November 25, 2010

Well-Staffed

You can't complain that high tuition private colleges aren't well-staffed these days. From an article in the Washington Post about problems college freshmen have with their parents when they go home on vacation for the first time:
A growing number of colleges are helping freshmen and their families navigate the fine art of learning to live together once again. Last week, George Washington University hosted a seminar for about 40 students on "Going Home: It will be different."

The university's Office of Parent Services also sent a letter to parents explaining that their kids won't be the same people this semester - and probably will sleep a lot.

Tips included: "Try not to remove all of the freedoms that your student has become accustomed to over the past few months. They have developed a new way of living, and reverting back to the 'old way' may cause stress." The letter ends with a couple of phone numbers to the school's Office of Parent Services that parents can call "if things get rough."

78 comments:

asdfasdfasf said...

Try not to remove all of the freedoms that your student has become accustomed to over the past few months. They have developed a new way of living, and reverting back to the 'old way' may cause stress." The letter ends with a couple of phone numbers to the school's Office of Parent Services that parents can call "if things get rough."
-------------

Try not to remove all the freedom? Funny coming from an institution that removes freedom in the name of political correctness.

Maybe colleges need another staff to tell this staff to stop acting like pests and go bugger off.

Anonymous said...

What do you expect from a country that has passed a law that treats offspring up to 26 year olds as dependent children?

Come to think of it, what do you expect from a country that has produced parents who like their 26year old offspring to be considered children?

Anonymous said...

The point was made recently on the "100 Reasons NOT to go to Grad School" blog that colleges now have so many permanent employees (in jobs that have nothing to do with teaching) that they have become the real stakeholders in higher education.

Teaching and learning have taken a back seat on campus as colleges have become job-creation centers for white-collar (and, to some extent, blue-collar) employees.

In an economy with no manufacturing and little else productive going on, the higher education bubble is still a place to find work... as long as the student/parent debt that supports it all continues to grow.

Anonymous said...

I'm thankful to be reading a blogger who posts on Thanksgiving.

Anonymous said...

Your kids are ours now. If you resist, our Office of Parent Re-education will explain why you are heteronormative capitalist racists and why everything your kids do is right and everything you do is wrong.

Thanks for the $40k.

IHTG said...

How much of the conservative animus against academia is really about angry parents, shocked by how their formerly innocent children have gone wild without their supervision?

dearieme said...

Next we'll need a seminar on the transition between college and the college/home interface. Then a seminar on the transition between college and the seminar on the transition between college and the college/home interface. Then.... recursion ad nauseam.

Anonymous said...

"Tips included: "Try not to remove all of the freedoms that your student has become accustomed to over the past few months. They have developed a new way of living, and reverting back to the 'old way' may cause stress." The letter ends with a couple of phone numbers to the school's Office of Parent Services that parents can call "if things get rough.""


Was this written by some chick psychology professor with no children? Freaking hilarious. Can you say, "Orwellian"?

Now they fancy themselves the "professional" "expert" advisors to parents of students. Hilarious. If they even have kids, the kids probably have nose rings. There is no end to the arrogant presumption of "educators".

They should rename it the Office of Services to Insecure, Emasculated Helicopter Parents.

What real man would listen to this BS from a company he employs to educate his kid? It is like the scene from Ghostbusters, "Yes, it's true. This man has no dick."

Figgy said...

What infernal poppycock! Could we get any wimpier with our kids than we are now?

Paul Mendez said...

"College: It's the new High School."

Anonymous said...

Higher education and the federal government -- America's two growth industries.

-- JP98

Anonymous said...

Your student loan money hard at work lol. Liberal arts is such a waste of time, maybe do away with liberal arts outside of the ivies and replace the rest with suped up vocational academies.

Off subject but I was watching The Walking Dead. I like it but sometimes the PC comes on so strong that it is distracting. The show makes it a little bit too easy to assign blame, dislike the designated unlikable characters (who are all white males so far). Also, wondering about your take on Breaking Bad and The Goode Family. Full reviews at some future point?

Anonymous said...

This is in loco parentis on steriods. If I were a parent of a GWU freshman, I'd be pleased to know that I was buying (expensive) advice along with my child's education...

Anonymous said...

I think the term you wanted was "well-stuffed" ...

Mel Torme said...

