When Michael Olneck was standing, arms linked with other protesters, singing “We Shall Not Be Moved” in front of Columbia University’s library in 1968, Sara Goldrick-Rab had not yet been born.
When he won tenure at the University of Wisconsin here in 1980, she was 3. And in January, when he retires at 62, Ms. Goldrick-Rab will be just across the hall, working to earn a permanent spot on the same faculty from which he is departing.
Together, these Midwestern academics, one leaving the professoriate and another working her way up, are part of a vast generational change that is likely to profoundly alter the culture at American universities and colleges over the next decade.
Baby boomers, hired in large numbers during a huge expansion in higher education that continued into the ’70s, are being replaced by younger professors who many of the nearly 50 academics interviewed by The New York Times believe are different from their predecessors ”” less ideologically polarized and more politically moderate.
Its time for a sea change.
Less political indoctrination and more non-biased education.
It’d be lovely for professors to care more about the pursuit of truth than their pet ideological nonsense for a change.
But now we have to worry again, as they will polarise and radialise the nursing homes…
I ran into this from time to time when I was in college and grad school. I never really understood the penchant of professors from this era to believe that the purpose of the classroom was to get people, not to think in general, but to think like the professor.
I had professors which held views I vehemently disagreed with, and that was fine. What I thought was abuse of the role of professor, however, came when professors would force students to agree with them or else fail the class (or at the very least get a bad grade). It was if disagreement was somehow a personal affront to the professor.
You can have your opinions and express those opinions; I should be likewise able to have and express my ideas, even if they are contrary to yours. Exchange of ideas is what (I believe) is the purpose of “higher” education.
And the pendulum swings back…
These are the same people who, if they couldn’t evade the draft by getting their Ph.Ds, did so by going to seminary and becoming non-Christian ministers at liberal mainline denominations. One of the major reasons for today’s implosion of the faux Christian churches.
I’ll believe this when I see it. My colleagues are all hard core liberal in as far as I can see. Maybe they aren’t the radicals of the 60s, but (excepting the sciences) the transformation of the American college into liberal indoctrination institutions is complete. There’s nothing for them to protest. They run the show.
I had to appear on a TV show a couple of years ago with one of the more well known academic radicals around here. This was my first one-on-one experience with her. The media had always portrayed her as an intellectual heavyweight, but when I met with her in the studio before the program started I found the exact opposite; there was virtually no independent mental functioning going on in her mind.
It was like she was a tape recorder filled with pre-recorded messages. You pressed one button and she came out with various pro-Marxist statements that most people laugh at now; you pushed another button and she would come out with pre-recorded messages on how our society is entirely based on oppression of women and people of color. After about ten minutes it dawns on you that nothing is going on upstairs.
It was pretty sad to see what a light-weight she really was, and yet she had bullied her way (by filing lawsuits saying she was discriminated against as a woman and minority) into being a tenured professor of “ethnic studies” at our largest university. And all I could think was, are these the kinds of people that are teaching our children?
#7
You’re absolutely right. The damage done to academia (and therefore to our culture) by these Marxists is incalcuable.
If only this went for seminary professors, as well, be might not be in as bad a shape.
I’ll believe this when the University of Colorado located in the Peoples Republic of Boulder starts hiring neutral or conservative professors.
Not a moment too soon. The far left wing academics have done all the damage they could, and its consequences will be with us for generations.
And its main lesson is the old one: If we are in power, we can do wht we want and that includes suppressing thought. As the president of Harvard found out. Larry