What happens on campus doesn’t stay there

Submitted by Mastodon on Tue, 2017-05-30 19:42

Article here. Excerpt:

'Campuses across the country kicked off “Sexual Assault Awareness Month” (SAAM) this April to the tune of several hundreds of thousands of dollars. Since 2001, every U.S. President has declared April to be SAAM, and President Trump has followed suit. Over the past decade in particular, an increasing number of Federal mandates encouraged colleges and universities to up the ante on such awareness programming, enforcing punitive measures should they fail to do so. This suggests an observation: Those who believe that an increased Federal role will solve campuses’ well-documented sexual woes might be suffering from something akin to April foolishness.

It’s not simply the bureaucratese-heavy emails that flood my inbox from consulting companies—designed with “best practices” in mind and in collusion with lawyerly types—that influence this observation. (Though it’s been several years since I worked as a student affairs professional, the industry likes to remind me of all the ways I, or my institution, should continue to fund their existence.) The headlines of the past few months alone are enough to give one pause about throwing more regulations, more lawyers, or more courts at campuses’ sex-related problems.

So does the lived experience of working in student affairs, at the nexus of competing student needs, parental demands, faculty expectations, legal obligations, and public opinion.

The situation on college campuses is well summed up by a recent flurry of articles and books. For a representative sample, take Stuart Taylor, Jr. and K.C. Johnson’s “The Campus Rape Frenzy: The Attack on Due Process at America’s Universities,” or Northwestern University Professor Laura Kipnis’s riveting Chronicle Review article, “Eyewitness to a Title IX Witch Trial,” an excerpt from her own recent book. The latter is not so much about Kipnis’s own surrealist encounter with Title IX enforcers as it is about her erstwhile Northwestern colleague Peter Ludlow, now effectively unemployable and living in Mexico. About American campuses, Kipnis observes, “Rampant accusation is the new norm.” About everything, she adds—but particularly about sex.'

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http://www.intellectualtakeout.org/blog/how-emotionalism-slowly-replacing-rationalism

'But considering that self-command over one’s emotions was believed to be the wiser course for years, we should ask ourselves whether our full blown embrace of emotions is a good thing.

Is it possible that we have embraced the emotional outpouring in life because it is one of the few weapons with which we have left to work? Have we marginalized rational thinking and reasonable discourse to such an extent that the only way we can get our point across is to yell, scream, cry, or rant?'

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Submitted by Matt on Fri, 2017-06-02 01:35

I have noticed most of the people now carrying on happen to be in their late teens and early 20s. H@ving just come out of adolescence (or still in its latter stages), and often spoiled and sheltered, they are on college campuses and have their first taste of life not going the way they want it to. In addition, they get the correct impression that their futures are very much in doubt. With the Internet being what it is, they know from news stories that the job market is bad and not improving. AI/automation threatens to leave them among the long-term unemployed unless they can learn to do something that will be in demand for years to come. Not surprisingly, that describes jobs requiring a higher-than-average IQ. By definition, that leaves out most people.

Now take these horny, naive, easily-manipulated (by professors who never set foot outside academe), restless, often bored, spoiled kids and place them in large numbers on a college campus. Leave them largely unmanaged or supervised. Give them only things to do that by and large they are not interested in doing. Finally, enact policies that don't let them be young fools: zero tolerance for "unauthorized parties", etc.

Like you can't predict what is going to happen. They will find some way to get attention. Much of what is happening today on campuses is little more than the barking of wolf pups reminding the adult wolves not to forget the kids.

College has become a waste of time and money for most people. Those needing a college degree to pursue a profession like medicine or engineering, they are not wasting time or money. But the bulk of everyone else is. And, they are getting into a mountain of debt, the means by which to pay it off increasingly elusive. Heading onward, only a handful of professions will grow in the coming decades: medicine, esp. geriatric medicine, computer programming, automation engineering, robotics, and prostitution. Drug trafficking/production will also continue to thrive.

To think, the kids carrying on at colleges today, putting on marches, protesting the patriarchy and white privilege, etc., will be vying desperately for a job at Starbucks in a couple short years. Meanwhile, the kids who studied Biology for pre-med and computer science will be the ones that go on to have marketable careers. Obviously, these two sets of kids will not be the same. Sad, but the law of cause and effect is hard to defy.

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Submitted by Matt on Sat, 2017-06-03 04:07

Everything you said has much truth to it, Matt (as always).

It makes me glad that I specialized in STEM, and not any of the other useless academic programs universities offer. I also did so of my own accord. I knew that as a male I have no choice but to be self-sufficient, and this was pretty much the only way to ensure myself a good career.

You have pointed this out before, but this is the exact reason why STEM is around 80% male. Men know no one will pick up the slack for them, so they choose practical careers. Many women are convinced that someone will take care of them, and for the most part try to eschew careers that are this rigorous. That is also why it takes huge efforts to get girls interested in STEM.

I'd be willing to bet any money that in a society where men and women were expected to split the cost of everything equally in a relationship, and held to that standard, that STEM fields would be a lot closer to 50-50.

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Submitted by xtrnl on Sun, 2017-06-04 01:29