When did the leftism trend begin in American education?
There’s been an ongoing discussion in yesterday’s feminization of education thread concerning when the leftist rot in education actually began. That put me in mind of a post I wrote back in 2017, which I now reproduce here, about some observations Robert Frost made when he was a college professor. He certainly noticed the trend over a century ago.
Robert Frost has long been one of America’s best-known poets. During his lifetime, he was also seen as a sort of folksy New Englander on the lecture circuit.
But Frost was far more than that (as I’ve previously discussed in many posts). Frost not only had a great deal to say about politics, human nature, science, and literature, but he’d been a teacher and a college professor for many years and he had a great deal to say about education as well.
The following excerpts are from a fascinating book called Robert Frost: The Poet as Philosopher, by Peter J. Stanlis. I think they are remarkably apropos to what’s been happening today, because they describe some of its roots [emphasis mine]:
To Frost, progressive education [Dewey] was a closed system that would “compel liberality.” Like Rousseau, it would force students to be free, not merely from self-discipline, but from social traditions and normative beliefs…To Frost, the progressive theory of the child-centered school was false. Its worst feature was to encourage immature and uneducated students to have a decisive voice in determining the curriculum. Frost’s response was to declare, “There is such a thing as not being old enough to understand.”…
Two things in progressive education provoked Frost’s particular rage—their abandonment of the ancient Greek and Roman classics and their attempts to apply the scientific method to teaching. The latter separated form or technique from genuine content…
Frost also rejected the social objective of progressive education—to indoctrinate students in favor of egalitarian democracy. He always favored education that would allow “the cream to rise to the top.” He believed that in secondary education the progressive theory stressed emotion too much, whereas graduate studies were too centered in abstract reason…To Frost, sound education involved all of human nature….
Frost began teaching at Amherst in 1917, under Amherst president Alexander Meiklejohn:
To Frost, Meiklehohn’s conception of academic freedom was merely a collegiate adaptation of Dewey’s progressive education in the form of doctrinaire compulsory liberalism, centered in social problems rather than in psychology. Meiklehohn’s educational reforms were in the spirit of what Frost called “the guild of social planners,” men who assumed that abstract reasoning and logic were sufficient to solve the world’s great perennial problems. After meeting with some of Meiklejohn’s young faculty appointees, Dwight Morrow, an Amherst trustee, described them to a friend as “bumptious young men…who insisted that nobody thought or studied at Amherst until they came.”
Here’s how Frost described them:
They fancied themselves thinkers. At Amherst you thought, while at other colleges you merely learned… I found that by thinking they meant stocking up with radical ideas, by learning they meant stocking up with conservative ideas—a harmless distinction, bless their simple hearts…They had picked up the idea somewhere that the time was now past for the teacher to teach the pupil. From now on it was the thing for the pupil to teach himself using, as he saw fit, the teacher as an instrument…I sat there patiently waiting, waiting for the youth to take education into their own hands and start the new world. Sometimes I laughed and sometimes I cried a little internally…
Here’s more from Stanlis:
The hubris of their young teachers deluded egotistical students to imagine that through their rational discussions they could find easy and valid solutions to the complex problems of society.
Frost wrote of the experience:
I discovered what the Amherst Idea was that is so much talked of, and I got amicably out. The Amherst Idea as I had it in so many words from the high custodian is this: “Freedom for taste and intellect.” Freedom from what? Freedom from every prejudice in favor of state, home, church, morality, etc. I am too much a creature of prejudice to stay and listen to such stuff. Not only in favor of morality am I prejudiced, but in favor of an immorality I could name as against other immoralities. I’d no more set out in pursuit of the truth than I would in pursuit of a living unless mounted on my prejudices.
Stanlis writes:
It was clear that, like Edmund Burke, whom the poet greatly admired, by “prejudice” he simply meant moral habit beyond reflection built into human nature from infancy in favor of home, church, and state. Frost was convinced that Meiklejohn’s “freedom for taste and intellect” was destructive of the norms in the basic institutions of civil society and involved a chronic separation of the intellectual virtues from the moral virtues.
Well, we know how that all turned out, don’t we? Frost experienced a sort of fractal of what was to develop into our current university woes, and recognized at once what the dangers were and what the denouement was likely to be.
