Crippling America

If you want to take a gander at America’s future, look at today’s college campuses. So says Everett Piper, and he kindly presents some of the rampant absurdity that has infected America’s institutions of higher learning. (via Maggie’s Farm)

In truth, these institutions no longer care about higher learning. They have dumbed themselves down and are now dumbing down America’s future leaders. They have destroyed Humanities education, turning it into an indoctrination mill, producing graduates who have the poorest career prospects. As William McGurn writes in the Wall Street Journal today, students with degrees in English literature most often regret their choice of major. Worst yet are students who study art history, and so on. 

Evidently students who major in STEM subjects have far better prospects, but this only tells us that American universities have been divided between the very bright and less bright. I will not explain which groups gravitate to which majors, because that would be offensive.

So Humanities and Social Science majors militate for social justice and cannot understand why no one wants to hire them. Then they become embittered at a system that does not recognize their moral superiority… and they become activists, either as politicians, bureaucrats or teachers.Their goal is to produce a generation of students that reveres them for their poor choices.

Sadly, it is all taking place in the name of therapy. Children who know nothing and who have too much time on their hands are out in force whining and complaining, about God knows what. They are so thin skinned that the least discouraging word, the least word that suggests they have headed off on the wrong track, must be suppressed. The last thing they want is any indication that they have been duped, even brainwashed into believing a pile of ordurous nonsense. 

Anything that would challenge their beliefs must be suppressed. Because their mental health is at risk.

Will the self-absorbed snowflake insanity persist? Will you continue to hear cries of “you offended me” and “trigger warnings” in the halls of the academy? Will the demands for “safe spaces” continue to trump the study of science? Will the fixation on “micro-aggressions” continue to be more important than teaching morality? Will victimization continue to trump virtue?  

Piper does us the kind service of reminding us of some of last year’s greatest academic hits. If the past tells us anything about the future, we will see them repeated this year:

Students at Emory University will renew their cry for counseling because someone used chalk to write the name of an unpopular politician on a campus sidewalk. 

Young intellectuals at Yale will continue to demand the termination of professors because of their “hurtful” views on such critical issues as Halloween costumes.

Southern Illinois University will double down on its brilliant plan to host campus “naps” in its library so students can snuggle up together in sleeping bags as they seek to solve our nation’s ills. 

In the coming academic year, millennials from campuses across the land will persist in their juvenile fits of rage. 

At American University, the University of Wyoming and the University of California-San Diego, burgeoning scholars will, once again, receive coloring books to help them cope with their stress and anxiety.  

At Pitt, 18-year-olds will continue to block streets and destroy public property. They will then form “healing circles” because they feel “unsafe,” not because of their self-destructive lunacy, but because of the results of the most recent election they don’t like.  

And also:

At Virginia Tech and Michigan State, professors will tell first-year students to embrace identity politics and deny science. The result will be nothing less than total ontological chaos. Some co-eds will face expulsion for refusing to embrace the misogynistic “preferred personal pronouns” of delusional men who want to pretend to be women. 

Biological facts will continue to be flushed down the toilet, as college bathrooms become laboratories for social experimentation and university classrooms become platforms for ideological indoctrination. 

Of course, if a man can declare himself a woman and then participate in woman’s sports, women will suffer. If a man can declare himself a woman and then enter the women’s locker room, women will find their privacy invaded. About that, social justice warriors do not care. Happily, some feminists are raising the alarm, and we hope that their voices will be heard:

In the face of this nonsense, women will suffer first and suffer most. They will lose their facilities, lose their sports, lose their privacy and even lose their identity. And all who dare to suggest that a female is a fact and not a fabrication will be harassed into silence. 

Piper concludes that these children are suffering because reality challenges their narcissism. It also challenges the education they have received, often at a very high price. And, of course, the faculty and administration, through an excess of cowardice and empathy, will happily go along.

These stories will be endless. Millennials and GenZ’ers, who feel uncomfortable with anything that challenges their narcissism, will demand to be coddled. Spineless college administrators and feckless faculty will readily comply. 

And also:

Never forget this one rule: What is taught today in the classroom will be practiced tomorrow in our culture. 

If we do not halt this slide into absurdity, our coddled campuses will produce a crippled America.

Are we so certain that our coddled campuses have not already produced a crippled America?