I will not get sentimental, or so I keep telling myself. Well, maybe a little sentimental, but never maudlin at the approaching departure of my 17-year-old son for college in the fall. Fall? Did I say fall? No, he leaves in August — cruel calendar!
If I sometimes find myself leafing through photos of him at ages two, five, and eleven — here nodding off in the stroller, there in his Harry Potter costume — and if there’s a smile at the memory of how enthralled the preschool David was with the Triassic, the Cretaceous, and the Jurassic and its fearsome denizens, well, that’s the way of mothers. One video I happened to pick off the shelf featured an eight-year-old David narrating a tour of the backyard, with, as he put it, grinning, “my dimwitted assistant, Ben.” That would be his little brother, who knew well how to give it back. “Mom,” Ben called on another occasion, “David hit my hand with his face. Can you punish him?”
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Now we count the days until David is off to college. A liberal parent may glow with excitement and pride at the prospect of his child attending college. Isn’t that why she got straight A’s, crammed for the SATs, played travel soccer, and dug wells in Guatemala during summer breaks? But no conservative can be entirely cheerful at the prospect of an impressionable youth being bundled off to a university in the United States. Academia is a conquered land — the playground of the ultra left.
A recent report by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education counts David’s college as among the seven best for free speech in the nation. That such a list is required speaks volumes. The seven are Arizona State, Dartmouth, William and Mary, the University of Pennsylvania, Carnegie Mellon, the University of Tennessee Knoxville, and the University of Virginia. Not that these seven are moderate in their political or social views. Don’t make me laugh. Not that they have more than one or two Republicans on the whole humanities faculty. Ha! No, these schools excel simply because they don’t exert the kind of totalitarian thought and speech control so commonplace on American campuses.
We scrape together our hard-earned income (lots of it) to deposit our cherished offspring at schools that are determined to teach them to despise everything we revere — even learning.
Three decades ago, at Stanford University, Jesse Jackson led chants of “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go.” If you were in any doubt, the National Association of Scholars reports that the mob was wildly successful. The institutions that are (or were) one of the glories of Western civilization — universities — now no longer see the worth of teaching the history of the West. In The Vanishing West, the NAS examined the curricula at 50 leading colleges over time. In 1964, all of them required some sort of Western civilization survey course or interdisciplinary course treating the same themes. They began with Greek civilization and encompassed Rome, the rise of Christianity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, literature, art, music, the history of science, political philosophy, the modern era, and so forth. By 2010, none of the 50 colleges required any course in Western Civ. Even for history majors, survey courses on Western civilization are rarely required. The same is true for American history.
Students can still find courses on these subjects, but only as choices in a vast cafeteria of offerings that also includes courses like “Lesbian Queer Media Cultures” (University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign), “The Living and the Undead: An Inquiry Into Zombies in Cinema and Literature” (University of Mississippi), “The Militarization of American Daily Life” (Oberlin), and “The American Sexual Past” (Temple University). The term “higher education” is fast becoming a misnomer. American students are graduating with scads of courses on zombies and queer theory — which is why we’re importing an ever-larger number of our Ph.D.s.
David, thankfully, will have little time for nonsense courses (not that we’d pay for them anyway) because he will be studying music — specifically trumpet performance. Like the hard sciences, music remains a realm largely uncontaminated by the absurd political and sexual obsessions that afflict so many other disciplines.
Someone who aspires to play in a symphony orchestra has a sheaf of requirements: Music Theory, Keyboard Studies, Harmony, Solfege, Eurhythmics, and (huzzah!) survey of Western Music History. That’s in addition to studio, ensembles, and practice time. He will have time for just one elective in his first semester (and that must fulfill a distribution requirement).
We are thrilled for David — and relieved that because he has chosen music, the corrupt culture of American “higher” education will get very few opportunities to miseducate him.
A rather short-sighted view, isn't it? At major universities, even music students are expected to attend a wide range of liberal arts courses, like government, English, history, etc. There is no more "safety" in music than there is in engineering, math or science as a major.
The best defense is a good offense. Children must be taught real history and civics before leaving home. They need to be well-grounded in principles, ethics and religion. Without a firm foundation, even the technically minded could be led astray by the liberalism on campus.
Our son graduated from the W.P. Carey Business College at ASU. One of his instructors would grade him harshly (his thoughts when compared to his classmates grades) for suggesting that the plight that American Indians suffer from today is much of their own making. She would be incensed at his rebuttals of treatment of the Indians but was forced to stay silent when my son shared that he was a card carrying (CDIB) member of the Choctaw Tribe of Oklahoma. My son certainly picked up more liberalism than our family believes during his tenure at ASU but sorely regrets his vote for Obama as President in 2008. I guess the lesson is to teach them well and let them wander - eventually they see for themselves the wasteland that the Progressives would force on all of us.