The latest madness from our thoroughly corrupt system of higher (mis)education concerns Peter Boghossian, a professor of philosophy at Portland State who has resigned from that insanely “woke” institution as a protest over its having become nothing but a “social justice factory.” Boghossian, who is by no stretch of the imagination a conservative, is likely to be defended only by those on the right, as leftists are unwilling to criticize any dissenters from the regnant ideology or any apostates from “progressivism” (pas d’ennemis a gauche, in the French expression). The fact that public education (K-12 and the universities) is a lost cause (no reform being possible) augurs badly indeed for the future of our sadly declining republic.
I had been in academia from my freshman year in 1970 until my retirement in December 2018. From my personal observations the faculty was generally center left except for the engineering and business schools. At the 4 year college I ended up at, all the faculty I knew from outside the sciences, again except for a few actual conservatives, were again center left. However, the big difference then from now, is that 98% of them fervently believed in the concept of the classic liberal education. They tolerated and even encouraged dissenting views on every subject. Faculty meetings were fascinating with all sorts of differing opinions being expressed.
All of that changed in the early 2000s. First to succumb was the English department as the newer arrivals were increasingly not classic liberal but radical leftists. Next was sociology, and so on down the line. As I retired, even biology became radical, chem was heading down the path, and the pressure was on for physics. Only computer science was holding out. Faculty meetings were boring affairs with the party line being repeated ad naseum.
So I have to disagree with Frost. From my experience the rot set in about 20 years ago and accelerated greatly in the past 10. Even my left of center friends in the faculty from 20-30 years ago as they retired along with me couldn’t believe the change and also wanted out badly.
I doubt Frost would be surprised by the latest outbreak of virtue signaling at Amherst: COVID-19 rules that place the students inside an extremely expensive jail (cost: about $77,000 per year). From the NY Post:
“Last week, Amherst College announced that its students will be subject to double-masking and to COVID tests every other week throughout the fall semester. Indoor dining services will be shut down, and the size of gatherings severely restricted. Students, all of whom were already required to be vaccinated, will spend non-class time in their dorm rooms and may leave campus only in a handful of defined emergency situations. One of these is apparently going to the bank, though what a bunch of would-be rowdy undergraduates who can’t hit up the local dive bars or have a coffee will need money for is a mystery. . . . The new Amherst regulations are obviously insane. They are also a good reminder, in case anyone needed one, that the pretense of COVID measures having any basis in science or common sense was abandoned by the liberal establishment long ago. . . . the point is to show that [Amherst students] aren’t like the uncouth MAGA morons. You know the people I mean: the morbidly obese red-state monsters who drink bleach at the bidding of their exiled emperor Drumpf and inject themselves with horse medicine in between ritually sacrificing Hispanic and transgender youths at their nightly mask-free motorcycle rallies.”
https://nypost.com/2021/09/01/amherst-colleges-insane-covid-rules-are-all-about-upper-class-virtue-signaling/
PA+Cat, I was just about to post the same thing.
The next step Amherst and other colleges are probably considering is expelling (without refund) students who come up positive on one of their weekly tests. Because the only way the virus could get through two masks in students on lockdown is if they broke the rules and snuck out into public, because Science says the test is completely foolproof with a false positive rate of zero and anyone who brings up “PCR cycles” and “the CDC is scrapping the current testing on December 31, 2021 because it can’t reliably differentiate between covid and other viruses” is a conspiracy theorist who drinks bleach and takes horse medication.
Another bit of virtue-signaling at Amherst that would not have surprised Frost: dropping Lord Jeffery Amherst (commander-in-chief of the British Army in what is now Canada during the Seven Years’ War against France) as the school’s mascot. In 2016, protesting students convinced the college to get rid of Lord Jeff.
“Cullen Murphy, chairman of Amherst’s board of trustees, said in a statement that the college has decided to nix Lord Jeff in its ‘official communications, its messaging and its symbolism.’ That also includes renaming the Lord Jeffery Inn, an iconic hotel on the campus. Furor over the 18th century military man rose among the student body last year, centered on his alleged wartime suggestion to use smallpox against Native Americans.”