Yeah, I could see the letter my Dad got from the college, as he left it and his reply on the dining room table:

From the University:
"Dear Mr. Torme: We have spent the last four months doing our best to turn your son into a politically correct communist. During this holiday break, we ask you to please refrain from trying to de-brainwash him. A large amount of the taxpayers of your state's money has been utilized for this important societal goal.
We ask you to sign the form below, stating that you will comply"

Dad's reply: "NUTS!"

kurt9 said...

There's an existential reason for the recession.

Anonymous said...

Steve sailer comment on this please:

http://brain-training.googlegroups.com/web/jaeggi2010.pdf?gda=zZHmYUAAAABL-AAtWJyv-45o99_wkvZJIJmujCqssXqIGurl4tWJ196jg7H_HxJpGtJwskokOR9txVPdW1gYotyj7-X7wDON

Anonymous said...

"Try not to remove all of the freedoms that your student has become accustomed to over the past few months. They have developed a new way of living, and reverting back to the 'old way' may cause stress."

Nooooo not stress, please anything but stress.

SFG said...

"Try not to remove all the freedom? Funny coming from an institution that removes freedom in the name of political correctness."

I think they're talking about drinking and sex, not politics, guys. I went to a very, very liberal college, and a lot of the propaganda goes in one ear and out the other.

sabril said...

I do recall that when I went to college, I got used to coming and going as I pleased without having to tell anyone where I was going or when I would be back. So yeah it was a bit annoying when I came home for breaks and was back under my parents' thumb.

Anyway, I agree that colleges tend to have a lot of staff doing useless nonsense. When I was in college, a conservative student group reviewed the university books and apparently discovered that there were more non-teaching staff members than undergraduates.

alexis said...

There's really a job at the "Office of Parent Services" for this? Looks like a candidate for a Bud Lite Presents Real Men of Genius profile.
Let's try "Mr. Office of Parent Services Coordinator"

Anonymous said...

Anonymous: Your kids are ours now. If you resist, our Office of Parent Re-education will explain why you are heteronormative capitalist racists and why everything your kids do is right and everything you do is wrong.

Mel Torme: Dear Mr. Torme: We have spent the last four months doing our best to turn your son into a politically correct communist. During this holiday break, we ask you to please refrain from trying to de-brainwash him. A large amount of the taxpayers of your state's money has been utilized for this important societal goal. We ask you to sign the form below, stating that you will comply.

I.e. Introduction to Gramscian-Frankfurt-School Nihilism 101.

Next semester: Introduction to Gramscian-Frankfurt-School Nihilism 102.

Sophomore year: Intermediate Gramscian-Frankfurt-School Nihilism, 201 & 202.

Junior year: Advanced Theory of Gramscian-Frankfurt-School Nihilism, 301 & 302.

Senior year: Honors Seminar in Gramscian-Frankfurt-School Nihilism 401 & 402 [senior thesis].

Anonymous said...

Over at AosHQ, we have pretty much given up on The Walking Dead - it's so PC that it's unwatchable.

Also, this past week on NCIS, [SPOILER ALERT] the good guys were:

1) A negro bureaucrat, and

2) A jewish Israeli bureaucrat, and

3) A white female career woman*,

whereas the evil mole who was trying to destroy NCIS was an older white male with a strong southern/country/redneck accent.

So I'm pretty much done with that franchise.

Finally, Breaking Bad is really fascinating in that the negroes & Mexican indians are consistently shown to be utterly merciless, cold-blooded, animalistic killers, whereas the only sense of humanity that you get in the entire series emanates from the white characters.

And I don't know how much longer the suits at AMC are going to allow that line of thought to fester.



*WHISKEY: Please note that that that episode of NCIS was written by a Jesse Stern and directed by a Mark Horowitz, both of whom have very obviously Scots-Irish surnames.

Kylie said...

The linked WaPo article was not about "colleges are helping freshmen and their families navigate the fine art of learning to live together once again". It was about parents further accommodating their returning offspring. All the advice on what to do and not to do was directed toward the parents who were told, among other things, that "'flexibility' is a very important word for parents to digest".

As always in a left-leaning society, all the burden for appropriate behavior is placed on the one who gives, not on the one who receives. It's not enough to give, the giver has to have the appropriate attitude, which invariably involves preserving the receiver's dignity, autonomy and individuality while relinquishing much if not all of his own.

Where's Whiskey? The rest of you might not see the typicaly female Western mind at work here but I do.

