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The only point of going to college is to get a degree for a job you want to work, because that's why you're spending 1000s per semester.
If I wanted to learn and expand my mind, I would have gone to my local Barnes and Noble at a tiny fraction of a cost.
No, the point of college is to prepare you to critically think, analyze, and express yourself effectively. To prepare you for life. You're thinking of vocational school, which is narrowly focused.
The only point of going to college is to get a degree for a job you want to work, because that's why you're spending 1000s per semester.
If I wanted to learn and expand my mind, I would have gone to my local Barnes and Noble at a tiny fraction of a cost.
Even better, libraries are FREE. But going to Barnes & Noble or a library is still keeping yourself in a bubble, as you can pick & choose what to read (or not read). Most people go in already knowing what they want, and don't purposefully seek out materials that go AGAINST their beliefs... so it's good to have a "forced" situation like college, where you meet a wide variety of people and learn things you wouldn't have otherwise. You don't need to like or agree with everything, either, as any good professor welcomes dissent/debate.
So no; college is NOT just about getting a degree to find work. A lot of graduates don't end up working in the field they studied, but still (generally) find what they learned to be useful going forward. And that's not even getting into the social aspects of a college experience!
The requirement of General Education courses isn't the issue at contention in this thread. Rather, it's the silly notion that there are 'SJW' and 'Marxist' classes that are required in order for one to graduate from universities. As I clearly demonstrated in post # 126, even at a small, granola-crunching, very liberal college it is easy to fulfill those requirements without taking any of the classes the OP thinks are mandatory. It will undoubtedly be even easier at state universities.
So you want the degree, yet you don't want to fulfill the requirements for the degree. Aren't you special? The entire concept of a bachelor's degree is a multi-disciplinary course of study with a focus in one particular area.
Tell you what. Go to a university and study whatever field interests you. Let's say it's chemistry. Your major requirements will vary, but they'll include a lot of chemistry courses, some mathematics, and probably some physics. You can simply not take the gen eds. Then take your transcript and apply to wherever you want to be a chemist. Let's say, Koch Industries - because this isn't an issue of left-v-right. Explain on your resume how you were laser-focused on chemistry, and how you didn't waste any of your time study unimportant stuff like composition or sociology or history or literature.
Here's what will happen. Koch Industries will roll its eyes and toss your application into the recycle bin. They'll eventually hire someone with a broad-based education. Someone who has skill beyond the laboratory. Someone who has been exposed to information and viewpoints beyond his own narrow outlook. Someone who will better relate to coworkers from widely varying backgrounds. Someone who has been forced out of his hard-science cocoon and made to demonstrate competency in studies of the arts, of history, of the social sciences. That's what it means to hold a bachelor's degree.
You can take only the courses you want to take. But it's absurd that you think you should be granted a degree without fulfilling the requirements upon which degrees are predicated.
You did not successfully refute the contention. Students must accumulate credits in electives. At public universities, sections of courses quickly fill. As a result, students often have to go with second, third, fourth choices, which is how many of them arrive in these classes.
More importantly, as I already pointed out, profs in the humanities and social sciences are now specialists and a disproportionate number of them specialize gender-intersectionality/LGBT lenses. It's ignorant and/or naive to believe that these specialists teach survey courses divorced from this drivel around which their graduate studies were organized. For instance, a Recent American History course from one of these folks will look at it through the lens of "intersectionality."
Now, I know what you're thinking: "College is about 'critical thinking' and exposure to new ideas!" All true. But the ideas must have some validity. Notice how no one has actually come forward here and defended SJW dogma with any evidence. None. Bupkis. That's because SJW dogma is the most anti-scientific tripe you will ever find. You could find more science in that Tennessee creationist museum than you will find among SJW dogma. 62 genders. Implicit bias. The school-to-prison mass conspiracy theory. The universal conclusion among them that statistical disparities among groups is necessarily attributable to discrimination. The gender pay gap. We could go on and on. It's why they embrace "autoethnography" and reject rigorous examination and good, objective data. Tripe like this has no place in higher education, just as all of you would argue against Young Earth Creationism in the science classroom.
The other problem is what you noted when you mentioned "narrow outlook." Forget about gazing only within, these are the folks who explicitly look to prevent alternative viewpoints from even being presented. After all, anything counter to their religious dogma is "hate speech." This is how we get rather pedestrian, uncontroversial speakers shouted down or even banned. These are the least open-minded folks you will ever encounter.
