Should the public subsidize Left-wing curriculum at colleges

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Comprised by Dennis Prager over at the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles, the list below is more or less what is taught at the average college and University across the United States. As you may notice, it is entirely the narrative of the Left, and so it's pretty safe to say that many non-leftist parents are forking over a ton of cash to pay for over-priced tuition to send their children to Leftist seminaries that are publicly funded by everyone, including those who don't agree with these positions.

Question: Should we be publicly funding colleges and universities to make future democrats out of our children. And if not, would you be willing to continue wastefully throwing money at over-priced colleges if they hired conservatives to teach the conservative view of things?

America:

1. The United States is no better than any other country, and in some important ways it is worse than many.
2. On the world stage, America is an imperialist country, and domestically it mistreats its minorities and largely neglects its poor.
3. “American exceptionalism” and overt displays of patriotism are examples of American chauvinism.
4. America is a racist country. You white students are racist — and you either acknowledge this or you are in denial.
5. Non-whites, however, cannot be racist — because whites have power and the powerless cannot be racist.
6. The South votes Republican because it remains racist, and the Republican Party caters to that racism.
7. Women are victims — of men. Blacks are victims — of whites. Latinos are victims — of Anglos. Muslims are victims — of Christians. Gays are victims — of straights.
8. The American Founders were sexist, racist slaveholders whose primary concern was preserving their power and wealth.
9. The original meaning and intent of the Constitution are either unknowable or irrelevant to today.
10. The Electoral College should be abolished in order to transform America from a republic to a democracy.
11. America’s dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima was racist and a war crime.

Religion:

1. God is at best a nonissue, and at worst a foolish and dangerous belief.
2. Only people who reject science believe that the universe was designed.
3. Religion has killed more people than any other idea, group or movement in human history.
4. Christianity, in particular, has been a malevolent force, its history consisting largely of inquisitions, crusades, oppression and anti-intellectualism. Islam, on the other hand, is a religion of peace.
5. Criticism of Christianity is therefore enlightened. Criticism of Islam, however, is a form of bigotry known on campus as Islamophobia.
6. The good done by Christians in forming the Western world is not attributable to Christianity.
7. Evil committed by Christians is due to Christianity. Evil committed by Muslims is not due to Islam.

Society and Morality:

1. The reason for Third World poverty is that Western nations exploited Third World nations through colonialism and imperialism.
2. The great moral conflicts are between the rich and the poor and between the powerful and the powerless, not between the good and the evil (that is dismissed as Manichaeism).
3. The state is the most effective vehicle to creating a humane society. Therefore the larger the state, the more good it will do.
4. Big corporations are bad. Big unions are good.
5. Capitalism is rooted in selfishness and is structured to benefit the wealthy.
6. Health care for profit is morally wrong.
7. War is ignoble. Pacifism is noble.
8. Human beings are animals, differing from “other animals” only in having more developed brains.
9. Sexual orientation is biologically determined. Gender is not.
10. Therefore, men and women, including mothers and fathers, are essentially interchangeable. The notions that married mothers and fathers are the parental ideal and that mothers and fathers bring unique things to a child are heterosexist and homophobic.
11. The greatest vehicle for women’s happiness is career satisfaction, not marrying and making a family.
12. The primary causes of criminal violence are poverty and racism.
13. Man-made carbon emissions are dramatically heating up the planet, and this will lead to global catastrophe.

Arts and Literature:

1. There is no actual meaning to a text. Texts mean what the reader perceives them to mean.
2. There is no better and worse in literature and the arts. The reason universities traditionally taught Shakespeare, Michelangelo and Bach — rather than, let us say, Guatemalan poets, Sri Lankan musicians and Native American storytellers — was not that they were the best but because of Western “Eurocentrism.”

Israel:

1. Israel’s settlements on the West Bank are the primary cause of the Middle East conflict.
2. Israel is an apartheid state, morally little different from apartheid South Africa.

