I was excluded from university for questioning the term “white privileged” in an ethics course. Alex Sager from PSU, according to another professor began asking other members of faculty for any information that could be used against me. I was brought to global diversity and questioned multiple times. When it was determined that I had not done anything wrong I was then immediately slapped with a sexual harassment allegation from an unknown accuser. When that too fell through, they accused me of excessive emailing. They suspended me for attempting to reach out to my teachers, brought me in during my suspension to question me, tacked on more suspension time, asked me to write an essay about what I had done wrong, and then had me expelled. The administration has put a black mark on my transcripts and there was absolutely no due process given.
I spent two years trying to figure out what happened to me. And to this day I am still amazed by it.
I contend it goes back to 1968 when a handful of radicals took over college administration buildings all over the country. The administrators caved to their demands. From then on it was downhill all the way.
I remember it well. I was a freshman in college in 1968. Brooklyn College at that time had 38,000 students registered. 200 malcontents took over the president's office . The college shut down. The president gave in to their demands.
There is more to this story. When I applied to Brooklyn College the minimum admission requirement a combined GPA and SAT score that were rather high. Many didn't make the cut. Over the summer before I started college a new program was started to broaden the freshman class and reverse discrimination. An additional 10,000 students entered the freshman class, the majority of them unprepared for college study.
I had a few in my classes. They could not keep up. They disrupted every class by asking endless pointless questions and getting into arguments with the teacher/professor. It was truly annoying.
The agitators who took over the president's office were from this group.
By the sophomore year nearly all of them had dropped out and the sophomore class was at normal numbers to previous years.
I was 17 at the time and it hit me forcibly that we do no favors to students when we put them into academic environments for which they are unprepared. It makes them angry, aggressive and they feel personally targeted.
The Vietnam War at that time was the catalyst to get as many young men into college as possible because it gave the fellow a four year deferment from the draft. No one truly understood what we were doing there and over time the graphic nightly news turned much of the country against the war. It eventually became apparent the government was lying to us and President Johnson's popularity collapsed.
The new policy of open enrollment at Brooklyn College (and the other CUNY colleges) was likely a way of getting young men who would have been drafted a four year deferment. It had the unintended consequences of starting the process of desttroying our institutions of higher learning.
The students who couldn't keep up and were unprepared for college work demanded a change in the traditional curriculum. They said it was no longer relevant to study old dead white men. Sound familiar?
Many of the radicals who took over the college campuses in the 1960's eventually became the next generation of teachers and professors. The institutions welcomed them as a way to be more relevant to the new generations entering school. We are living with those decisions now.
FWIW, while students may seek to avoid classes featuring political indoctrination, it can be quite difficult to complete the required core curriculum doing so. Freshman writing seminars are almost uniformly the intellectual musings of masters students. Despite scanning course offerings to find something, anything, that doesn't overtly jam progressive theory down a poor freshman's throat, there's still no guarantee that the course you select won't devolve into exactly that dynamic. A course about great contemporary literature is cover for a survey of contemporary progressive authors. Or a review of the influence of Brazilian music on jazz quickly turns to racial dynamics and a history of oppression of under-represented descendants of African and indigenous peoples. It's so pervasive specifically because there is no one left in the faculty or administration that even recognizes it's an issue.
I was excluded from university for questioning the term “white privileged” in an ethics course. Alex Sager from PSU, according to another professor began asking other members of faculty for any information that could be used against me. I was brought to global diversity and questioned multiple times. When it was determined that I had not done anything wrong I was then immediately slapped with a sexual harassment allegation from an unknown accuser. When that too fell through, they accused me of excessive emailing. They suspended me for attempting to reach out to my teachers, brought me in during my suspension to question me, tacked on more suspension time, asked me to write an essay about what I had done wrong, and then had me expelled. The administration has put a black mark on my transcripts and there was absolutely no due process given.
I spent two years trying to figure out what happened to me. And to this day I am still amazed by it.
I contend it goes back to 1968 when a handful of radicals took over college administration buildings all over the country. The administrators caved to their demands. From then on it was downhill all the way.
I remember it well. I was a freshman in college in 1968. Brooklyn College at that time had 38,000 students registered. 200 malcontents took over the president's office . The college shut down. The president gave in to their demands.
There is more to this story. When I applied to Brooklyn College the minimum admission requirement a combined GPA and SAT score that were rather high. Many didn't make the cut. Over the summer before I started college a new program was started to broaden the freshman class and reverse discrimination. An additional 10,000 students entered the freshman class, the majority of them unprepared for college study.
I had a few in my classes. They could not keep up. They disrupted every class by asking endless pointless questions and getting into arguments with the teacher/professor. It was truly annoying.
The agitators who took over the president's office were from this group.
By the sophomore year nearly all of them had dropped out and the sophomore class was at normal numbers to previous years.
I was 17 at the time and it hit me forcibly that we do no favors to students when we put them into academic environments for which they are unprepared. It makes them angry, aggressive and they feel personally targeted.
The Vietnam War at that time was the catalyst to get as many young men into college as possible because it gave the fellow a four year deferment from the draft. No one truly understood what we were doing there and over time the graphic nightly news turned much of the country against the war. It eventually became apparent the government was lying to us and President Johnson's popularity collapsed.
The new policy of open enrollment at Brooklyn College (and the other CUNY colleges) was likely a way of getting young men who would have been drafted a four year deferment. It had the unintended consequences of starting the process of desttroying our institutions of higher learning.
The students who couldn't keep up and were unprepared for college work demanded a change in the traditional curriculum. They said it was no longer relevant to study old dead white men. Sound familiar?
Many of the radicals who took over the college campuses in the 1960's eventually became the next generation of teachers and professors. The institutions welcomed them as a way to be more relevant to the new generations entering school. We are living with those decisions now.
Universities need warning labels.
FWIW, while students may seek to avoid classes featuring political indoctrination, it can be quite difficult to complete the required core curriculum doing so. Freshman writing seminars are almost uniformly the intellectual musings of masters students. Despite scanning course offerings to find something, anything, that doesn't overtly jam progressive theory down a poor freshman's throat, there's still no guarantee that the course you select won't devolve into exactly that dynamic. A course about great contemporary literature is cover for a survey of contemporary progressive authors. Or a review of the influence of Brazilian music on jazz quickly turns to racial dynamics and a history of oppression of under-represented descendants of African and indigenous peoples. It's so pervasive specifically because there is no one left in the faculty or administration that even recognizes it's an issue.
Hmm why not line up the students by SAT/ACT scores (a predictor of college success) and include these Administrators also?