Academic Insanity

Last week, Charles at LGF described as "Academic insanity" this latest bit of low intelligence and non-thinking going on at our institutes of "higher" learning:

Furious students and faculty members at the Borough of Manhattan Community
College are demanding that the school abandon plans for a certificate program on
security management. They view it as an endorsement of the Bush administration's
Department of Homeland Security.

Let's see. Does the teaching of Chinese herald the "endorsement" of Communism? Does the teaching of computer technology mean the "endorsement" of hacking? What are these dodo brains thinking (if they are thinking)?

Then we hear from John Leo at US News about the university his daughter attended the last 4 years:

After the 2000 election, my daughter told me that 80 percent of the students had voted for Al Gore. "Bush got only 20 percent of the vote?" I asked. "No, Dad," she explained, "the 20 percent was for Nader." Visiting speakers who challenge any aspect of campus orthodoxy are as rare as woolly mammoths. However, columnist Nat Hentoff, whose son had gone to Wesleyan, showed up in 2002 and criticized the lack of intellectual diversity and free speech.

At a Manhattan holiday party last week, hosted by a friend with Wesleyan ties, I overheard my daughter explaining that no real debate takes place on campus. This was a major frustration, since she is feisty and brilliant and loves to argue ideas. She is politically liberal but wonders how Democrats of her generation will be able to speak convincingly to the middle of the political spectrum when so many of them shun the complexity of arguments and simply spout the party line.

This is a campus apparently that is so obsessed with being "diverse" that it has a "naked dorm, the transgender dorm, the queer prom, the pornography-for-credit course, the obscene sidewalk chalking, the campus club named crudely for a woman's private part, or the appearance on campus of a traveling anti-Semitic roadshow, loosely described as a pro-Palestinian conference."

Or: A one-liner about the campus is that "Wesleyan is so diverse that you can meet people here from almost every neighborhood in Manhattan." And the students tend to have opinions from every known corner of MoveOn.org.

Academia in general has become so obsessed with being "diverse" and "politically correct", that it has failed to notice that its students are marching mindlessly in lockstep to the tune of "Diversity Uber Alles". This is unsurprising, when the faculty--those responsible for the young minds of the students--do the same.

The hostility to new ideas--or even different ideas; the ingrained, immutable belief that "there is only one way to think" --is particularly painful in an environment that should be teaching its students how to think and celebrating reason, logic and the diversity of ideas.

As the president of the student government at the Borough of Manhattan Community College stated regarding the proposed courses on homeland security:

[the proposal is] "a very scary issue that students are very, very against." He said if the program were to be instituted, students would be exposed to "a lot of right-wing views" and about "a lot of things that other countries have done to America without giving the other side of the story." He said it was the "progressive" faculty members who voiced opposition to the proposal at Wednesday's meeting

Well, gee! We wouldn't want the poor dears to be EXPOSED to such inflammatory ideas, would we? That might make them UNCOMFORTABLE (all that thinking, you know). Obviously getting the "other side of the story" isn't important if the story conforms to your way of thinking already. As for those "progressive" faculty members... I never realized that "progressive" could be a synonym for "insane".