I don't care that much about the curriculum but I think there is too much importance put on getting a college degree when a lot of jobs don't really require it and could be trained on the job, I think that you should be able to discharge these loans thru bankruptcy which would make lenders only want to give these loans to people they think can pay them back which would force universities into lowering their tuitions due to lower demand. Knowledge is much more open sources now, you don't have to go live in some broom closet with another dude in some castle for a few years to be educated.

I would have to see what exactly is proposed to decide but I know what I do not like.



I found this following interesting and think you will as well.



Regards
DL

I agree. I spent two years in a community college ( AS Agriculture, AS Cultural Anthropology ) and while I still use things I learned studying Agriculture, mostly I use knowledge that I have acquired since, plus things I was taught on the family farm in Upstate New York. But, as far the examples cited go, this simply a case of indoctrination vs. education. These types of courses are for the Professional Students, those who have no plans on any career.

Some of the things you mention are simply fairly well documented facts...some of the others sound like exaggeration on your part I've gone to college and was not taught all white people are racist, that non-white people cannot be racist, also there is no criticizm of regular heterosexual parents just the view point homosexuals can make decent parents to, I mean a kid would probably do better with loving gay 'parents' than say being stuck in foster care of the state tossed from group home to group home or whatever.

And well a lot of the world problems of poverty do trace back to corporate exploitation from the west. America doesn't do a very good job of addressing poverty at home or caring for its poor.


What is the right wing way? Ignore all social issues and pretend capitalism is pure goodness, and that we're solving poverty around the world and refuse to revisit that hey maybe dropping a bomb purposely aimed specifically at civilians rather than any kind of military supply base or anything might have been a little bit of over-kill. IDK I don't see anything specifically wrong with over-all college curriculum...except tuition is ridiculous and a debt trap.

Either way what changes to the perceived curriculum would you like to see made? What ought they be teaching?

You go to college to get educated to get a job, not to be indoctrinated.

Is it still as bad? Way back in the 70's a good Classics dean was thrown out to be replaced by a young Marxist historian. There was a summer school were the strident left wing feminists were pushing it and anybody who had a different opinion was flattened. People were paying to learn Sociology in an academic way. The students were not pleased.

Oh goody, another right-wing persecution complex.

Several things on your silly list are simple facts. Many are bizarre caricatures that few or no people even believe. Very few are standard components of the typical college curriculum. Most professors go to great pains to avoid advancing political or moral stances in the classroom.

If it matters, the most recent high-profile case of a faculty member being sacked for "incorrect" political views was a professor who criticized Israeli policy a bit too harshly on twitter, not some conservative being chased off by the PC brigade.

Facts do have a well-known liberal bias

at any rate, the public only kicks in 10-20% at the "public" colleges these days, so what's the big deal?

Exactly. Originally, it was born out of our valuing merit, which only begin in the early 60's when Ivy League schools switched from being prep schools for the rich and connected, to admissions based on achievement via the raising of SAT requirements. Since then, we've become a nation whose narrative is saturated and fixated on achievement, which is fantastic.

That's sadly no longer the case, and colleges are producing some of the dumbest people in modern higher-ed history these days. The issue is all the government-backed free money they're given, through government backed student loans. Free, government-backed money invites tuition hikes. There's also the non-major requirements to force students to take up social-justice focused courses, which prolongs ones education, adding to its cost. And then there's the fact that college administrators, on so many campuses, outnumber professors. It's become a bureaucratic machine where, in order to drive the focus of colleges towards achieving social ends, it helps to cut professor salaries and the number of faculty, hire adjunct professors for half or a third of the cost, and redirect that money to fattening up administrations who tackle social justice issues on campus, often while complaining(scamming) to the public that you don't get enough money from the state to cover basic professor salaries.