Anonymous said...

OT

A teenaged Somali immigrant just won top scores for America in the Math Olympiad and has been admitted to CalTech on full scholarship.

...

Just kidding. He was arrested for trying to blow up a Christmas tree lighting in Portland, OR.

-Diversity Celebrator

sdfsadfasdf said...

What kind of bubble do these liberals live in? The problem with kids today is they are TOO FREE by the age they're 10. By grammar school, they are bumping and grinding on the dance floor. With the internet, even young ones are looking at porn. And with parents stuck in juvenilia, there's precious little in the way of social discipline or parental supervision.

Svigor said...

Off subject but I was watching The Walking Dead. I like it but sometimes the PC comes on so strong that it is distracting. The show makes it a little bit too easy to assign blame, dislike the designated unlikable characters (who are all white males so far). Also, wondering about your take on Breaking Bad and The Goode Family. Full reviews at some future point?

I take it as a bit flattering (inter alia) that in pop culture white ethnopatriotism is never, ever attacked on its own; instead it is always joined at the hip to a flotilla of personality flaws. And twisted beyond recognition, of course, which is more or less the same thing. Using Walking Dead as an example: hyper-aggression, stupidity, barbarism, misogyny, low agreeableness, and most of all, low status markers galore.

When people who hate you have to demonize you by turning you into something you're not, it says a lot about both parties.

On a side note, I was thinking the other day about how the lack of nuance in film morality distorts (or works toward distorting) the moral acuity of audiences, eroding their ability to accurately perceive morality and conflict in the real world.

Anonymous said...

"How much of the conservative animus against academia is really about angry parents, shocked by how their formerly innocent children have gone wild without their supervision?"

Very little. Their kids haven't been "innocent" for a long time. They've pretty much been indulged, coddled brats for a very long time.

helene edwards said...

What this is, is the female employment machine at work. The women who compose these missives believe themselves to be "professionals," too sophisticated to teach first grade or to be legal secretaries.

Anonymous said...

I'm a George Washington alumnus. I'm constantly dunned for donations. I don't feel quite so guilty now in ignoring them.

Thanks.

Albertosaurus

Jack O'Bannon said...

Wow, thats very interesting, thanks for that little tidbit.

Anonymous said...

Here in Illinois a parent is not allowed to know what courses or grades their children receive in college even though they are funding the entire amount. The Illinois system really F****d me over. but then it was probably my fault for being such a believing stooge.

Anonymous said...

You are all laughing now but you should be organizing.

I'm married to a man with a 15yo and a 17yo from a previous marriage. He will be supporting them well into their 20s, because their mother isn't stupid and knows that if she positions them to go to university (and/or gets them diagnosed with something expensive) he's on the hook. In most states, child support does not end at 18. Noncustodial parents must pay university costs.

This is of course quite unjust, as if your parents remained married you have no recourse should they tell you to get a job to fund your own journey through higher learning. How do you all think this is going to be resolved? Hint: it won't be resolved in a way that allows you all to keep your money.

David Davenport said...

In an economy with no manufacturing ...

What sort of enclave do you live in? A Lefty college town?

Lots of products are still manufactured in the USA ... More and more so in "Red" states.

Anonymous said...

In an economy with no manufacturing ...

What sort of enclave do you live in? A Lefty college town?

Lots of products are still manufactured in the USA ... More and more so in "Red" states.

--------------

Fewer and fewer products, particularly high value-added ones are manufacturer in the US. There was just an article on bloomberg describing how a rare-earths magnet factor is now a doggy day care center after the manufacturing was shipped to China. I work in heavy industry (i.e., large power and chemical plants) and many components can only be found now in Asia and Europe (as well as the expertise that goes with them). Extremely sad.

Anonymous said...

Oh, come on. It's got to be a false flag op done by some inventive student looking to stay out late while back at the 'rents.

ATBOTL said...

I shocked than any heterosexual men in America still watch scripted television of any kind, especially those incredibly phony/unrealistic/pc detective shows.

Fred said...

"*WHISKEY: Please note that that that episode of NCIS was written by a Jesse Stern and directed by a Mark Horowitz, both of whom have very obviously Scots-Irish surnames."

What happened on the episodes of Breaking Bad that Melissa Bernstein produced or the ones where Adam Bernstein directed? Were the heroes in those episodes sassy black women, and the bad guys white rednecks?

