Tag Archives: University

News

Brainwashed by secular left radicals, college students reject freedom of speech

11 Comments
No media allowed, because it's a "safe space"
No media allowed, because it’s a “safe space”

I can’t link to every article I’ve read about this topic in the last few days, but I thought that I’d better put up something about what is happening on university campuses, now that Judeo-Christian values have been driven out.

Moderate conservative David French posts this message from the University of Missouri in National Review:

The secular left's fascism on university campuses
The secular left’s fascism on university campuses

So, if you feel offended by someone else’s free speech, the laws of the United States do not allow you to punish them. But university campuses are their own little fascist societies, run by secular leftist tyrants. They have ways of getting around the laws of the United States, even as they grow fat from taxpayer subsidies. It’s just disgusting. This is why we need to either scale back non-STEM departments in universities. Indoctrination programs will stop when we remove all the subsidies they get. When students have to pay for an education that is actually useful, then these left-wing re-education camps will disappear.

What do students learn in these left-wing seminaries? How to earn a living by creating value for others? Oh no – they hate capitalism. They learn that the first amendment (free speech) is morally evil.

Here’s Breitbart News reporting on one of the little brainwashed fascists:

[University of Missouri Students Association Vice President Brenda Smith-Lezana] was asked, we have tensions simmering at Yale University, protests erupted at that university because an email was sent to students urging them not to wear racially offensive Halloween costumes, and one professor complained that universities are becoming places of ‘censure and prohibition.’ What’s your feeling? Do you believe that that’s a place that we’re heading for [on] American campuses now, a place of censure and prohibition?”

She responded, “I personally am tired of hearing that First Amendment rights protect students when they are creating a hostile and unsafe learning environment for myself and for other students here. I think that it’s important for us to create that distinction and create a space where we can all learn from one another, and start to create a place of healing rather than a place where we are experiencing a lot of hate, like we have in the past.”

Would you hire someone like that? I would not. But this is the kind of person the secular left produces. I cannot imagine that anyone in the private sector would want to hire someone like this who cannot bear to hear opinions that disagree with her own, and actually wants those who make her feel bad to be silenced, coerced and punished.

Who teaches these little secular left drones?

The US Herald reports:

Sounding more like a 1970’s version of teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa, then an assistant professor of communications, Melissa Click was caught on video harassing a young student journalist who was attempting to report on the ongoing protests taking place at the University of Missouri.

Student Journalist Tim Tai, who was actually on assignment and freelancing for ESPN to cover the racially charged protests on Monday, was suddenly confronted by the agitated Assistant Professor Melissa Click blocking him from filming the protesters.

Professor Click is heard yelling for protesting students to help her stop Tai from taking photos, as the protesters push Tai as he tries to explain how the First Amendment actually works in a free society.

And Professor Click responds with a mind bogging retort; “I know, that’s a really good one, I’m a communication faculty and I really get that argument, but you need to go,” she says.

Tai is seen and heard trying to talk his way through the recalcitrant crowd who shouted at him, chanted “hey, hey, ho, ho, journalists have got to go” and generally made it impossible for Tai to carry out his First Amendment-protected assignment from ESPN to photograph the tent city.

The confrontation seems to heat up further as another student reporter, Mark Schierbecker, tries talking to Click. She tells him to “get out,” hits his camera and yells: “Who wants to help me get this reporter out of here?

Ah yes, an assistant professor of communications. A useless clown hiding from the demands of a private sector job in her “safe space” in academia. Unemployable as she is, she is still capable of forcing her mindless little captives to accept her own fascistic values. And at taxpayer’s expense. And if they don’t accept her secular leftist views, well, that’s what suspensions, expulsions and campus police are for.

The Wall Street Journal comments on the meaning of it all:

What was evident at the University of Missouri, and in last weekend’s confrontation over free speech at Yale, is that political dialogue on universities is disintegrating to the level of 1968, when many schools became places of physical and intellectual chaos.

Missing today, as then, is adult leadership. Too often university presidents, their boards of trustees and leading political figures default, and quickly, to the most reactionary progressives in modern student bodies. We want to be clear about this, because so many of these university leaders regard themselves as principled liberals. But their timidity is putting at risk the classical liberal values that are the essence of the idea of a university.

Many of our readers by now have seen the video of the Missouri communications professor calling for “muscle” to ban a student reporter from covering their protest. Or last weekend’s video of a Yale student shrieking at a dean to resign for defending free speech. Professors increasingly acquiesce to student demands for “trigger warnings” about course material that might offend them. Small student minorities ban commencement speakers or boo them into silence.