Does the UC San Diego really need all of the following:

1. Vice chancellor for equity, diversity, and inclusion
2. Chancellor’s Diversity Office
3. The associate vice chancellor for faculty equity
4. The assistant vice chancellor for diversity
5. The faculty equity advisors, the graduate diversity coordinators
6. The staff diversity liaison, the undergraduate student diversity liaison
7. The graduate student diversity liaison, the chief diversity officer
8. The director of development for diversity initiatives
9. The Office of Academic Diversity and Equal Opportunity
10. The Committee on Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation Issues
11. The Committee on the Status of Women
12. The Campus Council on Climate, Culture and Inclusion
13. The Diversity Council
14. The directors of the Cross-Cultural Center
15. The Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Resource Center
16. The Women’s Center.

Each and every one of these require staff and are a drain on resources, not to mention eat up millions in salaries, with many of these people making at or close to six figure salaries. So the cost of college alone is not worth it, especially if so much of your money is eaten up to advance social justice politics.

What about government-backed student loans made by the department of education, etc.?

No I expect you Orwell to doubt anything that makes the Left, look, bad, or totalitarian, etc. Most professors go to great pains to avoid advancing political or moral stances in the classroom? lmao, okay, and at what colleges do these professors teach at...

I took a class once to learn Excel. We spent the first 30 minutes of every class making fun of Bush and the Iraq war. I've never taken an english / writing class where the professor didn't use a chunk of class time to explore race or gender inequality. My writing 121 class was taught by a black lady who did nothing but complain about race inequality, and my writing 122 class did nothing but explore poverty in the third world and how we in the first world contribute to so much of that.

The only places where you might be spared the politics of the Left is in Business departments, but the Liberal Arts is screwed, and so is the Humanities.

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It's worst actually, because when you went to school, you didn't have to put up with the recent progressive innovations made on the fronts of Race and Gender.

Which of these are exaggerations? You're certainly taught at the overwhelming majority of colleges to view racism as something that whites do onto non-whites. Whenever race is explored, it's sort of done so within those confines. And there's certainly criticism of heterosexism in every gender and womens department. You may find an exception, but it's nothing more then an aberration, and not the general rule.

You shouldn't compare best-case scenario to worst case-scenarios, it's often best to test the metal of your ideas by comparing your preferred view, against the best of the other, and in any event, the choice really doesn't come down to loving gay parents versus state-sponsored foster care.



The world was poor prior to America becoming rich. Many people now living in better homes that can weather the elements, walked around on gravel and lived in straw dwellings as recently as 100, 50, even 25 years ago. So you can't say that we caused their poverty. By the way, poverty isn't a phenomenon, considering that was the way of the world for most of human history. The question really comes down to why is their now wealth and innovation that built the modern world, where there wasn't any before.




Not at all, most of these issues had nothing to do with capitalism. The atomic bomb ended our war with a Japan who was intent on fighting us to the death, and whose own generals were willing to sacrifice the entire Island then surrender. Would you rather we had massacred millions of Japanese to bring an end to those fascists in a land invasion?



I should actually write that up. I mean, most of us who don't agree with this curriculum already know what we want taught, but it isn't so apparent to those who prefer the current left-wing curriculum, so I'll write it out.

Shoot, I messed that list up:

1. Does the UC San Diego really need all of the following:
   
2. Vice chancellor for equity, diversity, and inclusion
3. Chancellor’s Diversity Office
4. The associate vice chancellor for faculty equity
5. The assistant vice chancellor for diversity
6. The faculty equity advisors
7. The graduate diversity coordinators
8. The staff diversity liaison
9. The undergraduate student diversity liaison
10. The graduate student diversity liaison
11. The chief diversity officer
12. The director of development for diversity initiatives
13. The Office of Academic Diversity and Equal Opportunity
14. The Committee on Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation Issues
15. The Committee on the Status of Women
16. The Campus Council on Climate, Culture and Inclusion
17. The Diversity Council
18. The directors of the Cross-Cultural Center
19. The Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Resource Center
20. The Women’s Center.