the money

[Northwestcoug]

This is not an east/west thing. Parents in Utah do the same thing if they have the money

No doubt. I'm just in awe that this is a thing anywhere.

[old_gregg]

if you spent a couple million dollars on prek-12 private school tuition, an extra $120k to help your kid get into an ivy is probably worth it.

[USUC]

This article from the Atlantic has me thinking about a humanities education today versus the humanities education I received as an undergrad in the 90s.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/02/thinking-yourself/677321/

My father was an academic and a writer who cared a great deal about teaching, and he was never off the clock. There we’d be, chatting away, when some new subject or other would heave into view, and I’d launch into a long assessment of it. I’d be certain—absolutely positive—that I was right. My father would listen, head cocked a little to the side, often smiling a bit, sometimes raising his eyebrows after an especially bold point. For some reason, I would feel encouraged—not wary—and I’d bash ahead into bolder assessments.
Eventually, I’d run out of steam and finish up, with some sort of gesture meaning “case closed.”

There would be a moment of silence. And then my father would say—gently, because there was zero need to say it any other way: “And what is the best argument of the other side?”

The best argument of the other side! Jesus Christ—the other side? The whole point of the argument was to destroy the other side! I was there to illuminate and then devastate the other side by engaging deeply with the worst it had to offer.

Which is usually a light lift.

I had learned the style and the rhetorical turns of making a great case, but I didn’t know the first thing about fortifying it with facts, reason, logic—or the best argument of the side I was treating in such a cavalier way.

You don’t have to delve into the arcana of the Third Reich to destroy anyone making a case for it. But these layups rarely present themselves in decent places. Most of the time, the subjects we talk about are—for all of their flattening by cable news and internet wormholes and all the rest of it—extremely complicated.

A teacher should never do your thinking for you. She should give you texts to read and guide you along the path of making sense of them for yourself. She should introduce you to the books and essays of writers who disagree with one another and ask you to determine whose case is better.

Many college professors don’t want to do that today. They don’t want to “platform” a writer they think is wrong; they don’t want to participate in “both sides-ism.” The same thing is true for the students who pound on the doors of lecture halls and pull fire alarms and throw garbage cans down hallways to protest the 45-minute speech of a visitor.

Do any of you have children who are currently in college studying the humanities? Is this really the case at most institutions? I had a couple of professors who were open to "steelmanning" an argument, but they were kind of the exception. However, most of the professor's relished the chance to have their viewpoints challenged by students. And enough students felt comfortable speaking up where these conversations occurred regularly. And if this doesn't happen anymore, is it the result of more conformity among the student body or professors and a minority of students shutting viewpoints down?

[Goatnapper'96]

This article from the Atlantic has me thinking about a humanities education today versus the humanities education I received as an undergrad in the 90s.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/02/thinking-yourself/677321/

Do any of you have children who are currently in college studying the humanities? Is this really the case at most institutions? I had a couple of professors who were open to "steelmanning" an argument, but they were kind of the exception. However, most of the professor's relished the chance to have their viewpoints challenged by students. And enough students felt comfortable speaking up where these conversations occurred regularly. And if this doesn't happen anymore, is it the result of more conformity among the student body or professors and a minority of students shutting viewpoints down?

My oldest is a double major at the College of Idaho-a liberal arts college in Caldwell, ID. One of her majors is history and she has felt that the classes were conducted similar to how the author's father taught.

My other college kids are freshman taking mostly required core classes at UC-Colorado Springs and a JC in Powell, WYO called Northwest College. The daughter at UCCS has had a good experience in class with the one humanities class she took conducted the way the father taught. The one humanities class the daughter at Northwest took was taught by a conservative LDS professor in the Bighorn Basin, WYO. He also taught like the father in the article but he was obviously not a liberal.

Saying that on the day kids signed up for clubs at UCCS my daughter there thought the woke clubs were out of control-which they were. They were shouting at and down at any club they viewed as religious or conservative. It was a bit overwhelming for a kid from where she grew up. She sent me a text about planning to serve a mission after her FR year at UCCS and transferring to ISU or University of Idaho and running track there. I told her to calm down and as she got into the swing of things she would learn that those kids are a very vocal minority. In a short time she got caught up in her classes and made friends with kids from both the Church and her team-she is loving it there now. She isn't into the clubs or scenes where the Woke kids rage against the machine so as far as she can tell they no longer really exist.

I am sure that as our civilization moves in a direction where folks prefer echo chambers to being challenged there will be more and more of the type of teaching the author asserts has become the norm, but from my kids experience-albeit in rather conservative areas as Colorado Springs isn't a bastion of liberalism despite it being in Colorado, teaching of the humanities still tends to favor good arguments over a right answer and encourages open dialogue and understanding.

[Moliere]

This article from the Atlantic has me thinking about a humanities education today versus the humanities education I received as an undergrad in the 90s.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/02/thinking-yourself/677321/

Do any of you have children who are currently in college studying the humanities? Is this really the case at most institutions? I had a couple of professors who were open to "steelmanning" an argument, but they were kind of the exception. However, most of the professor's relished the chance to have their viewpoints challenged by students. And enough students felt comfortable speaking up where these conversations occurred regularly. And if this doesn't happen anymore, is it the result of more conformity among the student body or professors and a minority of students shutting viewpoints down?

I have a daughter taking "government" classes, which is part of the humanities education at her university. She tended to be very left in high school, but has since moderated a bit as we've discussed some issues. It sounds like her classes can still have robust discussions but she also goes to school in Texas, and while the university is liberal there still tends to be more diversity of thought there than I think you'd find in morel liberal states. I did find it funny that she posted an invitation to a political discourse function held at the school and it was intended to allow candidates for state offices to have a debate or express their views, and all the attendees were all Democrats...