Today’s progressive activists, unlike their liberal antecedents, believe that ideas with which they disagree or which they deem morally repugnant don’t deserve to be heard. And so they shout them down or tell their speakers to “shut up” or “resign.” They believe that free-speech protection is a quaint obstacle to getting what they want, which is control.

Please remember to never vote for Democrats. They are the ones who inundate these leftist seminaries with taxpayer money. If secular leftist administrators, professors and students have to sink or swim on their own strength, they would be far less politicized. We have to starve the left-wing seminaries and force them to focus on preparing students to work, instead of indoctrinating them in hatred and intolerance.

News

Tenured professor faces persecution for writing about being raised by two lesbians

1 Comment
Gay activist vandalizes pro-marriage sign
Gay activist vandalizes pro-marriage sign

Here’s the latest story of secular leftist coercion from Breitbart News.

Excerpt:

The charges against Lopez shifted almost constantly and to this day he has never been shown the formal complaint from the still-unidentified former student. His understanding of the charges against him have been from meetings with university administrators and taking notes.

Her first complaint centered around a conference called The Bonds that Matter that Lopez organized at the Reagan Library, a forty-minute drive from the UC-Northridge campus. The conference featured noted speakers on divorce, third party reproduction, and adoption.

She says she was coerced into attending, that she was never informed of what the subject matter of the conference would be, and that she was offended by some of what she heard that day. She said the conference should have come with a trigger warning that it might cause trauma to gays and lesbians. She also said she broke down “in tears, crying.”

She says speakers explained that “all women who use sperm banks are evil” and that “gay people cannot be good parents.” She also complained about a brochure produced by the Ruth Institute she picked up at the conference aimed at the “victims of the sexual revolution” including those who tried the gay life and now want out.

Once the complaint was made, Lopez stepped beyond the Looking Glass and into the world of university investigations. For the next 378 days Lopez and his paid lawyers spent countless hours trying to keep up with the charges and investigations by multiple university administrates and their lawyers.

[…]He was formally charged with “discrimination,” one of the few charges that can result in revocation of tenure and dismissal.

[…]It should be noted that the speakers at the conference, while controversial, are not considered wild-eyed radicals. Jennifer Lahl speaks on the dangers to women of selling their eggs or renting their wombs. She’s from Berkley and is a frequent guest on liberal campuses. In fact, Lahl specializes in speaking to the left. Alana Newman spoke, a folk singer, who was born from surrogacy and is now an advocate against it. Perhaps the most controversial speaker was Jennifer Roback Morse who runs the Ruth Institute and who focuses broadly on what she calls the “victims of the sexual revolution.”

None of the speakers talked about gay issues and Lopez provided the tapes to prove it. There was one exchange between Newman and one student who asked about gays and surrogacy, but the student turned out to be the complainant. So, the only person who brought up the gay issue at the conference was the student who complained the conference slammed gays.

Lopez provided documents that also showed the students were not coerced. In fact, they didn’t even have to attend the conference. It was one of two options in the course. Most of the class chose the conference option.

The article alleges that the student was a plant by powerful LGBT groups who want to silence Lopez.

Marquette University

This reminds me of the other professor McAdams from Marquette who got into trouble for writing about how a student argued with his professor that he should be allowed to disagree with her about gay marriage. The left-leaning The Atlantic has the story, and surprisingly sides with professor McAdams.

Here are the details:

The incident that McAdams blogged about happened on October 28, 2014. Cheryl Abbate, a graduate student in philosophy who was leading a class called Theory of Ethics, was teaching undergraduates about John Rawls. She asked for examples of current events to which Rawlsian philosophy could be applied.

“One student offered the example of gay marriage as something that Rawls’ Equal Liberty Principle would allow because it would not restrict the liberty of others and therefore should not be illegal,” according to Holtz’s version of events. “Ms. Abbate noted that this was a correct way to apply Rawls’ Principle and is said to have asked ‘does anyone not agree with this?’ Ms. Abbate later added that if anyone did not agree that gay marriage was an example of something that fits the Rawls’ Equal Liberty Principle, they should see her after class.”

Sure enough, a student approached her after class, and in what was arguably an ethical breach, surreptitiously recorded their exchange.

[…]At this point, both the undergraduate and the grad student instructor spoke to various “superiors” about the incident. And the undergrad talked to McAdams, who decided to blog about it. He has been stripped of tenure for that blog post.

Marquette is a “Catholic” university, except it obviously is not.

Vanderbilt University

Meanwhile, here is yet another recent example of a professor getting into trouble for going against the secular left. National Review has that story, written by the famous civil rights expert Peter Kirsanow.