Mel Torme said...

"A teenaged Somali immigrant just won top scores for America in the Math Olympiad and has been admitted to CalTech on full scholarship.

...

Just kidding. He was arrested for trying to blow up a Christmas tree lighting in Portland, OR.

-Diversity Celebrator
"

So, he's not going to Cal Tech, then?



(I can't see them letting anyone in who can't make a simple bomb - as far as hard-core engineering goes, Cal Tech is head-and-shoulder above anyone - that includes MIT, Georgia Tech, and Berserkely.)

Mel Torme said...

"A teenaged Somali immigrant just won top scores for America in the Math Olympiad and has been admitted to CalTech on full scholarship.

...

Just kidding. He was arrested for trying to blow up a Christmas tree lighting in Portland, OR.

-Diversity Celebrator
"


Ohhhhh, you mean he didn't even win in the Mathematics competition. So, what score did he get?

You're losing me, Diversity man.

;-)

Mel Torme said...

"Lots of products are still in the USA ... More and more so in "Red" states."

I'm in a conservative state (don't agree with the red/blue, since they switched it after 1992). A whole lot of manufacturing has gone, just since the mid-1990's.

Do you know David, that employment in government is higher than employment in manufacturing, in America? That about says it all. A country with those figures won't be prosperous for long; we are just winding down the wealth right now.

Anonymous said...

My cabndidate for Comment of the Day.

"I do recall that when I went to college, I got used to coming and going as I pleased without having to tell anyone where I was going or when I would be back. So yeah it was a bit annoying when I came home for breaks and was back under my parents' thumb."

Too bad you father did was not entitled to the same. I'm sure he was not the slightest bit annoyed getting up at 7 am while you slept in to earn money to make your life possible (if no father, some taxpayer).

You can see the political power of academis in all the rules. When a child is 18 they are a legal adult and tell you to f..off. If they go to college you are required to pay for their education. The college gets to look at you tax return before setting the price. If airlines and car dealers could do that the nirvana of price discrimination would be achieved. The university stands behind privacy laws so that they get to deal with an inexperienced 18 year old who is spending your money. Grades? viol;ates the students privacy. Clinic? violates the students privacy. Living arrangements? violates the students privacy. Yet, parents are allowed to see the tuition bills, cafe bills, bookstore bills and even the ambulance charge generated whenever a student passes out and takes the "taxi" to the local hospital.

Anonymous said...

Lots of products are still manufactured in the USA ... More and more so in "Red" states.

Would these be advanced manufacturing jobs, therefore having some hope of staying domestic? Or is this commodity manufacturing that can easily be offshored? If you have examples i would certainly love to hear what and where it is.

Svigor said...

Nice comments at that link anon. Finally somebody pointed out that in Chocolate Mega-City Two Atlanta there are no black zombies.

Obviously drama sells better than harmony but I seem to get the feeling that most post-apocalyptic stories are written from the perspective of people who assume they wouldn't survive, wouldn't want to survive, militantly so; like the only point of survivors is so they can suffer before they join the bitter dead. Oh, well, that, and PC gets to carry over so even the most die-hard reactionaries can have their noses rubbed in the fact that PC most certainly does not depend on the fat of the land being plentiful, no sir; it's PC-or-die-trying for us westerners. I bet the actual history of the aftermath of the Black Death (unprecedented prosperity) sends shivers up their spines. Which is odd for nihilistic population-reduction lefties, isn't it?

On a side note, it's a bit odd to consider that (if the comments are correct - I haven't seen episode 4) the one-handed redneck neanderthal is actually in the right and deserves his revenge on the SWPL posse, particularly the prop-not-person black character (was that redundant?) who conveniently forgot to kick him the hacksaw before he fled. And the cop who didn't express the least concern for the man he handcuffed to his doom until he was safely 15 miles out of town. The writers seem to be almost daring us to come to this conclusion. Then they double down by playing the cop up as the selfless hero for deciding to go back and "rescue" the guy he condemned to death (twice, really, the second time by trusting the keys to the black guy).

Just shoot me said...

"Here in Illinois a parent is not allowed to know what courses or grades their children receive in college even though they are funding the entire amount."

