This assessment of the current state of higher education is pretty accurate.
From Doc Emet Productions:
After School: The Place of Social Justice at the UniversityLet’s face it, the American university as we had known it since World War II lies in ruins. The buildings still stand. But the Ivory Tower of the 1950s, ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s (when it was indeed possible to get a good liberal arts education there) has been retrofitted. It serves now as Jeremy Bentham’s “panopticon” was famously said to, in Michel Foucault’s landmark reflections on modernity’s array of exquisite psychological tortures, perpetrated by means of constant observation, continuous monitoring and ubiquitous “normalizing” exercises—power scrubbed of all apparent physical violence to more cleanly vivisect the human spirit in the name of totalitarian control. As Foucault writes in Discipline and Punish: “Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?” (New York: Vintage Books, 1995, p. 228). Were he alive today, what would he say Twitter and other social media resemble?In their fancy prisons, glued to their phones, students are no longer taught to think and act for themselves, but to internalize prohibitions and behave themselves. They are watching! They are being watched! By teachers, administrators, and above all, each other. Is it any wonder they take it on themselves to monitor their teachers, too, in return? The “genius” of this panoptic surveillance is that it operates in all directions at once.Courses are still offered. But syllabi that once proudly displayed names like Aristotle, Shakespeare, Walt Whitman, and Sigmund Freud (when it was indeed possible to encounter great authors, ungarnished by some adjunct instructor’s crippling aversion to “stereotypes”) have been hollowed of meaning, as the formerly inspiring experience of being introduced to canonical texts of Western civilization has been replaced by a routine, joyless training in moral hygiene. It’s as if humanities faculty had decided that what their subhuman wards needed was not access to the inheritance of human civilization as their birthright but humanizing and civilizing itself—or to be remade in the image of “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” administrators, as creatures trained in the manners and mores of Silicon Valley. Say this. Don’t say that. Use these words, not those. Here’s what’s upsetting nowadays (misgendering somebody). Here’s what’s not (grooming children in politically correct attitudes toward sex).
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