He writes:

The illiberal idiocy currently on display at the University of Missouri and Yale has now manifested itself at Vanderbilt, where an online student petition demanding the suspension of Professor of Law and Political Science Carol Swain for being “hateful” toward minorities has gotten more than 1,000 signatures. The fact that Professor Swain is black is no insulation from these charges.

Swain’s apostasy is that she has made politically incorrect statements about radical Islam and her traditional Christian beliefs, statements that the petitioners deem intolerant and which the University, therefore, must  not tolerate — tolerance, of course, being a one-way street.

That’s right. She’s a female, black professor. No one is safe from the secular left inquisition. They own the university, and if you want to go there, you have to get in, do your STEM degree, get out, and get to work. And vote to defund them completely when it’s election time.

The United States ought not have an official state church. But as Dennis Prager often says, universities and colleges are left-wing seminaries. They teach their secular left religious dogma, and God help you if you say one word to disagree with them. These are not people who handle disagreement and dissent well. These are not people who value free inquiry. These are not people who value truth.

Mentoring

How to go to college without going into debt for the rest of your life

4 Comments
Choosing the right major
Choosing the right major: study one of these, or learn a trade that pays well

First, watch this this 5-minute video that explains why college is so expensive:

This video clearly makes two points:

  1. College costs more because of government subsidies
  2. Only STEM degrees are worth taking out loans for, because there is a demand for STEM-degree holders

Now, in a previous post, I explained more about what’s in the video, and linked to appropriate sources (the New York Times) for support.

But this time, I want to get some advice from a friend of mine, the famous Lindsay. She has a BS and MS in biology, was admitted to a PhD program in biology, but then decided to become a stay-at-home wife, and the best homeschooling mom in the whole world.

She writes:

It is possible to go to college and get a degree that will prepare you for a job and to do it without drowning yourself in debt. I did it. I graduated with a Master’s degree in Biology, with a 4.0 GPA throughout, with no debt, and got a job right out of college. But I’m the exception. You can’t just do what everyone else is doing and expect things to work out well for you. You have to be smart and informed or you’re likely to end up an unhappy statistic, paying down enormous debt on a degree you never use.

She has 5 pieces of advice for you young people.

Here’s my favorite:

5) Remember that the proper amount of student loans is zero and any non-zero amount must be justified by careful study and number-crunching to make sure it is worth it. Your future is at stake. In my experience, the only time student loans are an acceptable investment is when you’re going into a high paying field (think doctor, lawyer, or engineer), have very high graduation and employment potential (good grades and some work experience), and your realistic (not idealistic) future income will be sufficient to pay for your total student loans in less than 10 years while also allowing you to cover all your living expenses. You have to crunch the numbers and make sure the investment, including the interest you will pay, is worth it in better job prospects and pay than you could achieve without the degree. You can’t rely on the system to check this for you. They are all too happy to mortgage your future for a degree you can’t afford and that won’t get you a job.

Straight talk from the Lindsay.

I guess I should say something about me. It’s hard for me to remember the numbers exactly, but I think I finished my Bachelor of Computer Science with $9,000 in the black, and then graduated with a Masters of Computer Science with $16,000 in the black. As Lindsay advises in her point #4, I worked in the summers and took two semesters off (in my BS) to work full time. I went to a very ordinary school in my home town for both degrees, and chose all programming courses as much as I could. I stayed away from anything theoretical, and even niche courses. (At least until graduate school – then I went crazy and audited 5 theoretical courses in addition to my programming courses and thesis). I do recommend working in some work related to your degree, at least in the summer, even if you don’t get paid. However, if you can’t find paid work in the summer related to your degree, that’s a pretty good sign that you’re not in a program that is going to pay for itself.

I mentor a lot of young Christian men and women about their educations and careers. Of all the other young Christians I mentor, everyone is in a STEM program, except for these two girls in California who just started working on. One got a job on Monday night, and the other one (who is shy) is investigating getting a promotion at her current job, as well as adjusting the courses she is taking now. Parents really need to be on top of the education and career situation of their children. And older Christians like me, well we need to be taking an interest in young Christians… making sure they study apologetics, apply themselves in school, study for jobs that pay – either in vocational training or in a STEM college program. Something where they  can find a job that pays. This is especially important for men, because they are tasked with the role of primary provider.

By the way, college is not for everyone. Previously, I blogged about the specialty welder who has struck it rich. There are many advantages to being in a field like that where you get to work as much or as little as you want, instead of working 40 hours a week regardless of money requirements. If you don’t like welding, here’s a list of blue-collar jobs that pay well.