Be careful about Arizona State -- a current student there reports that his teacher threatened to give him a failing grade if he continues using the term "illegal aliens" instead of "undocumented immigrants.". Fortunately, he sees through it all and cannot wait to graduate in two more years.
I've sent 3 boys off to college now. One attended a large college, another a small college, and the 3rd at a service academy.
Each one regularly comments on the vacuum of serious courses and professors; the fact that probably 1/3 of students belong there; and on the ubiquitous PC culture and campus-wide sneering at anything celebrating America.
As parents, we observed that colleges below the Mason-Dixon line are more likely to acknowledge their roots to America's heritage, while those above the line won't even mention it.
Allan Bloom wrote a brilliant book in the 1980s noting the rapid erosion of American universities titled "Closing of the American Mind". It was truly prophetic.
We just sat through a graduation ceremony last week where the doctoral candidates earned their PhDs in subjects such as: "Examinations of ethnocentric musical influences at vacation bible schools in four Baptist Churches in southern Prince Georges County"; and "An in-depth analysis of the various Arabic dialects in Muslim Music used in chants in Mosques in Northern Virginia".
Even a young teen-aged girl sitting in our row wondered out loud how such a scraped together concept could earn the candidate the title of "Doctor".
As usual, Mona's insights are spot on. If we want our kids to learn anything positive about their heritage, you better be talking about it a lot over the dinner table when they are youngsters.
This August, we will also send our daughter to a state university, for engineering. But, I have been battling radical indoctrination since she was in middle school.
Twice: once in 7th and once in 11th, she was assigned to read Zinn's People's History of the United States. It was up to her family to lead her to original source documents, biographies of founders and conservative writers like Adam Smith, George Orwell, etc. It was up to us to discuss the fallicies of the unconstrained vision that Thomas Sowell has defined.
And, when the school sponsored a week long seminar on Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth, my daughter countered with arguments from STATE OF FEAR by Michael Crichton.
These are just two examples.
The main battle, however, is yet to come. While she had free speech rights in her high school classrooms and I had parental rights, to voice privacy concerns over mandatory bullying assignments or to object to political activism masked as community service projects, she will not be as protected in college.
Not only is there the usual grade revenge from teachers who take a dislike to your values and arguments, but now universities squelch free speech and free assembly from any organization or individual they deem to be spouting hate speech, especially if you want to sponsor a conservative speaker on campus.
So, we hope she has earned enough AP credits to fulfill her humanities requirements, encourage her to express her values and opinions judiciously, and pray her campus develops a true, liberal atmosphere for academic learning.
As a graduate of Arizona State I can say that I was afforded the opportunity to express myself and learn. I was able to get the education I wanted and have always been thankful for all of the experiences. Unfortunately, I could not afford to attend there now because of the insane eternal building programs and multiple campus expansions which have driven up the cost of a basic education. Go figure. Priced themselves out of the market.
My daughter majored in music at Rhodes in Memphis. Good school, minimum of liberal craziness and ranked at the top in students' knowledge of American history.
I hate to break it to you, but music departments are the worst of the worst for harboring radical leftists, and they are very pushy and intolerant of anything even remotely conservative... except for music, if it's a classically oriented curriculum. After getting a BM at a conservatory, an MM at a university, and working on a DMA at one of the top five best graduate schools for music, I ought to know. In fact, I quit the DMA program in disgust because the faculty were all such hopeless, brain-dead, loud-mouthed lefties.
I had the opportunity to study music in college and eventually embark on a professional career. I don't think Mona's comments are entirely short sighted. Yes a music student has to attend classes taught by marxists, but in my experience, music was such a challenge that I didn't have much time to worry about or even think about anything else. I managed to pass the gen-ed courses all the while soaking up everything I could about music. I graduated 26 years ago, and now teach part-time in a college of music, and thankfully I don't see much change, except for students who are not dedicated to the task of learning music -- We are passing them through classes that in my college years they would have failed. Fortunately there are many dedicated music students, quite a few who amaze me with their interest and ability and willingness to learn.
The issue for me at this juncture is that a lot of my teaching colleagues in the music school came up through the system, got credentialed and began teaching almost straight out of college. They have little real experience, are much more likely to have marxist tendancies and to promote them, and consistently game the tenure system to work as little as possible. Victimhood is their fallback position. Thankfully, and amusingly, most of the good students of the type mentioned above, recognize this behavior and rise well above it. Academia has been damaged immeasurably by marxism, but not all students are willing to drink from that pool.
If he were playing strings I'll say plead with him to reconsider.