The Hartford Courant article also quoted a resident of the town as praising the students: “‘I’m proud of the students for thinking of this,’ Pofcher said. ‘They’re taking action, doing it in a way that seems to be mannerful.'”
https://www.courant.com/education/hc-lord-jeff-amherst-20160127-story.html
I can only imagine what Frost would have thought of the students’ mannerfulness. OTOH, the successors of the mannerful protesters of 2016 are locked down on their own campus. Karma?
physicsguy, your continued presence here as a conservative physics guy is a welcome antidote to my visit with an old friend, who did basic physics research at a high level for 40+ years, and who talked about “white privilege” and “global warming.” I was appalled.
My belief on the takeover by the Progressive-Left of academia is that it was slowly at first [1900s to 1960s], faster [1970s to 2000] and then all at once [2001 on].The early thinkers/thinking gets covered in this piece by Tiffany Jones Miller from 2010.
“The Progressives’ Legacy of Bankruptcy”
https://www.nationalreview.com/2010/07/progressives-legacy-bankruptcy-tiffany-jones-miller/?target=author&tid=902555
The “faster era” was made possible by the Soviet aid funneled through the CPUSA to the New Left where the plans were hatched to infiltrate education at all levels but especially at the college level as it was there the ability to influence who would be the teachers and leaders in all fields had the greatest leverage.
The “all at once” happened because of the foundational work from the past. And too because those who have worked since the 60s-70s to see this happen are now getting old and want to see the project of their lives completed before they pass on.
So I have to disagree with Frost. From my experience the rot set in about 20 years ago and accelerated greatly in the past 10. Even my left of center friends in the faculty from 20-30 years ago as they retired along with me couldn’t believe the change and also wanted out badly.
Somebody shepherded these people through dissertation programs (rejecting others for such), somebody hired them, somebody granted them tenure. If the department was clueless, how’d these appointments get past the provost?
I’m going to point out that the median age of a newly minted PhD is 33 years, so the median vintage of the rancid cohorts you began to see ca. 2000 would have been the 1967 birth cohort. The thing is, youth of that vintage typically voted Republican when they were college students. So, how do you have all these Republicans among your matriculants in 1985 and you end up with SJWs 15 years later. Someone discouraged the modal student from persuing graduate studies. Who?
I was an English major in 1960. That was so I could get a student loan as a pre-med was not eligible. I took my pre-med courses as electives but enjoyed my English classes. I could not detect the political philosophy of any of my professors and I had been a Republican since I took an Economics class. I voted for Nixon in 1960, enraging my Democrat family,. The big shift was later than that, at least at USC where I was.
There are many levels and degrees of rot. It certainly got worse, and more noticeable, over time. And it also spread to more and more universities. But that doesn’t mean Frost was mistaken. He saw some of the early stages and described them over a hundred years ago. I see no reason to doubt that he was accurate.
Art Deco. Good point. But what also was happening is that the administrators at that time were pushing for more hires that were more of a radical bent. Presidents would hold a position hostage unless a department would yield to the administration choice. ie hire who we want or lose that faculty line.
Kate, physicists tend to be a bit naive when it comes to politics. They also tend to follow the ‘Star Trek’ utopian future model. They also don’t like to be seen out of step with the ‘cool kids’ from across campus. Of course I’m talking about academic physicists. Those in government/defense labs are a different breed.
We were singing “This Land is Your Land” in elementary school back in the mid-early 60’s. We were getting indoctrinated way back then. We were taught the glories of the Mayan, Aztec, and Incan civilizations, especially as opposed to our own culture. Also, I remember my 1st grade teacher being appalled when I said my father was voting for Goldwater (why were we being polled?), and my 5th grade teacher telling us to tell our parents that they should vote for LBJ. This bullshit in public schools has done on a very long time.
“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.
“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”
–Ernest Hemingway, “The Sun Also Rises”
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I believe physicsguy is describing the “suddenly” phase of education’s bankruptcy.
physicsguy: Thanks for all your from-the-trenches comments.
We are the recipients of the ‘seeds’ René Descartes, Baruch Spinoza and Jean-Jacques Rousseau first planted.