That's not specific to Illinois. It's the whole country. It's a federal law called "The Family Education Rights and Privacy Act."
Since your kid is 18, you as the parent, while required to foot the bill (Federal aid application gives an "expected family contribution' -- good luck explaining to the college that parents shouldn't have to pay that) don't get to know your kid's grades -- or even if he's showing up for his classes.

And get this-- I've got a 15 year old boy who takes Calc III at the local community college.
*I* can't be told by the college HIS grades, either -- apparently the mere fact that he's smart enough to do college work must mean he's wise enough to not need parental supervision.
Funny how I'd still be legally liable should he decide to indulge in shoplifting, or something, though.

Just shoot me said...

Svigor,

Have you ever considered that, in anti-White-male America where all the evil genius Hollywood villains are White men, that moviemakers are, in fact, HBD'ers?

Before you choke on yer coffee, consider: MAYBE what Hollywood is REALLY implying is that non-Whites are not SMART ENOUGH to concoct and direct the carrying out of complex plots and plans?

Maybe it's too disruptive for the audience's suspension of disbelief to have the lead bad guy be non-White? The thugs, the brass-knuckles-wearers, yes, sure, but not the criminal masterminds?

Mayyyyyybbbbeeee it's sorta kinda, in a weird way, a compliment?

none of the above said...

Anonymous:

Ah, so the Somali kid's interests run more to chemistry than math, then?

none of the above said...

I seem to recall those newfound freedoms came awfully close to ending my go at a college education, those first couple years. Say, nobody cares whether I go to my calc class or not, this is great....but I wonder if theres a catch somewhere....

Anonymous said...

" Liberal arts is such a waste of time, maybe do away with liberal arts outside of the ivies and replace the rest with suped up vocational academies."

It's painful to watch this level of social waste. I lean towards a consupmption tax on most liberal arts coursework (with the exception of certain foreign languages, narrow expository writing classes, and quantitatively rigorous prerequistes for STEM and Economics courses.

Hopefully Anonymous

http://www.hopeanon.typepad.com

dsfadsfasf said...

"Liberal arts is such a waste of time, maybe do away with liberal arts outside of the ivies and replace the rest with suped up vocational academies."

At the very least, it should be renamed 'political arts' or 'liberal dogma'.

Anonymous said...

College is a waste of time, and that's just as true of the supposedly "practical" majors like engineering as it is for English lit. Add to that the fact that in order to pay for college, you realistically have to either bury yourself in debt at the beginning of your life or mooch off your parents until your mid-20's, neither of which are very good options (the former is bad for you financially, and the latter is bad for you psychologically). Then once you graduate you get to fight over unpaid internships packing boxes or doing other menial work, with the hope that you will later be promoted to a paying position doing menial work. Do you really need a degree for that?

We should encourage more smart people to get jobs or start businesses straight out of high school.

Anonymous said...

As a recent college grad,

Helene Edwards NAILED it.

Anonymous said...

I'm shopping for a new fridge and the store salesman told me that the best selling brand are all made in Korea...... What the heck? Can't we make fridges anymore? Can't we do anything anymore?

Oh...... and why the hell can't we just shut off immigration from Somalia? Japan and Korea aren't taking any Somalis and their economic performance isn't suffering much because of it.

Actually, I got a better idea. Let's send some Somalis to Crawford, Martha's Vineyard, and Kennenbunkport. That would be cool.

David Davenport said...

Would these be advanced manufacturing jobs, therefore having some hope of staying domestic? ... If you have examples i would certainly love to hear what and where it is.

Yes, I agree, things are grim if one lives in a region where the cost of doing business is too high, such as a "blue" state or perhaps Deutschland.

On the other hand:

Nissan has been expanding its factories here in Tennesse, The Nissan Leaf and the batteries for the Leaf are being manufactured here.

Volkswagen is about to open a factory in Chattanooga. It's advertised as billion dollar investment.

Both the Nissan ard the VW operations are nonunion ... No United Awful Workers. They say it's cheaper to make cars in Dixie than in Deutschland. BMW has been building Z3's and Z5's in South Carolina for several years now. What, you thought all BMW cars are built by Olde Worlde elves clad in lederhosen?

Boeing is going to split production of the Navy's new P-8 Maritime Patrol Aircraft between Wash. State and South Carolina.

