Have You Noticed the Lack of Anti-Israel Protests at Community Colleges and Trade Schools?
“It wasn’t lost on me in the moment that all of these events were happening at what is considered the best of the best elite universities across the country”
What we’re seeing in terms of protests is often at the most prestigious and exclusive schools. You know, the places of privilege?
The Washington Examiner reports:
Community colleges and trade schools are largely void of Israel-Hamas protests
TV host Mike Rowe said that eight years ago, he was switching the news channels on his television and saw several college students setting fire to the American flag and dancing around a pile of burning flags. They were telling reporters in interviews they were disgusted with Old Glory and “fearful” of the flag.
“It wasn’t lost on me in the moment that all of these events were happening at what is considered the best of the best elite universities across the country,” Rowe told me. Among supposedly non-elite students, though, the situation wasn’t and isn’t as bad.
Rowe said it didn’t take long for him to figure out why those “elite” students drew those conclusions about Old Glory: The idea of associating fear with the flag came from the very people who were supposed to be instructing these privileged students.
Rowe said the evidence was crystal clear when Jonathan Lash, then the president of Hampshire College, chose not to assure the students that no country offers more liberties to their people and therefore there was nothing to “fear” from the flag. Instead, he spoke up in ways they understood to validate their fears.
“Lash actually removed any traces of the American flag from the campus and said in a statement that removing the flag from the campus ‘will better enable us to focus our efforts on addressing racist, misogynistic, Islamophobic, anti-immigrant, antisemitic, anti-LGBTQ rhetoric and behaviors,’” Rowe explained.
Lash, a former Peace Corps volunteer, federal prosecutor, Harvard graduate, and president of a Washington-based environmental think tank, left the college in 2018. Hampshire College, under Lash in 2015, was one of the first elite schools in the United States not to accept SAT scores from applicants, in part because Lash said SATs were strongly biased against students of color.
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Comments
Heh – I’ve been in community college education for around 10 years now and the fact is, these students have lives. None of them come from rich families. Most of them get by on low-wage jobs; many of them have families to support. All of them are looking for a leg up in life, and I’m always happy to give it to them. They don’t have time or inclination to protest.
At one school where I worked, the faculty union tried to rile up students against the president and others in the administration (meaning, um, me). They got a few students on the student newspaper to get excited and agitated, and no one else. (Indeed, it looked to me that faculty wrote some of the articles under the students’ names — can’t prove it, but I have a pretty fair guess).
Community college students are by and large salt-of-the-earth folk. I love working with them; they are unpretentious and never seem to think they are entitled to anything they didn’t earn.
So they are a bit wiser than their counterparts at Harvard.
Not just a bit.
I am reminded of the monstrous ignorance of the typical journalist with little to no real world experience. Going straight from primary school to college tends to produce an empty head filled with book “learning” and little practical knowledge. Of course not all fields are created equal. Some, such as engineering professions, require students to dirty themselves with real world knowledge.
When I was hiring engineers or associate tech people I quizzed them about their hobbies. Best grades did produce best engineers. Neither did degrees. Hands on did.
(Also speaking as one with 10+ years’ experience teaching at the CC level…)
In general I agree with you, but I think by and large the determinative factor is “non-traditional students” who don’t go to college straight out of high school but rather have spent some time in “the real world.” They also tend to be more focused on actually learning and getting their money’s worth instead of going for the “college experience” (i.e. protests, dorm life, going because mom & dad are footing the bill for 4+ years of partying, etc).
I noticed the difference between teaching day classes (typical student was “traditional”) vs night classes (typical student was “non-traditional”).
This is why “dual enrollment”, where a high school junior or senior can opt to take courses at a community college rather than continuing to subject himself to public school idiocy and a deranged peer group, and waste time on AP courses designed to benefit the high school rather than the student. And colleges value dual enrollment credits more highly than AP credits.
I suppose community colleges are also technically government-run, but for some reason they seem to be somewhat immune to the corruption of leftism.
Re: your last paragraph: fortunately most of the leftist nonsense at my CC (in FL) was stamped out by DeSantis. But it was there–certain administrators made sure of that.
the fact is, these students have lives
Progressivism is a luxury belief system. Especially in the late stages of a very rich society.
Also, community college and trade school students aren’t going there for the name. The purpose of Ivy league and other “important” schools now isn’t for the learning but for the credential it provides, “Oh, you went to Hahvahd. How would you like a cushy job?” The community college has the credentials of a different sort, “Oh, I see here you learned X, Y, and Z. Can you demonstrate some of that learning for me?”