All that is of the left, arose from those ‘seeds’.
physicsguy, the Star Trek utopian does describe her. Thanks.
Dewey… I wrote enough about him here and took enough guff for it..
I would search google but neo’s site doesnt come up
maybe her site is returning a noindex header in the HTTP response
[I checked to see if the site had a noindex meta tag]
in lieu of finding and linking I will just put this up.. call it a kind of follow up to Robert Frosts view of Dewey.
The Tragedy of American Education: The Role of John Dewey
https://www.iwp.edu/articles/2018/02/01/the-tragedy-of-american-education-the-role-of-john-dewey/
The destruction of the family was ‘hidden’ and the poison first delivered in feminism.. the whole of it was debased and dissected to the point where it was changed to opinion that it was a form of prostitution and a happy gulag guarded by the oppressors from the patriarchy..
From another article on Dewey:
At first, Dewey was very interested in Hegelian ideas of organism, that the living being interacts with its environment, and that society is an organic whole that can be viewed as an organism. After writing a dissertation on Immanuel Kant (17241804), he taught at the University of Michigan from 1884 to 1894. At this time he became interested in public education and progressive politics, as well as psychology. In 1894 Dewey became chair of the department of philosophy, psychology, and education at the University of Chicago. At Chicago, working with colleagues, he began to develop activist social theories.
With this in place, where did Dewey end up? Columbia University…
The university with a huge problematic history not often looked at.. (wrote about that too before)
Dewey chaired the 1937 Mexican commission investigating charges against Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky (see that ole Dewey Commission)
He also defended Bertrand Russell in 1941, when Russell was denied a teaching opportunity at City College , New York
That is another to read about…
not to mention a list of people i have pointed out that are part of this.. Skinner, Boas (and students!), etc.
If radicalism be defined as perception of need for radical change, then today any liberalism which is not also radicalism is irrelevant and doomed.” – John Dewey
no source was more influential than his encounter with the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel as a student at the University of Vermont.
no comment as to all i wrote on Hegelian Dialectics..
In 1929, Dewey had become both president of the People’s Lobby (formerly the Anti-Monopoly League) and national chairman of the League for Independent Political Action (LIPA). The two groups sought to unite liberals and socialists behind a common program of industrial democracy.
Most things you will read will not have any of this mentioned..
ewey never pursued a serious study of Marx. According to the radical writer-cum-conservative critic Max Eastman, Dewey even confessed in 1941 to having never read Marx despite much evidence to the contrary.
As his 1928 book Impressions of Soviet Russia and the Revolutionary World reveals, Dewey held out hope for the Bolshevik experiment and particularly admired its educational reforms. The revolutionary changes in Russian society, he wrote, represented “a release of human powers on such an unprecedented scale that it is of incalculable significance not only for that country, but for the world.” He lamented that the United States — with its mature industrial stock and advanced system of public education — could not undertake similar experiments without a comparable experience of revolutionary civil war.
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IF ya want to REALLY know more…
move ahead and read Charlotte Iserbyt who was former senior policy advisor to the U.S. Department of Education.
she can blow your minds with all kinds of stuff that you definitely do not know..
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The other that would give you lots of insight you wont find anywhere else is John Taylor Gatto..
After teaching for nearly 30 years he authored several books on modern education, criticizing its ideology, history, and consequences. He is best known for his books Dumbing Us Down: the Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling, and The Underground History of American Education: A Schoolteacher’s Intimate Investigation Into the Problem of Modern Schooling, which is sometimes considered to be his magnum opus.
He was named New York City Teacher of the Year in 1989, 1990, and 1991, and New York State Teacher of the Year in 1991
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Lastly… read
The Underground History of American Education: A Schoolteacher’s Intimate Investigation Into the Problem of Modern Schooling – by Gatto
Gatto presents his view of modern compulsion schooling as opposed to genuine education, describing a “conflict between systems which offer physical safety and certainty at the cost of suppressing free will, and those which offer liberty at the price of constant risk”. Gatto argues that educational strategies promoted by government and industry leaders for over a century included the creation of a system that keeps real power in the hands of very few people.
