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Some U.S. Colleges & Universities
Setting Their Students Up to Fail
By: David Deschesne
Fort Fairfield Journal, August 30, 2017
“A college or university in the United States is an institution of higher learning” is an oxymoron. Given today’s education level of the average college graduate most won’t even understand what an oxymoron is.
Communist sympathizers and far left socialists have been slowly infiltrating the professorships and administration of U.S. colleges and universities for decades but now the seeds of their destructive ideology is finally blossoming and coming to seed.
In a recent op-ed for Inside Higher Ed, A.W. Strouse argued that teachers and professors—even employers—should not correct slang language usage from the younger generation.
Strouse is a tenured professor of Medieval Literature at the City University of New York. He suggests that by correcting young adults when they use slang or improper grammar, or even suggesting that they use proper grammar to begin with, is somehow racism—“Linguistic Racism” to be exact.
He says slang should be accepted and not corrected in the classroom.
“Already, scholars of rhetoric believe, as the consensus view, that instructors should not try to change their students’ speech patterns,” Strouse said. “In the classroom, students shut down in the face of pedantry because they hate when bossy teachers tell them how to talk, especially in cases in which bourgeois white teachers dictate ex cathedra about what speech is ‘correct.'”
He also advises his students should be verbally defiant to their employers if they start demanding using proper grammar. “The workplace has way too much power and should not be allowed to determine something as fundamental as how we speak,” he told Campus Reform. “People need to tell their bosses, ‘F*** you.’” However, he doesn’t indicate what might happen to an employee who actually takes his advice seriously.
Allowing slang vernacular to purposefully replace proper grammar was predicted by George Orwell in his prophetic book, 1984. In it, he predicted “newspeak” would overtake the language, watering it down by removing all excess words and reducing it to a barely functional mode of communication in order to keep the people down and oppressed under a tyrannical, socialist authoritarian government.
Today’s college and university professors are doing a marvelous job towards building their socialist dream world where everyone is a government slave and doesn’t have the ability to even understand that fact, much less free themselves from its bondage.
“It’s stories like this that help us decide where to not send our kids to college,” said one Fort Fairfield mother. “But these problems are systemic and we’re running out of choices rapidly.”
Watering down the language is just one avenue of attack academia is waging against their students in the U.S. For years, they’ve been inculcating the idea of “free speech zones” on their campuses and throughout society—places secluded from the main traffic flow where people may exercise their “free speech” sheltered from the likelihood of anyone else being exposed to it.
Last Fall, Kellogg Community College (KCC), in Battle Creek, Michigan arrested three activists from Young Americans for Liberty (YAL) for passing out copies of the U.S. Constitution on the college’s sidewalks in September, 2016.
KCC staff attempted to move the activists to a designated ‘free speech zone’ several times before ultimately having them arrested. KCC’s position is passing out copies of the U.S. Constitution on its sidewalks somehow threatens the safety of their students. “We don’t regulate the content of anyone’s solicitation materials, but we do govern the time, place and manner of the activities in order to ensure the safety of all students, employees and guests on our campuses,” said Eric Greene, spokesman for KCC, in a press release on the incident. “KCC’s Solicitation Policy ensures that the time, place and manner of solicitation activities – regardless of the content of those activities – do not impede or interfere with the learning environment or College business.”
“Free Speech Zones” are ubiquitous among college campuses in the U.S., training the future electorate that the Bill of Rights only applies in certain designated areas. The University of Maine, Presque Isle (UMPI) even has its own “Free Speech Zone.” It is located on the sidewalk in front of their circle of flags. There is no charge to use it, but one must obtain permission from a campus safety and security officer before exercising their first amendment protections thus transforming a right instantly into a de facto privilege. The conversion of rights into privileges is the hallmark of all authoritarian governments who believe the government should hold the monopoly of power over the people they represent.
With “Free Speech Zones,” students are being acclimated to the idea of privileges granted by authorities—as opposed to rights that are inherent in society regardless of government decree. This indoctrination by colleges and universities is deployed so when Free Speech Zones are put in place in large cities where political election campaigns—or other events of social importance that conflict with the establishment’s views— are being held, the electorate won’t see a problem with having their protest or rally moved miles away from the site to a desolate area that the general public is not even aware of. Thus when TV news cameras and news photographers photograph the primary area, it appears filled with supporters of one side of the ideology and is artificially void of all discontent that has been moved off site. This tactic creates the illusion of support for a particular candidate or idea since all forms of protest or rebuttal have been moved miles away into a “Free Speech Zone” out of view of the public and news media. The government has been using designated Free Speech Zones in the U.S. since at least the Clinton regime and continues to exercise that power over curtailing the rights to freedom of speech and assembly to this day. Colleges and universities are doing their part to keep the citizenry acquiescent and compliant by training them to accept these unlawful usurpations of their rights.
The U.S. Constitution—specifically the Bill of Rights—has been a bulwark for individual rights against authoritarian socialists who have been attempting to undermine it for over 100 years.
Students today are paying tens of thousands of dollars per year to attend a college or university believing they will be able to earn more money in the long term. However, most of the information about increased wages is hype and for many graduates those wages will be consumed by compounding interest on the crushing debt of their exhorbitant student loans.
That some people do still learn and are capable of achieving success is also being belittled by academia.
Dan Williams recently argued in an op-ed in the Daily Iowan that people have no control over how smart they are when they’re born and that they have “Cognitive Privilege” over those who are born less smart. Because Williams’ idea about how people acquire their intellect is essentially a roll of the dice, he says “you have nothing to be proud of for being smart.”
In an environment where High School SAT scores are at their lowest level in ten years, colleges and universities have to juggle remedial math, science and English (for those institutions that still consider proper grammar to be important in the world and workplace) along with frivolous social experiments such as “free speech zones,” gender identity, transgenderism, anti-misogyny, race baiting, homosexuality, and the desire for some to legalize pedophilia and necrophilia. Given this mixed bag of tricks, it’s amazing anyone learns anything of substantive value at an “institution of higher learning” these days.
There is also a war on critical thinking and problem-solving skills. The Wall Street Journal found after reviewing the latest results from dozens of public colleges and universities that gave a critical thinking exam between 2013 and 2016 at least a third of seniors were unable to make a cohesive argument, assess the quality of evidence in a document or interpret data in a table. “At some of the most prestigious flagship universities, test results indicate the average graduate shows little or no improvement in critical thinking over four years,” wrote Douglas Belkin for the Wall Street Journal.
This past July, the Education Advisory Board issued a press release regarding the normalization of failure at some colleges and helping students feel more comfortable about making mistakes. “Today's students face rising levels of stress. In 2016, The American Freshman survey found that the share of students who frequently “felt depressed” grew from 6.1% in 2009 to 9.5% in 2014—the highest level since 1988, according to researchers. Additionally, those who ‘felt overwhelmed’ due to commitments and schoolwork jumped from 27.1% to 34.6%. One student told the Times there's ‘competitive” pressure to appear busy at all times to impress classmates.’”
College and university students are spending more money, learning less and entering the workforce less capable of being a free, productive, informed citizen than their contemporaries did just a couple of generations ago. A day may be coming in the not too distant future when the socialist-dominated college degree becomes not only cost prohibitive but more poignantly functionally irrelevant.