Wow today I had an extended lunch break and decided to go back and answer this question. I went to go find the original piece (once I noticed the link had been removed) so I could get a scope of these jobs in order to find a suitable comparsion group. I just have to thank you because I was really illuminating as to how these smear articles work.
It is very difficult to identify a comparison group because the definition of "diversicrats" used is so broad as to be almost meaningless. It's just a hodgepodge of things that seem to have something to do with women and/or communities of color (Which women and/or POCs you say? staff? faculty? students? K-12 students? whole communities? take your pick LOL). Also, a lot of these people are paid for with grant money, so we don't even know how many of them are fully on the school payroll.
Once again, the entire Title IX office (the sexual assault invesitagtors) are included. Why are they on this list? How are they serving a "special group". Is it presumed to be impacting women's interests the most so it counts? Men report assault cases as well. But I mean... so no one is supposed to investigate college assault/rape cases? Don't schools have to in order to stay compliant with the law AND protect against lawsuits? So how is it a waste when the need is mandated by law? In any case let's carry this to it's logical conclusion: so you'd call the police and start criminal cases on any accused colllege student instead? Wouldn't that work out WORSE for the accused male students, given that most campus rape cases don't even end with anyone criminally charged under this system? This way no one goes to jail/raises bail during the investiagtion and everyone gets to keep attending classes AND get access to mental health care while the staff look into it. The parties are ordered to stay away from each other in the meantime, and that's a less disruptive option than jail.
Moving on... the Center of Engineering Diversity and Outreach is also here muliple times, even though a good chunk of their programs are run with federal and/or corproate grant money. So... how much of their staff does the school actually pay for? Does anyone know?
This list also includes administration staff of all these offices. So the person asnswering the phone, booking appointments and filing documents counts as a "diversicrat"? How is that not padding the numbers for effect?
These people are not even in the same schools. The Office of Health Equity & Inclusion is a department of The School of Medicine and includes faculty, staff and hospital personel. They are a research center too so they certainly have faculty/staff covered by grants. But given their inclusion I undershot the amount of UM staff because I only counted the undergraduate school. There are 45,000 faculty and staff on the total campus, so the 93 people on this padded diversicrat list represent LESS THAN A TENTH OF A PERCENT of the total worksforce at UM.
Given that reality, do you think that perhaps this whole line of questioning is ridiculously petty?
In any case, you can't really compare this with say, the financial aid office because that has a very specific definition - they aid students and family with paying for school. This is more akin of listing any personel that has anything to do with money... including financial aid, student employment, the budgeting office, the business office, development and anyone who does bookkeeping with a division. I mean they all have something to do with money right? The school runs on mney right? We didn't say whose money or where or how. Just money.
But that would make no sense you say? Those people are doing dramtically different things that are only vaguely connected?
Exactly.
But if you did count all the money people at the college, it would be WAY more than 93.
What you want to do is count all the college student serving personel against the other student affairs offices, community serving programs vs community serving programs, staff vs satff, research vs research. That would make a but more sense. But I'm not doing all of that so have at it. LOL
LOL. I addressed this already. LOL. An intelligent comparison would be to compare the number of diversicrats to the staff totals in Financial Aid or Student Life or some other administrative department regardless the contortions you make here to take that off the table. LOL. In my state and undoubtedly in many others, numbers are being cut in Financial Aid and the others while the numbers are increasing in the Equity and Diversity bureaucracies. That's telling. LOL.
Using the silly logic you present here, I suppose the chancellor is especially insignificant, given that he/she is exactly one person measured against the thousands of staff. And, yes, the entire apparatus in these departments is important. Many criticize bloated athletics departments. Would you argue that we should discount all the support staff and only focus on the coaches in our analysis of the effects of bloated athletic departments on higher education?
You've constructed a strawman in your assignment of the argument to me and others that we think Title IX is odious because it benefits a "special group." You also constructed a real humdinger, LOL, of a strawman when you asked the rhetorical, "so no one is supposed to investigate college assault/rape cases?" LOL. We object to its effects on campuses because it leads to witch hunts and perversion of the presumption of innocence with its standard of proof resting on "preponderance of the evidence." Compounded by the fact that the proverbial foxes guarding the henhouse often make up the star chambers deliberating the guilt of the accused. LOL.
Yes, LOL, male students would often be better off with real cops investigating and not campus cops. Real cops are not beholden to anyone on campus. LOL. Additionally, LOL, judges and juries in the real world apart from fantasyland, LOL, must adhere to the much higher burden of proof that we fools outside of the campus have found preferable. LOL.