“… what I’m trying to describe [is] that what has happened to our schools was inherent in the original design for a planned economy and a planned society laid down so proudly at the end of the nineteenth century.”
full text:
https://archive.org/download/TheUndergroundHistoryOfAmericanEducation_643/JohnTaylorGatto-theUndergroundHistoryOfAmericanEducation_ASchoolTeachersIntimateInvestigationIntoTheProblemOfModernSchooling2000.pdf
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I have always enjoyed the original Star Trek, but am deeply appalled by Star Trek, The Next Generation. I would not want to live in that era. I never thought Star Fleet, as structured in the original series, would have what is, in all but name, a Zampolit, in the character of Deana Troi.
Instead of calling them useful idiots, they ought to be called the lemming left, since they are driving themselves off the side of the cliff.
artfldgr – thanks for the links to so many articles and references that fill in the background of the decline of America and the West.
Just searching for “John Dewey education theory” turns up posts that talk about his precepts and purposes, but are drawn from a wide spectrum of writings and don’t (from just a quick skimming) pull up anything negative.
One example, which is quite benign and presents his theories as commendable, and as even containing elements I can agree with. I suspect that, as with much of modern (20th c) educational philosophy, the implementation over the entire school system for decades drove the good points (such as they were) out and the bad ones to the fore, both deliberately (as in Iowahawk’s Skinsuit Procedure) and just through the entropy of dispersal among the mediocre teaching schools and graduates.
https://www.teachthought.com/learning/pedagogy-john-dewey-summary/
This one appears to be from a college paper mill, and is so badly written, anyone who buys it should get a refund.
https://graduateway.com/an-analysis-of-john-deweys-experience-and-education/
I thought about compiling a list of institutions that are now known to have been captured by Iowahawk’s Skinsuit Procedure*, but I suspect a list of those that haven’t would be much shorter.
At the moment, I can only think of a few, and some are recent ones that have arisen specifically to counter the decline of the gutted ones:
Hillsdale College
Prager U
Heterodox Academy
*Iowahawk (David Burge) contributed this “Skinsuit Procedure” to the blogosphere some years ago, and it is frequently cited on the Right. IIRC, Neo brought it up not too long ago. This is the original formulation.
https://i0.wp.com/www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2021/09/Screen-Shot-2021-09-02-at-7.58.20-PM.png?w=1058&ssl=1
One of artfldgr’s links contained this warning, which was delivered in 1961, although the iwp article was written long after the predictions had already come to pass. They have been validated by what we’ve learned during the last year about what goes on in schools that parents are not being told.
(paragraphing and emphasis added)
https://www.iwp.edu/articles/2018/02/01/the-tragedy-of-american-education-the-role-of-john-dewey/
The author** is speaking from the viewpoint of non-secularist educators, which puts him in a dwindling minority.
This is the footnote to the excerpt artfldgr quoted, which immediately precedes my selection:
Skinsuits and entropy seem to be inescapable.
* Christopher Dawson, The Crisis of Western Civilization, Washington, D.C., 1961
** Dr. Alberto M. Piedra is a Professor Emeritus at IWP. He is Former U.S. Ambassador to Guatemala and Former Chairman, Department of Economics and Business at The Catholic University of America.
Re: Non-captured colleges…
AesopFan:
I’d include the St. John’s Colleges at Annapolis and Santa Fe.
Their raison d’etre is to teach the Great Books, so they can’t very well junk Dead White Males in favor of Wise Latina Shamans.
This link contains a list of colleges which offer Great Books programs.
https://www.bestcollegereviews.org/features/best-great-book-programs/
Thomas Aquinas College. Main campus in California, new campus in Northfield, Massachusetts, on the former girls’ campus of the Northfield Mount Hermon prep school. One of the few cases of a formerly woke (albeit prep) school going the other way. May be the only one so far.
AesopFan: what about BYU? Not woke, as far as I know. Yet.
@ geoffb > “My belief on the takeover by the Progressive-Left of academia is that it was slowly at first [1900s to 1960s], faster [1970s to 2000] and then all at once [2001 on]. The early thinkers/thinking gets covered in this piece by Tiffany Jones Miller from 2010. “The Progressives’ Legacy of Bankruptcy” (NR)”
I seem to remember when National Review was sane.