“There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.”
― George Orwell
My personal favorite quote on education:
“Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.”
–Gilbert Keith Chesterton
Chesterton’s amazing talent was that almost every sentence he wrote was quotable on its own.
Having spent years in academic medicine, I can assure you that there’s a well-known phenomenon: Young researchers at “Big Name” institutions are more apt to publish kooky/contrarian ideas. That generate … buzz. They seem to feel pressure to come up with NewTheories!!!!OMGOMG such as, eg, the earth is, actually, flat, that gravitational forces go up, etc.
Ya sorta have to feel sorry for them — but for the damage they do.
I believe it was Michael Eisner who said, upon taking over at Disney maybe 30? years ago, “We’ll aim to hit singles and doubles; and the triples and the home runs will come.” And that’s what happened there for about 20 years.
Imho folks at fancy name schools get all wrapped up in constantly trying to hit triples and homers, and that’s no way to succeed
But community college students, it seems, have more reality-based perspectives.
I also think that if college students were not spending so damned much money each semester, they’d feel much less crazy-pressure to CHANGE THE WORRRLLLLD
The higher Ed system in America really is so completely dysfunctional. From soup to nuts.
This is noticed this in other areas as well. People trying to become “known” in an industry but without the chops to come up with anything original themselves, make their name by “discovering” that some age-old wisdom or an established principle discovered by someone with much more talent than they will ever have, is actually “wrong”.
And it often works. Even if their ‘discovery’ later turns out to be bunk, their name becomes known in the field and they often grow a dedicated “following” who’ll support them forever more.
Most humans are, by nature, more highly evolved sheep.
Sorry, horrible editing and even worse proof reading.
That first line should have been “I’ve noticed this in other areas as well…”
Or they make their name with other people’s work, like Bill Gates and many others.
I’ve been revisiting the current state of SW and IT development practices lately — yes, pity me. You just described the current state and whole history of the sector, both practices, and technologies.
I”m a history nut with no credentials, just an avid reader. But I”ve noticed the craze to place new interpretations on old events. Because now that we have smart phones, everything has become clear to us! So Wikipedia will tell you that the Empress Elisabeth of Austria was a force for progress in Hungary. This of a woman who was not allowed to raise her own children and who was considered little more than the emperor’s much loved, decorative wife. Elisabeth was a cousin of Mad KIng Ludwig of Bavaria and her own father was considered rather strange. Elisabeth herself was shy and introverted, not particularly suited to the formal Austrian court and no match for her formidable mother-in-law. In later life, she retreated to her yacht on the Adriatic and her palace on the Greek island of Corfu. But we are asked to believe that the hapless Sissi was instrumental in Hungarian affairs. It’s not likely. This is just one of several reinterpretations of history, usually involving the contributions of women. Right.
Most certainly women can and do make great contributions, Gertrude Elion was a great example, an incredibly nice person.
Your point is lost on me, as the accomplishments of a scientist are not really comparable to an assessment of a life spent in a royal family. More to the point might have been a reference to Elinor of Aquitaine, Catherine de Medici, Elizabeth i, or any number of. women who made definative contributions, for good or ill, to history.
Oh, Wikipedia turned out to be a wonderful experiment in socially sourcing knowledge. In practice, social signaling overtakes content and you source knowledge of only who’s got time on their hands or an agenda, what they care about, and who’s in and who’s out of the cool kids lately. It’s “knowledge” but perhaps not the particular knowledge you sought.
Left without constraints, the pesky humans’ behavior devolves to a middle-school lunchroom, and stays there.
Look up L’affaire de Huberman. After candidate Kennedy’s talk with Joe Rogan, Huberman tweeted something like “It would be great if every candidate did long form interviews like that one.” Now, double-plus-ungood on him for mentioning either of those guys without the standard disparagements. Besides, H has been on Rogan, discrediting himself as well.
Within hours, Huberman’s Wikipedia bio had been scrubbed of reference to his credentials, appointments, and publications, retaining only comment on how he had “associated” with various deplorables, thus was deplorable in turn, yet another beyond the pale.
Such is the Wikipedia; less than a swamp, an oubliette.
It is a shame that the open access to editing Wikipedia articles has resulted in so much political posturing. The idea behind WIkipedia is a terrific one; a quick, accessible source of general knowledge. It is sometimes amusing to watch articles change over time, as self-important contributors add their take on their favorite subject.
“are largely void” vs. “are largely devoid”?