4 thoughts on “Newsflash: My Parents were Right”

1. That’s why only Gold medals matter. Who taught these kids to be happy with first loser?

   LikeLiked by 1 person

2. Maybe University of Chicago is not a safe space for liberal education:

   Pressures on liberal education come from the left and the right—although those terms are inadequate approximations, since campus politics never map well onto the real world. From the left come the campus activists, who believe, more or less, that Chicago’s traditional fetishization of rigor and the Western canon is almost literally destroying the lives of marginalized students. They are brilliant, well-armed with proof texts, and committed to transforming American higher education from the inside out. It’s their ideas and actions that so many universities across the country have reluctantly half-accepted and that Chicago prides itself on resisting.

   On the right, there are the future consultants, the pre-professionals, the “organization kids.” They run the College Republicans, and for that matter the UC Democrats; they’re Chicago’s equivalent to the bipartisan coastal elite we hear so much about these days. They want to have fun at college and get some networking done, activities that often overlap if you play your cards right. For them, the core curriculum is a distraction (and sometimes a threat to their GPAs) and amenities are essential. When students complain online about grade inflation, gleaming dorms, and the rapid expansion of the fraternity system, they tend to respond with confusion or disbelief. They too are frighteningly smart; they know what they want out of life, and they are glad to have come to a school that is starting to figure out how to help them get it. They are unsympathetic or even actively opposed to calls for trigger warnings and safe spaces, but, crucially, they also seem uninterested in the kind of abstract, freewheeling debate that the campus left is trying to constrain.

   Both sides question Hutchins’s vision for a university education that forces us into an encounter with difficult and even unpalatable ideas—with great thoughts that are not always also good thoughts. But while university administrators have made concessions to both sides, the pre-professionals are winning. In an effort to attract the well-connected, multi-talented students who populate Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford, Chicago has been trying to shake off its monastic reputation for the past two decades. It’s introduced new, intensive majors, most notoriously the molecular-engineering program, which, like engineering programs everywhere, requires four years of absolute commitment and leaves little room for electives. Chicago always avoided introducing an undergraduate engineering major because of the rigors of Hutchins’s core curriculum, but that too is changing: core requirements were cut by a third in the ’90s, and new, easier sequences have been introduced in the social sciences and humanities to give harried engineers and econ majors a break.

   LikeLiked by 1 person

3. This certainly doesn’t sound like the UC where the late Allan Bloom taught. I recall reading “The Book Wars: What it Takes to Be Educated in America,” by then NY Times editor James Atlas (1990), when it was published and was astonished to find Bloom arguing in favor of keeping “the classics” on the curriculum vs. other notorious professors and department heads at colleges around the country who were pushing their agendas for substituting “culturally relevant” reading material. Not astonished at Bloom, mind you, but at the major turn in the country’s college educational fabric – if you’re out to seek a good, solid, and (heh) expensive liberal formal eduction, why would you not want to read the classics. ‘Course, the two and half decades since the publication was released have only seen this situation worsen. Maybe UC is just giving up on the whole bad business and taken a sharp turn toward the hard sciences as an escape route (or maybe I should say “safe space).

   LikeLike

4. I went to college figuring I was better than my professors and going to have to overcome them. I was right and I did. “Pay a nickel and make your choice, Mr. Moore!” More imprecision from doctors, I want my nickel back. But you can keep nickelback.

   LikeLike

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.