Yes, General Motors Saturn is mostly gone. There were something like 3,000 or more Saturn employees at the factory on the outskirts of Nashville when GM was building Saturn cars. Local media says that 480 U.A.W. people will stay there and continue to build GM's Ecotec engines there. ( "Ecotec" -- GM's newer technolgy four and six cylinder engines. )

Cylinder heads and blocks for Nissan's four and six cylinder North American cars are cast at a Nissan plant in Decherd, TN.

Not too far south of Tneessee, all of America's larger size liquid fueled space launch missiles are going to continue to be assembled at the United Launch Alliance facility near Decatur, AL.
(United Launch Alliance = Boeing and Lockheed. )

Also,

http://m.knoxnews.com/news/2010/nov/14/modular-reactor-plan-worth-pursuing/

MODULAR REACTOR PLAN WORTH PURSUING

Published Sunday, November 14, 2010
The Tennessee Valley Authority plans to build a modular nuclear power plant at the old Clinch River Breeder Reactor site in Oak Ridge over the next decade.

If approved, the plant could house up to six small reactors - each with the ability to produce 125 megawatts of electricity - and would be the first modular nuclear facility built in the United States.

...

According to the firm, many components of the mPower reactors can be assembled off-site, which should reduce construction costs. ( The reactors may be built at a centralized location, such as the Clinch River site, and then exported outside the TVA area. --DD ) The reactors are designed to be put underground, which Babcock and Wilcox claims provides more secure containment. ...

...


The old breeder reactor site is a good location for the first plant. It's already been deemed a suitable location for a nuclear power plant and efforts to find other uses for it have failed. The new plant could help supply Oak Ridge National Laboratory with zero-emission power.


Yo Mr. Headache, how are all those photovoltaic panels and windmills working out for Germany?

James Kabala said...

FERPA was originally sponsored by WFB's brother James Buckley, who was otherwise a pretty good Senator. I've never seen a good explanation of what his motives were. Does anyone know?

David Davenport said...

Fewer and fewer products, particularly high value-added ones are manufacturer in the US. There was just an article on bloomberg describing how a rare-earths magnet factor is now a doggy day care center after the manufacturing was shipped to China. ...

Where is that? It sounds like a b-l-o-o-o-o state.

Anonymous said...

OT.

The baddest general that ever was.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1333465/Liberias-General-Butt-Naked-The-evil-man-world.html

Donna Shalala said...

The ratio of faculty:staff at most colleges, especially small liberal arts colleges, has grown to unsustainable levels.

Part of this is the inevitable cancerous nature of publicly- financed bureaucracies without objective standards to meet.

Another part is that "higher education" is increasingly more about the fun experience rather than an education. For example, colleges are on a treadmill to provide an ever-expanding number of creature comforts like a posh resort spa to keep attracting increasingly demanding students.

Higher-education is becoming a high-service product rather than an hard-earned process. Students are the customer (even if only the gov't and parents pay), and the customer is always right. This has been accomplished by shifting hiring from faculty that educates to staff than entertains, consoles and keeps the customer student happy.

sabril said...

"Too bad you father did was not entitled to the same. I'm sure he was not the slightest bit annoyed getting up at 7 am "

Lol, if you are saying that I was an ungrateful little sh*t, then you are right. Still, my parents were excited to spend the tuition money so that they could tell their friends that their son went to School X.

guest007 said...

If 18 is not the cut off age for universities and helicopter parents, then what should the age be?

For every few thousand 18 y/o freshmen students at a private liberal arts there are 10,000s students above the age of 18 paying their own way to college.

Is it really the job of the university to figure out who paid the bills so that the university know who to send the grades to.

Remember in most states, medical privacy starts before being 18.

Dave said...

We still manufacture more than anyone else in terms of dollar value of output, but we have a lot fewer manufacturing jobs than we used to. From John Mauldin's letter this week:

"At the peak in the late '70s the US had almost 20 million manufacturing jobs with a population of a little over 220 million. In June of 1998 we still had 17.7 million manufacturing jobs. But by October, 2010 we were down to 11.6 million manufacturing jobs in a country of 320 million people."

Anonymous said...

@dsfadsfasf
"At the very least, it should be renamed 'political arts' or 'liberal dogma'."

Well then we are talking about 2 separate problems. Taken a a whole, academia is leftist and this creates a lot of long term problems for society. But even if liberal arts were more politically balanced or any other orientation, I'd still say it is a less harmful waste but still a waste in both time and money for all but say ~2% of the population. Liberal arts was explicitly not a job training programming, but that how society is using it now. The waste is especially bad when you consider the opportunity cost of time and money for a someone in their late teens and 20s.

