Starting with the 70s, America’s colleges and universities have undergone a dramatic downturn in the quality of education
At one time our universities were recognized throughout the world for their excellence. Students from other countries eagerly came here to attend our colleges and universities. They still do, but unless they attend schools like MIT and Caltech, they would have been better off going to a prestigious university back home.
It was during and as a result of the Vietnam War that America’s colleges and universities began a downward spiral. Anti-war protests on college campuses empowered Marxist and other far-left professors. And those professors were more interested in indoctrinating students than in giving them the education their parents paid for.
Let me give you a Houston area example. In 1970, I left the faculty of Sam Houston State University to take over the law enforcement programs at College of the Mainland in Texas City. It took me only a month to realize that the college should have been named College of the Disneyland.
Except for a short interval, history professor Larry Smith was the de facto president of the college. He was one of several avowed Marxists on the faculty. In 1983 Smith handpicked music teacher Larry Stanley to be the college’s president. Until he retired in 2000, Stanley made no major decisions without the explicit advice and approval of Smith.
The college’s Marxist professors were imbedded in the Social Sciences department which offered courses in government (political science) and history, two courses required for an AA Degree. What the students got instead of government and history was a good dose of anti-Americanism.
While the nation’s colleges and universities may not be controlled by Marxists to the extend College of the Mainland was, they are influenced by their far-left faculty members. Worthless degrees are now offered in Women’s Studies; Gender Studies; Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) Studies; African-American Studies, etc.
Here are some course offerings:
“Queer Marriage, Hate Crimes, and Will and Grace” at Dartmouth
“Race, Gender, and Ethnicity in Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee” at Harvard
“Politicizing Beyoncé” at Rutgers
“Lady Gaga and the Sociology of the Fame” at the University of South Carolina
“Kayne vs. Everybody” at Georgia State University
“Demystifying the Hipster” at Tufts University
“The Sociology of Miley Cyrus: Race, Class, Gender and Media” at Skidmore College
“The Science of Harry Potter” at Frostburg State University
“Philosophy and Star Trek” at Georgetown University
Is nonsense such as that what Mom and Dad had in mind when they send their kids off to college?
Try getting a job with degrees in Women’s Studies, Gender Studies, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) Studies, African-American Studies, etc.
Ann Coulter was a guest on Sunday’s ABC This Week. She talked about how the far-left has taken over our colleges and universities and how higher education has been degraded. Coulter said attending college is a “4-year vacation.”
Attending college is a 4-year vacation? It’s sad, but I couldn’t have said it any better myself.
I didn’t see any of that as an engineering student at UH in the 80s. I did a see a heck of a lot of middle easterners escaping the turmoil of that region getting along pretty well with each other over here.
I also remember there were many middle easterners constantly protesting on campus until the administration decided to start requiring student IDs for them to demonstrate. It stopped immediately.
But UH back then (and maybe still) was attended by students that typically worked too. Almost all of my classes in the engineering college started after 5pm. I was considered a part-timer at my job for only working 50 hrs/week while attending classes in my final semester. I believe our engineering college average age of 27 mirrored CUNY at the time.
I had two bothers attend Sam Houston before and after their stints in Viet Nam in the late 60s/early 70s.
I should clear something up about College of the Mainland which opened its doors in 1967. Its first president was obsessed with catering to the blacks living in the college district as a means of atoning for the sins of his great-grandfather who was an Alabama slaveholder. The next president, unfortunately, suffered from a brain tumor. It was when he left that Larry Smith became de facto president of the college.
If you send a dips**t to college, college sure ain’t gonna fix ’em. If you send someone with goals and the drive to achieve them, college is still a great place to do so.
It is unpleasant and depressing to be always at odds with your professors. Maybe with one or two, but not with all of them. So I don’t agree that “college is still a great place” to achieve your goals today. I enjoyed UT Austin, and Austin itself, in the 1970s but it would be a definite downer for a rational student to tackle today.
Doubtless some of the new snowflake degrees are a waste of time and money that don’t serve to prepare the student for employment. However, the question arises as to what percentage of the students take snowflake degrees, and what percentage engage in courses that actually prepare for work? I don’t have an answer, but conventional wisdom suggests that the examples cited in your post, which mostly would not achieve an employment purpose, are the exception not the norm.
Don’t automatically write off some of the courses cited however. Film study can serve as a good conduit to philosophical discussion, which causes students to think critically. The issue is in getting a diversity of opinion in the ranks of instructors.
Institutions should use the adjunct professor positions to achieve this purpose. For a few years I was an adjunct at Lamar teaching meteorology. Rewarding experience that I viewed as service to the community given the low pay. A concerted effort by conservatives to seek out the positions would help to bring the needed balance.
Whoever said the point of college was to prepare one for employment ? There are very, very few undergraduate degrees requisite for professional certification. Off the top of my head, I am thinking Engineering is one of the few. I know physicians with BAs in French Literature, attorneys with BAs in History, architects who have degrees in Entrepreneurship. The military has for years, no decades, criticized the overabundance of officers with degrees in engineering and sending senior officers to MBA school
The best understanding of a liberal arts degrees is exhibited by a former college president (and I’m paraphrasing):
This school has say in about 8 hours of your day for the rest of your life:
8 hours are spent sleeping
8 hours at work
and
8 hours are up to you. This is where your liberal arts education might inform your opinion.
If the author is trying to present the above mentioned courses as representative of a college or university’s offering, he’s not being forthright. Those are all cherrypicked to support a predetermined narrative.
Of course, I wasn’t trying to imply that those courses I cherry picked are representative of a college or university’s offering. But I was trying to show that when prestigious universities like Dartmouth and Harvard approve such worthless courses, it is an example of the sad state of higher (?) education in this country.
The millennials’ are eating this stuff up with soup spoons. They still live at home at 30 and have never held a serious job in their life. The children of this country’s greatest generation were molded by the Vietnam protests. Our leaders allowed this to happen in what some call a war for profit.
The Vietnam police action is very much to blame. Everyone knew it was wrong. The greatest generation’s children were very vocal about it and their protests finally brought this country to it’s knees. Kent State was the turning point when our own children were murdered in an effort to silence them. Their choices were, either be privileged and get a college deferment or die in the jungles of Vietnam. Nearly 60,000 of them died in a losing police action because it wasn’t important enough to be a war. Our college campuses just provided the soapbox.
Whether our participation in the Viet Nam War was wrong or not, our returning soldiers and Marines did not deserve to be spit at and denounced as baby killers.
And those shameful anti-war protests gave rise to the drug culture, the sexual revolution, anti-Americanism and other ills that have cursed America ever since, including the sad state of education.