RUTHFULLY YOURS

In my building and among my acquaintances high school seniors are nervously awaiting responses to their college applications. A friend of mine- a brilliant intellectual writer and editor, whose child is among them, remarked at a recent dinner that college catalogues should read as follows:

Dear Applicants,

Your parents have inculcated you with faith and respect for free speech and open debate. You have been taught to admire Judeo/Christian values, Western Civilization and culture, the genius of the founding fathers, and American exceptionalism. You are generally patriotic and liberal in the John Stuart Mill definition of the word.

Come to our college and for a tuition of $70,000.00 per year we will free your mind from all the foregoing and outdated cant.

Parents who plan on refinancing their homes in order to send their children off to college should instead consider encouraging them to specialize in a trade.

Speaking as a Ph.D. in philosophy who has spent the last 17 years teaching at the college level, I’m perhaps the last person from whom advice of this sort is expected. But it is precisely because of my familiarity with academia that I beseech the college bound and their enablers—I mean their supporters—to revisit their plans.

Whether one regards a post-secondary institution as a means to either a remunerative profession or a genuine education, the tragic fact of the matter is that the contemporary academic world is about as politicized a cultural institution as any. More specifically, it is a bastion of Political Correctness, a decidedly leftist ideology that tolerates no competition.

For the last 11 years, Professor Duke Pesta, who is currently an associate professor of English at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, has taught literature at a range of colleges. At the outset of each semester, he would quiz his students on their knowledge of American and Western history. What he found is that the “overwhelming” number of them believed that slavery—an institution, mind you, that is as old as humanity itself, was practiced in virtually every society the planet over, and that lasted only some 87 years in the United States—was an exclusively American phenomenon.

“Most of my students could not tell me anything meaningful about slavery outside of America,” Pesta told The College Fix. His students “are convinced that slavery was an American problem that more or less ended with the Civil War and they are very fuzzy about slavery prior to the Colonial era.”

“Their entire education about slavery,” he adds, “was confined to America.”

Yet it isn’t just students who display an astonishing ignorance of slavery. Over at Boston University, Saida Grundy, an Assistant Professor of sociology and African-American Studies, tweeted that slavery is “a white people…thing.”

College is now a politically correct joke.

Suffolk University’s interim president said Tuesday that the college will hold mandatory microaggression training for all faculty in response to an outcry last week after a Latina student wrote a viral blog post saying she was the victim of a professor’s racial bias.

What did this racial bias involve?

Tiffany Martinez.said an unidentified Suffolk sociology professor handed back a paper she had written and in front of the class and told Martinez, “This is not your language,” insinuating that Martinez had plagiarized.

Martinez posted a photo of the paper on her blog, showing where the professor appears to have written “please go back and indicate where you cut and paste.” The professor had circled the word “hence” in the paper and wrote, “this is not your word.”

“In this interaction, my undergraduate career was both challenged and critiqued,” the student wrote. “It is worth repeating how my professor assumed I could not use the word “hence,” a simple transitory word that connected two relating statements. The professor assumed I could not produce quality research.”

Most college students, regardless of whether their ancestors originated from southern Europe or not, do not tend to use hence in a sentence. Hence, it’s the sort of word that professors seize on and suspect that what they are seeing is cut and paste material. Tiffany’s interaction has happened thousands of times with students regardless of race.