But studying a brass instrument is one of the (relatively) easier paths to an orchestra job due to a much smaller applicant pool. Aside from saxophone (which is still a speciality instrument in the orchestra) kids aren't taking up brass instruments the way they used to.
I teach 12th grade English in a Christian school, and along with Shakespeare, Byron and Shelley, I also teach them about their academic rights. I tell them about what they are likely to face in college, and how everything they believe will come under assault. I encourage them to stand up for their beliefs, and make sure they know about FIRE and other organizations on their side.
The value of online education cannot be minimized. I had a man tell me he saw no reason a degree in math couldn't be done entirely online. I tend to believe him since he is a math prof himself.
The demise of costly brick and mortar universities-- glorified sleep away camps for late adolescents, all too often-- is not on the immediate horizon. If anything I do foresee the conventional colleges mounting a legislative lobbying attack to halt the spread of online ed. True, there are many fields where hands on training and faculty interaction are indispensable [nursing, engineering and a few others] but can the same be said for statistics or accounting?
Bizaarely enough, I recently heard that the congress is now debating a law which would require private for-profit universities to PROVE their graduates can land a job good enough to pay their tuition. Imagine the howls you'd hear if we dared to require the same of our gummint skools?
You hinted at it when you mentioned looking through old photographs, but having sent five wonderful children out the door to colleges, I must warn you that the moment when you turn around and walk back to the car alone is one of the most wrenching experiences in a parent's life. I am a healthy, strong, middle-aged dad who was reduced to heaving sobs at that moment of transition. It passes, of course, but time after time I was surprised by the depth of my emotion when saying good-bye.
Thank God for a wife who let me cry it out without trying to fix me.
Speaking at least for history departments, there is a good reason so few faculty members are registered Republicans. No, not Marxist brainwashing. But the fact that most positions held by the GOP in 2011 wage war against the weight of historical evidence. (One of many examples: the top tax brackets paid over 50% of their income in taxes between 1945 and 1960. Yet the American economy was booming like no other time in US history. So how can we assert tax rates are automatically related to economic prosperity?)
I could go on, but that's enough for now. Meanwhile. NRO continues to espouse an alarming anti-intellectualism that causes people to write about fears of being indoctrinated by teachers they disagree with. Academia wouldn't be "the playground of the ultra left" if conservatives stopped complaining that higher education was the enemy.
"So how can we assert tax rates are automatically related to economic prosperity?"
Wouldn't it be astonishing if they weren't?
I cheeful concede that tax rates are not the only determinant of economic prosperity. In the example you cite, namely, the post-WWII era, there were a number of other things working for the economy.
First, the tax rates, high as they were, were less than those during the war, when the top marginal rate was 98% -- a rate I do not think would have been tolerated if there had not been an existential threat from the Axis. So tax rates had come down, even if their value was still higher than today's. The trend is also important; for one thing, a decrease in the tax rate can spur consumer and investor confidence even if the absolute rate remains relatively high.
Second, during the war, rationing sharply reduced consumption, with a corresponding increase in savings. There was a lot of purchasing power in that accumulated savings, which helped drive the postwar boom.
Third, the U.S. was almost the only major industrial power that had not been on the receiving end of a significant strategic bombing campaign. With the competition literally up in smoke, the U.S. had a huge and lasting advantage in world markets.
Fourth, the work force had increased considerably during the war. With so many fit young men off offing Hitler and his thugs, the labor pool was replenished from groups that had historically been left out -- women and minorities. Blacks were excluded from most labor unions prior to the war; the wartime pressure for workers helped change this. With a larger work force, or to be more precise, with a larger fraction of the population in the more productive sectors of the work force, the gross national product was bound to increase.
I do not believe your example proves what you want it to prove..
Amen. My youngest brother is a Ph.D. and teaches philosphy at a "conservative" Catholic university. His experience at his school bears out published estimates that over 70% of his colleagues in virtually all disciplines are outspoken Democrats or "progressives" or even harder left fountains of propaganda. Nevertheless, have heart and encourage your son to look carefully and he will find the occasional professor who, like my brother, is both a critical thinker and a true teacher of traditional Western values. They're still out there, but it helps for them to know there are still stundents seeking real knowledge. Unfortunately, the students who are already brainwashed make poor receptors of facts and ideas outside the party line.
I love the comments. It would appear no one is upset with indoctrination and expensive but worthless hobby degrees. It would seem what irks the author and those commenting is simply the flavor of the curriculum. No doubt all would praise Texas for its push to ensure fundamentalist biblical textbooks are used in public highschools there without a hint of irony.
Also.. PS. have fun with having a 30 year old trumpet player living in your basement. Get him trumpet lessons, but tell him to get a real degree...your retirement savings will thank you.
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