I also suspect Professor Miller has been cancelled by now.
Reading through her article affirms my own view that the Progressives / Democrats that we know and love started out as Classical Liberals, and were side-tracked onto the Progressive by-path because the principles as they were presented to the public contained only the beneficial-sounding objectives, and not the rotten foundation and implementations.
(The same methodology as with abortion, BLM, CRT, Dewey & education in general, and the other leftist causes that we are afflicted with today. Even the bugout from Bagram falls into that category: “Just look at our good intentions, not our disastrous results.”)
Miller makes it very clear that the sacrifice of the one for the many is wholly contingent on the ruling elites’ definition of the public good, with no consultation of either the one or the many in that determination.
And – what a surprise! – the value of the sacrifices usually ends up in their own pockets.
Like a beautiful house eaten through by termites — riddled with contradictions, obfuscations, and rationalizations rather than solid principles — the edifice contains the seeds of its own downfall. But the rot spread throughout the neighborhood, and the house-owners are going down with it.
I’m ambivalent about this topic.
In the 5th grade I went from a wonderful, progressive elementary school in Marin County to a a nightmare parochial school in Florida in 6th grade. I know which I preferred.
I don’t believe we have fallen from a Golden Age of Education. I think education is a complex problem in a rapidly changing, complex society. I certainly don’t think we are handling it well today either.
It’s been decades since I read John Dewey. I remember him as being somewhat tedious and not all that radical, unless one tends to “Eeek! moral relativism” responses.
Historically I trace these things back to the Catholic Church and the inevitable, necessary reactions, such as the Enlightenment, to break free of Church’s straitjacket. And I say, thank God for that.
Of course, solve one problem, create new ones. That’s the way life works. I’d rather be living in the 21st Century than the 15th.
I suggest the focus should on what can be done.
What if state legislators forced state colleges and universities to grant equal credit via examinations, with the education provided by the free market. Credits earned via examination could be mixed with those from sitting through the classes and would lead to the same degrees. This would create an explosion of free market providers of educational services and end the current abused monopoly status of academia.
Testing out of courses already exists but would be dramatically expanded.
The tests should not be pass/fail, but actually indicate the test score. The credentialing exams should also allow retaking, with higher grade points reflecting life experience and added study. To stop indoctrination, an appeals procedure staffed by volunteer alumni could allow review where other than multiple choice questions are part of the grade. Total transparency at the student’s option would be required.
Instead of creating generations so in debt that they have trouble starting families and buying their first houses, we could be creating generations who can train quickly for job opportunities in the high tech world of the future. It is time to open the provision of educational services to the free market in a truly meaningful way.
@ Hubert “what about BYU? Not woke, as far as I know. Yet.”
There is an ongoing battle between some of the faculty and students against the college administration and Church leadership.
Elder Holland of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles lowered the boom recently (August 2021), beseeching the errant in a loving and impassioned speech to reconsider their interjection of politics into their teaching (while not enjoining their private beliefs, even though they are contrary to Church doctrine, although the hysterical reactions don’t mention that point).
Gentle hints over the last decade or so had limited effect, apparently. Those are reviewed in the ellipsis in the middle of the quoted section below, along with the topic under fire, and a precipitating cause for this present admonishment.
Video first, then a transcript, for those interested.
The transcript does not include Elder Holland’s introductory remarks (before 6:00), which were the best part, IMO. Then he talks about his nearly-lifelong love of and commitment to BYU, including his tenure as President, and gratitude for everyone who served, and serves there, and some of the personal experiences of those who attend and teach.
The “controversial” part starts around 15:23, and is only controversial if you don’t believe a church-sponsored school should be allowed to insist that its faculty, students, and employees abide by the doctrines of that religion, or at least not promulgate the contrary using the school as their platform.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tg36L1989Ss&list=WL&index=155
https://speeches.byu.edu/talks/jeffrey-r-holland/the-second-half-second-century-brigham-young-university/
@ huxley > “Of course, solve one problem, create new ones.”
Bears a suspicious resemblance to updating computer programs: the number of bugs introduced exceeds by an order of magnitude the number of bugs fixed.