Anonymous said...

I wasn't only talking about graditude. When one person supports another, the responsible person bears the consequences of the other person's malbehavior. Therefore the responsible person should have a say in what the other person may do. The Salvation Army used to make you listen to the sermon before you got to eat the meal.

Another thought I had is, as I am getting older I can see the value experience gives to a person. Our culture plays down the value of experience; and, as Sowell said, kids don't know the value of experience because they don't have any. Colleges really are treating kids, their parents and subsidizing taxpayers as prey. Many law students at second tier law schools have almost no prospects yet the administrators work to fill the entering class.

Today in America every enterprise is or is becoming a criminal enterprise.

Janus said...

For an up close and personal with General Butt Naked check out The Vice Guide to Liberia. You can find it on Youtube. Our future looks glorious.

Svigor said...

Blacks are perhaps most conspicuously absent as malefactors in horror. They frighten middle America in real life, but fall short on the big screen? And horror directors will disembowel and dismember and put all kinds of twisted shit on screen, but blacks as baddies are a bridge too far? It shows you where their priorities are, when they'll show zombies eating live guts, or Satan humping a teenage girl, but won't cast blacks as villains.

Anonymous said...

OT:

Parody that sounds too real.

http://www.theonion.com/video/in-the-know-are-tests-biased-against-students-who,17966/

From the Onion, not from NY Times... though it coulda fooled me.

Anonymous said...

Yes, I agree, things are grim if one lives in a region where the cost of doing business is too high, such as a "blue" state or perhaps Deutschland.


The economy in Deutschland is actually doing quite well. I've never understood the fondness among some sections of the American right to bad-mouth the countries of Europe at every opportunity.

alexis said...

I'm glad they airbrushed the general's most dangerous weapon in the article.

Anonymous said...

Thanks David for the follow up about manufacturing jobs in the US.

Anonymous said...

How about we all just boycott Hollywood from now on?

1995 just called - it wants its boycott back.

Kylie said...

"How about we all just boycott Hollywood from now on?"

I've been doing pretty much that for years. The last movie I saw in a theatre was Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas back in 1998.

I have Netflix but usually select either old black-and-white movies or newer releases whose leftist agenda isn't too insistent.

Truth said...

Svigor said...

"JSM, the Media PTB have no problem with uber-competent blacks"


I think I see the issue, Svigor; you think it is the media's faux (in your opinion) positive portrail of African-Americans. Having read your posts for a few years now, many, upon many of which harp on on this subject, I beg to differ. The actual problem here in my humble opinion is...

You watch do much damn TV! Six the reason you know about ever cop, every DA and every Doctor who is black, is that you are in front of the damn tube 6 hours a day. Get out a throw a football around or something, Sport!

Svigor said...

T, wait til you're sober to post, eh?

David Davenport said...

Thanks David for the follow up about manufacturing jobs in the US.

Dixie is only doing better than "blue" states in a relative and comaparative way. The same can be said for Germany vis a vis the rest of Europe.

One starts to wonder about free trade dogma, if free free free trade boils down to moving the jobs to where they work cheaper.

Anonymous said...

You watch do much damn TV! Six the reason you know about ever cop, every DA and every Doctor who is black, is that you are in front of the damn tube 6 hours a day. Get out a throw a football around or something, Sport! - Truth

Hmm, I don't know if that honor should go to Svig - or more appropriately to Whiskey, our resident expert on racial and gender portrayals.

Just shoot me said...

"How about we all just boycott Hollywood from now on?"

I've been doing pretty much that for years"

Yeah, me too, and it shows in the movies I used as examples, Die Hard and Silence of the Lambs.

I still go see a PIXAR movie now and then. Hard not to like Finding Nemo.

Truth said...

"T, wait til you're sober to post, eh?"

You're right Svig-o-Letto, that was presumtious of me. I should not be exhorting you to go out and play football.

A SWiPpLe like you would be much more into Frisbee golf or Hackey-Sak.

Doug1 said...

Tips included: "Try not to remove all of the freedoms that your student has become accustomed to over the past few months. They have developed a new way of living, and reverting back to the 'old way' may cause stress."

I.e., there's a good chance you're daughter's become a slut under sex positive feminist influences. Don't try to reprogram her. Live with it.