Maybe the College Kids Should Destroy College?

[Recursion]

http://gawker.com/maybe-the-college-kids-should-destroy-college-1741946658

It is fair to say that, in examining the twin meltdowns at Yale and the University of Missouri, the pundit class has come down against the tactics of the students, who, in both cases, have been militant and aggressive. The writers have seen parts of each protest—Yale students berating a professor, Mizzou students boxing out a photographer—as a threat to college as we know it. But could colleges not stand to be threatened?

Conor Friedersdorf at The Atlantic, in a piece called “The New Intolerance of Student Activism,” dissects the Yale controversy—over a professor couple’s admonitions about the university’s admonitions about possibly offensive Halloween costumes—and concludes that the students’ “flagrant intolerance” is “illiberal.”

Though it can be tough to burrow into the hardline opinions and strategies of today’s students—and, damn, can they can seem so adorably foolish—Friedersdorf and his ilk are defending the tradition of American colleges without inquiring why contemporary students might be looking to rearrange the campuses they now inhabit.

Friedersdorf’s main problem is that despite thousands of words examining the Yale crisis, he fails to acknowledge the bigger picture, which is that colleges—elite ones, anyway—are white institutions, which is to say not only are they primarily directed, cared for and populated by white people, but that their entire mode of being from their beginnings has been molded by white people: the way white people think and act, what white people want to see in the world, what makes white people comfortable. Admissions policies have broadened through the decades, but the system still guides students onto a particular road, paved by and for a particular sort of person.

Probably my favorite piece on this so far.

[murielm99]

1. Today's students have figured out that

the old tried-and-true methods of protest are not working. They do not get media and public attention. This new method is working.

Good for them!

As far as realizing that colleges are white institutions, this is not news. Read The Port Huron Statement. All institutions in this country are white, designed to make life easier for white people.

[aikoaiko]

2. Who, besides this author, is talking about destroying college?

[Recursion]

3. Maybe more people need to (nt)

[aikoaiko]

4. I don't see the need. I see these recent protests as extra college events.

I see students talking about changing and improving college - not destroying.

To destroy means to make not exist anymore.

I don't think there is any need for that.

[malaise]

5. No - leave it to the corporations and politicians

They destroy 'everything' with way more efficiency

[redgreenandblue]

6. So how exactly should this new "turned on its head" system look like?

I don't quite understand what the article is proposing as an alternative model.

"questioning the way things are done, even if messily, is the hallmark of a modern and adaptive society"

I agree, but I don't, for instance, see that normalizing physical threats as part of discourse, or excluding anything that might make someone uncomfortable, is a desirable goal.

I also do not agree with the model of college as a "safe space", where one is only exposed to a pre-selected set of viewpoints, rather than a space where one is forced out of ones comfort zone.

I am somewhat reminded of something my mother said about why she was driven away from activism in the 60s. She said that it was her experience that the activists were often just as intolerant of other views than the people they were up against. This coming from a woman who once wrote an essay about how Communism may be a good approach to ensuring survival in places with extreme poverty.

[The2ndWheel]

8. It only makes sense really

I am somewhat reminded of something my mother said about why she was driven away from activism in the 60s. She said that it was her experience that the activists were often just as intolerant of other views than the people they were up against.

Any organized effort wants to make the world into its own image. You're not going to take the time and energy required to champion a specific cause if you're sort of cool with the other side.

[GreatGazoo]

7. College is indeed a strange creature at this point. Archaic, bloated, over-priced and insular.

It resists all attempts to quantify the value of what it sells and even more so, how it spends the state and tuition money that comes in. The highest paid employees of colleges are the football coaches with many making $3 to $5 million per year. Meanwhile the football players, who are also arguably employees of the school, get nothing. The players are scheduled to work 70 hours per week -- how could they possibly make use of the bogus scholarships ?

Attorney Jeffrey Kessler, who is no stranger to taking on sports' governing bodies, claims in the lawsuit that the schools are generating "billions of dollars in revenues each year through the hard work, sweat and sometimes broken bodies of top-tier college football and men's basketball athletes."

"The reality is that (college football) is already pro sports for everybody but the athletes," Kessler said, noting that the sports conferences negotiate lucrative television contracts and sponsorships, and universities shell out big bucks for coaches.

In most states, a team coach is the highest paid state employee, the New York-based attorney said.

http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/17/justice/ncaa-student-athletes-payment-lawsuit/

So college athletes are getting screwed over, what about everyone else? While standardized testing is used to beat up teachers and beat down their salaries, there is no such pressure on colleges. The Obama administration proposed and then backed away from a system that would provide more information to consumers, that would rank colleges' educational value in a straightforward way.

President Barack Obama dearly wanted to get the government in the business of rating colleges and universities based on value and affordability, promising a new system by 2015. Now that goal is shriveling under the weight of a concerted opposition from universities, lawmakers and bureaucrats

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/obama-college-ratings_5595b088e4b05bbba184b0e9

So what is the consumer paying for? The poll data below seems to suggest that college students are paying for a college degree that will open the job market to them -- those who are most discriminated in the job market place the highest value on college.



Plenty of room for improvement or a total makeover.