Now, LOL, apart from all of that, would you like to produce the evidence for SJW dogma like: implicit bias, the school-to-prison pipeline conspiracy theory, toxic masculinity, intersectionality, white privilege, the patriarchy, the gender pay gap and so forth? Let's see how these things stand up to rigorous examination. LOL.
The only point of going to college is to get a degree for a job you want to work, because that's why you're spending 1000s per semester.
If I wanted to learn and expand my mind, I would have gone to my local Barnes and Noble at a tiny fraction of a cost.
People could do that, but generally they don't. The option has been open to them since the public library movement 150+ years ago.
A large part of the problem is that they don't know how to read. Oh, they learned to read words in elementary, but they can't make sense of them or get much useful out of it. It was not until college that I actually learned to read for understanding, and learned to find & evaluate worthwhile books to read, rather than just read words on a page.
OP's question....whew that's some Ph.D., level dog whistling.
This will inevitably lead down a rabbit hole of RedPill, MGTOW, SJW's, Affirmative Action, reverse racism, IQ scores, why Asian women > white women, boot-straps, welfare, "illegal" immigration, liberals vs conservatives vs libertarians vs socialists vs Fascists vs "independents" and the glorification of Western Civilization which is code for "white guys created everything you love and if it gets ruined it's because white sympathizers and non-whites brought it down."
OP's question....whew that's some Ph.D., level dog whistling.
This will inevitably lead down a rabbit hole of RedPill, MGTOW, SJW's, Affirmative Action, reverse racism, IQ scores, why Asian women > white women, boot-straps, welfare, "illegal" immigration, liberals vs conservatives vs libertarians vs socialists vs Fascists vs "independents" and the glorification of Western Civilization which is code for "white guys created everything you love and if it gets ruined it's because white sympathizers and non-whites brought it down."
Strawmen appreciated.
Still waiting for any of you folks to defend, with evidence/data, SJW dogma. Please validate implicit bias, white privilege, the patriarchy, the school-to-prison pipeline, the benefits of safe spaces to aggrieved group members, et cetera. The longer you avoid actually defending any of it, the more obvious it becomes why you avoid doing so.
BTW, given the quotation marks, I take it your "argument" regarding illegal immigration is that misdemeanors are not illegal? In other words, when I speed, I'm not doing something "illegal?"
My fave is the woman in a hijab, i.e. a voluntary external signaling of adherence to an explicitly sexist, homophobic ideology, standing up and decrying the sexism and bias in society. Recently seen at a college near you.
On that point its interesting how religion (which is an ideology and therefore influences if not begets actions) is now being presented on the same plane as race for example (which is innate, involuntary, and tells one nothing of a person's likely actions). Frankly its repulsive that opposition to someone's ideological beliefs (magical thinking or otherwise) could be considered the same as racism or sexism.
My fave is the woman in a hijab, i.e. a voluntary external signaling of adherence to an explicitly sexist, homophobic ideology, standing up and decrying the sexism and bias in society. Recently seen at a college near you.
On that point its interesting how religion (which is an ideology and therefore influences if not begets actions) is now being presented on the same plane as race for example (which is innate, involuntary, and tells one nothing of a person's likely actions). Frankly its repulsive that opposition to someone's ideological beliefs (magical thinking or otherwise) could be considered the same as racism or sexism.
I've long believed that when the mullahs unleash large-scale violence on the West, it won't be the Christian fundamentalists who they behead first. They'll hate those apostates too, but there will a modicum of respect for folks who held true to their Abrahamic religious beliefs. No, the first ones they will behead will be the secular "allies" to Radical Islam. They will have zero respect for those types and will kill them first for their inherent wimpiness and transparent attempts to be, as the kids call them, "white knights."
How would you consider an English professor, who would give an F to papers that used words he considered sexist. Pronouns for example. Ever try writing a paper where the only acceptable pronouns are "they" and "their" and "it" even when talking about a singular person? Or where the word "human" or "woman" is unacceptable because it has the word "man" in it? That was my first semester freshman English class 40 years ago, so the SJW types have been around a long time and have gotten worse. My "D" in that course had nothing to do with content and everything to do with his SJW tendencies.
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But going to Barnes & Noble or a library is still keeping yourself in a bubble, as you can pick & choose what to read (or not read). Most people go in already knowing what they want, and don't purposefully seek out materials that go AGAINST their beliefs... so it's good to have a "forced" situation like college, where you meet a wide variety of people and learn things you wouldn't have otherwise. You don't need to like or agree with everything, either, as any good professor welcomes dissent/debate.
