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The top colleges for
freedom of speech
Townhall...
It’s Education, but
Higher Is a Misnomer
By Mona Charen
6/3/2011
I will not get sentimental, or so I keep telling myself. Well, maybe a
little sentimental, but never maudlin at the approaching departure of
my 17-year-old son for college in the fall. Fall? Did I say fall? No,
he leaves in August -- cruel calendar!
If I sometimes find myself leafing through photos of him at 2 and 5 and
11 -- here nodding off in the stroller, there in his Harry Potter
costume -- and if there’s a smile at the memory of how enthralled the
preschool David was with the Triassic, Cretaceous, Jurassic and its
fearsome denizens, well, that’s the way of mothers. One video I
happened to pick off the shelf featured an 8-year-old David narrating a
tour of the backyard with, as he put it, grinning, “my dimwitted
assistant, Ben.” That would be his little brother, who knew well how to
give it back.
“Mom,” Ben called on another occasion, “David hit my hand with his
face. Can you punish him?”
Now we count the days until David is off to college. A liberal parent
may glow with excitement and pride at the prospect of his child
attending college. Isn’t that why she got straight A’s, crammed for the
SATs, played travel soccer, and dug wells in Guatemala during summer
breaks? But no conservative can be entirely cheerful at the prospect of
an impressionable youth being bundled off to a university in the United
States. Academia is a conquered land -- the playground of the
ultra-left.
A recent report by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education
counts David’s college as among the seven best for free speech in the
nation. That such a list is required speaks volumes. The seven are
Arizona State, Dartmouth, William & Mary, the University of
Pennsylvania, Carnegie Mellon, the University of Tennessee Knoxville,
and the University of Virginia. Not that these seven are moderate in
their political or social views. Don’t make me laugh. Not that they
have more than one or two Republicans in the whole humanities faculty.
Ha! No, these schools excel simply because they don’t exert the kind of
totalitarian thought and speech control so commonplace on American
campuses.
We scrape together our hard-earned income (lots of it) to deposit our
cherished offspring at schools that are determined to teach them to
despise everything we revere -- even learning.
Three decades ago, at Stanford University, Jesse Jackson led chants of
“Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go.” If you were in any
doubt, the National Association of Scholars reports that the mob was
wildly successful. The institutions that are (or were) one of the
glories of Western civilization -- universities -- now no longer see
the worth of teaching the history of the West.
In “The Vanishing West,” the NAS examined the curricula at 50 leading
colleges over time. In 1964, all of them required some sort of Western
civilization survey course or interdisciplinary course treating the
same themes. They began with Greek civilization and encompassed Rome,
the rise of Christianity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the
Enlightenment, literature, art, music, the history of science,
political philosophy, the modern era, and so forth. By 2010, none of
the 50 colleges required any course in Western Civ. Even for history
majors, survey courses on Western civilization are rarely required. The
same is true for American history.
Students can still find courses on these subjects, but only as choices
in a vast cafeteria of offerings that also includes courses like
“Lesbian Queer Media Cultures” (University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign), “The Living and the UnDead: An Inquiry into Zombies
in Cinema and Literature” (University of Mississippi), “the
Militarization of American Daily Life” (Oberlin), and “The American
Sexual Past” (Temple University). The term “higher education” is fast
becoming a misnomer. American students are graduating with scads of
courses on zombies and queer theory -- which is why we’re importing an
ever-larger number of our Ph.D.s.
David, thankfully, will have little time for nonsense courses (not that
we’d pay for them anyway) because he will be studying music --
specifically trumpet performance. Like the hard sciences, music remains
a realm largely uncontaminated by the absurd political and sexual
obsessions that afflict so many other disciplines.
Someone who aspires to play in a symphony orchestra has a sheaf of
requirements: Music Theory, Keyboard Studies, Harmony, Solfege,
Eurhythmics, and (huzzah!) survey of Western Music History. That’s in
addition to studio, ensembles, and practice time. He will have time for
just one elective in his first semester (and that must fulfill a
distribution requirement).
We are thrilled for David -- and relieved that because he has chosen
music, the corrupt culture of American “higher” education will get very
few opportunities to miseducate him.
Read it at Townhall
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