I refer back to my distinction between “good intentions” of sincere, motivated, progressive-in-the-true-sense teachers (aka classic liberals), and the “skinsuit” worn by most of their successors either by design or incompetence (entropy works on institutions as well as closed physical systems and the universe as a whole).
FWIW, my “vision” of god-hood is the holding back of universal entropy.
Bears a suspicious resemblance to updating computer programs: the number of bugs introduced exceeds by an order of magnitude the number of bugs fixed.
AesopFan:
That’s a problem which has solutions. I refer you to Code Refactoring and Donald Knuth’s bug rewards:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_refactoring
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth_reward_check
Of course, solve one problem, create new ones.
Back in the human world, that’s the way it is and it’s often not depressing. An unemployed person gets a job — old problem solved, new problems arise, but usually better problems.
Tony Robbins jokes that his methods won’t free you from problems, but will give you a better class of problems to solve.
I complained about the Catholic Church, but in its time, and to a lesser extent still is, it was a remarkable solution to human problems. Which we are realizing now, as society moves beyond it.
As an ex-hippie/leftist/progressive I have thought long and hard about how those have gone as wrong as they have. But I don’t see them as intrinsically wrong and what we really need to do is get back to gingham dresses and powdered wigs. I see it as part of a longer song we are learning.
I don’t think the mission is to hold back entropy but to respond dynamically and improve, which entails making mistakes and dropping back before moving forward.
AesopFan: thanks for the pointer to Elder Holland’s remarks. I detect a veiled threat in those honeyed words, namely: Try to turn BYU into a “social justice factory”, and we’ll find other uses for the church’s funds. How did the other church official put it? Ah yes: “A college education for our people is a sacred responsibility, [but] it is not essential for eternal life.”
More musket fire in the offing, I suspect.
@ Hubert > “More musket fire in the offing, I suspect.”
I sincerely hope not, but some people don’t react to gentle hints.
Something more like a 2×4 upside the head is necessary.
Would the Church close BYU & their other schools rather than yield to government decrees to violate God’s commandments?
In a heartbeat.
Would they first do everything possible to forestall that situation?
Absolutely.
As Not the Bee puts it, “What a time to be alive!”
I posted a comment referencing “Firefly” and the story of the professor disciplined for hanging a poster on his door with one of Captain Mal’s famous wayings.
https://www.thenewneo.com/2021/09/09/reactions-to-bidens-covid-speech-on-vaccination-mandates/#comment-2576174
Note that this happened almost exactly 10 years ago.
Some people can’t tell fiction from reality, or threats from wit.
https://reason.com/2011/09/26/the-clear-and-present-danger-p/
Which said pretty much the same thing.
FIRE had to come in an’ ‘splain things to her.
https://www.thefire.org/fire-letter-to-uw-stout-chancellor-charles-w-sorensen-september-21-2011/
https://www.thefire.org/cases/university-of-wisconsin-stout-censorship-referral-to-threat-assessment-team-and-threat-of-criminal-charges-after-professor-puts-posters-outside-office-door/
CASE CLOSED
https://cvpost.org/lisa-walter-retires-uw-stout-police-chief-23-years-department/
Lisa A Walter was a DMV clerk who landed work as a security guard. In New York, a selection of campus security guards are deputized by local police and sheriffs. Not sure to what extent that applies in Wisconsin. Read the small section where she talks about telling parents their child has died and ask yourself given the circumstances described (house fire, suicide, bar fights off campus) if it is at all likely that it would have been the chief of security at the campus who had the task of talking to parents. Self-aggrandizing twit, this broad.
Under other circumstances, there would have been repercussions for harassing a member of the faculty and putting the campus in the cross hairs of his legal counsel, but this woman is an agent of privileged political interests. You won’t see the end of this behavior by higher ed apparatchiks until they’re stripped of their immunity by the state legislature and face personal liability for their malfeasance, misfeasance, and nonfeasance.
One other datum. She retired in 2017 and decamped to Arizona. Note, she held supervisory positions from 1999 to 2017, not grunt positions. See the pic of her: fat, no uniform, bad hair. She was 54 on the day she retired. I’ve read that Wisconsin has the most actuarially-sound public sector pension program in the nation. Sigh.