 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Before you embark, examine the school's website carefully. Remember that the goal of a college's web designers is to present the school as administrators want it to be seen, not necessarily as it is. Look at course descriptions and syllabi in the History and English departments, two bellwethers of curricular trends. Take note of the treatment of these subjects (chic professors make a living at unintended self-parody) or descriptions that employ the words race, class, and gender along with other trendy terms; these indicate a high degree of politicization — the substitution of politics for genuine learning. Browse the pages of student groups to learn how far the administration will go in accommodating students' every whim. If you find groups devoted to paganism, various brands of sexuality, and every imaginable ethnicity, you'll know the administration is afraid to risk being "judgmental" and will do just about anything to cater to the demands or desires of the odd and the misled. Academic
Life: Key Questions Does this school have a core curriculum? The customary affirmative answer is misleading at best. How many classes are in your core? Often, the answer is hundreds. If this is the best a college can do, there is no core curriculum worthy of the name, but only distribution requirements masquerading as a core. Ask whether all students must study Western history and literature as well as American history. Many schools have made these courses optional so that students graduate with little or no exposure to the events, personalities, or ideas of Western civilization. Finally, ask how many years, on average, it takes for a student to graduate, and what the graduation rate is. Recent statistics compiled by the American Council on Education show that only 47 percent of college students remain enrolled in the school at which they began their studies and graduate within five years. Schools with low graduation rates accept too many students ill-prepared for college-level academics. Student
Life: Information to Gather Inquire about the nature of freshman orientation, which radical administrators see as an opportunity to divest their young charges of the family values with which they were reared. Films that most parents would consider pornographic are often shown during orientation, and practices that violate widely accepted moral standards may be presented in positive terms or even advocated. Students who speak up against such practices are sometimes singled out for ridicule and ostracized. Crime rates in and
around campus are a final problem you should ask about. Some schools engage
in statistical high jinks in order to hide the true crime rate from parents,
students, and donors. They may ignore crimes committed in areas immediately
adjacent to campus in order to lower the apparent crime rate. Curricular politics are uglier today than ever before. Politicized courses serve to indoctrinate rather than educate, and professors who grind political axes rather than pursue the truth are, unfortunately, the norm. It's the inevitable outcome of the intellectual homogenization of the faculty: Hire only radicals and only radicals will be heard. It's the easiest way to quell dissent. Great professors are still around, but it's up to students to root them out. Learn
More — Winfield Myers is director of communications at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. |
|
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||
<% dim printurl
printurl = Request.ServerVariables("URL")%>
oon colleges
will host legions of rising high-school juniors and their parents for
the annual ritual of the college visitation. Picking a suitable school
requires developing a critical eye, asking the right questions, and reading
between the lines. Because few college officials will divulge controversial
or negative information, parents and students must question professors,
administrators, and students about the true nature of their school.
