Category: Seen On Campus

Observations from an elderly student

Irrelevant Institution

Business, Seen On Campus

Over at the awful Forbes magazine, writer Stephen McBride opines thus:

Here’s some great news: one of America’s most broken industries is finally being exposed as a sham.  And make no mistake, the end of college as we know it is a great thing.
It’s great for families, who’ll save money and take on less debt putting kids through school.  It’s great for kids, who’ll no longer be lured into the socialist indoctrination centers that many American campuses have become.

He goes on to talk about the savings to be made and the investment opportunities (in companies which will rush to fill the void), but that’s not central to the theme of this post, other than to note that as college costs have ballooned, the return on investment has decreased while its concomitant debt has increased.  Simply put:  for a huge number of kids, college tuition is not only a gamble, but a bad one.

While I don’t quibble at all with the writer’s perspective on universities as propaganda outfits rather than places of learning, I have a somewhat different take on the whole thing.

I’ve written before on the wisdom of young people learning a trade prior to (or even instead of) going off to college, so I’m not going to repeat that thought.  Rather (and this is my difference with the above Forbes article), I think that colleges and universities have become less relevant to people’s education.  Other than careers which require intensive knowledge (engineering, medicine, bio-mechanics etc.), there’s very little a college degree can teach you that could not be equally imparted through a lengthy apprenticeship in that field.

And if any good has come of the Chinkvirus pandemic and its related effect on our lives, it’s that realization of how little a truly motivated person needs classroom instruction.  (As an aside, if the would-be student isn’t motivated to learn, college is absolutely the worst place for them to be, not only for the cost but also for the array of distractions extant.)

I can hear it now:  “Oh,” stupid parents will moan, “my little Jimmy / Susie / Jamaal / Shaniqua won’t learn anything from an online course because they’ll just play their online games instead.”

I’ve got news for you, O Stupid Parents:  your undisciplined and ineducable kids are already doing that, only they’re doing it in the lecture room.

The late, great and much-missed columnist Mike Royko once said (and I paraphrase because I’m speaking from memory) something like:  most people shouldn’t go to college;  they should become butchers or janitors.  Worse yet, he added, the problem with giving butchers and janitors college degrees is that they then go into business with the same intelligence level, only now they’ll be woefully under-qualified to be managers, because they should have been butchers or janitors.

Or, as Daughter so eloquently put it after her first semester at college:  “Most of these idiots belong in the grease pit at Jiffylube.”   After two years, she expanded that thought to include the professors.  (Lest we forget, this was a girl who taught herself Japanese at home while being homeschooled.)

And this is the problem with most college graduates these days:  they had no business going to college in the first place because they were either stupid or ineducable.  Now they can be found in the outside world suitably “qualified” by their degrees:  at best, they’re busy screwing up some enterprise in a middle-management position;  at worst, they can be found among the ranks of the rioters in Portland and Seattle.

So yes, I agree with McBride that most colleges will disappear, and good riddance.  The ones that survive should get a wake-up call, and realize that in business, nothing is truly irreplaceable — and yes, their beloved ivory towers are indeed just a business.

All I can hope for is that parents will point their kids at careers and activities that will not only be valuable as income streams, but that the kids will actually enjoy doing because they’ve discovered the psychological value of a job well done.

For the rest, there’s the grease pit at Jiffylube.  Good luck to them as they compete with hungry Third-World immigrants.

Killjoys

Nannies, Seen On Campus, Snowflakes

“I know:  let’s put in policies which outlaw any kind of fun, lest the Terminally Sensitive be offended in any way.”

That’s the thinking behind this move, apparently:

Oxford University has cracked down on ‘vicars and tarts’ and ‘pimps and hoes’ parties in case they are deemed offensive to non-binary students.
…
The prestigious university body said they could be deemed ‘problematic’ and may stereotype men or women in a highly objectified or sexualised role.

Uhhh I thought that was the whole point of the thing, but nemmind.

I cannot count the number of times I’ve been to costume (“fancy dress”) parties of the kind mentioned above.  On one occasion, I recall that a “Pimps ‘n Prostitutes” party competition was won by a couple dressed as a priest and a nun, with second place going to a girl who wore her former — and very posh — private girls’ school uniform for the occasion (see below for an example).  (That she was by then in her 30s made for quite an accomplishment, by the way;  and no, it hadn’t been altered.)

Never mind;  students are endlessly inventive in their schemes to outrage the university authorities, and I’m confident that the Oxonians will come up with something good.  (If not, and they just cower in the face of such stupidity, we’re all doomed.)

Incidentally, the pic above is of the Britpop group Girls Aloud.  Here they are in another version of the uniform thing:

Just trying to help my Murkin Readers understand this whole “school uniform” thing.  That’s me:  Mr. Helpful.

Residential Collectivization

Eco-Crap, Marxists, Seen On Campus

As any fule kno, Communism is all about taking away the individual and replacing him with a cipher that can be controlled and manipulated by a benevolent Big Brother.  Here’s one such manifestation, in the ravings of some Marxist college professor [redundancy alert]:

“If we want to keep cities safe in the face of climate change, we need to seriously question the ideal of private homeownership,” says Kian Goh, who researches urban ecological design, “spatial politics” and social mobilization “in the context of climate change and global urbanization.”
…
Proposed solutions, including a public takeover of Pacific Gas & Electric, are missing one of the most important factors in climate change-driven destruction, Goh warns: “economic development, aspirations of home ownership, and belief in the importance of private property.”
To prevent catastrophe, Americans must reconsider their ideas about “success, comfort, home, and family,” particularly the single-family homes that followed in the wake of the Homestead Act of 1862 and federally backed mortgage insurance, the professor argues.
These policies benefited white middle-class families and “became synonymous with freedom and self-sufficiency” even though they represented “[e]xpansionist, individualist, and exclusionary patterns of housing.”

So having a house in the ‘burbs is a factor in Glueball Climate We’re All Gonna DIEEEEE! Catastrophe.

As we all know, of course, this whole climate bullshit manifesto is just a fig leaf covering the true aims of people like this asshole academic — there is no climate catastrophe looming —  but it sure as hell allows them to create their little model society, doesn’t it?

What really, really  scrapes these Commie bastards is that home ownership is the end result of individualism, provides the individual a stake in the society in which he lives, and provides for private security in his abode.  Private property ownership also means that people will, in the main, resist any and all efforts of the State to confiscate or otherwise appropriate it — and for the Commies, remember, there is no private property because all property belongs to the State.

So yeah, they’d prefer to have us all live in tiny, State-managed apartments in an urban environment, using public instead of private transport, and working for the State rather than for ourselves.

Already, the eeeevil automobile has been blamed for the non-existent growth of carbon emissions which is going to melt ice caps etc.  Now pricks like this Goh creature can add suburban homes to the list of eco-evils, which means that they too can be circumscribed, reduced and ultimately, banned.

Feel free to dispute anything you’ve read so far in this post, but you’d better have something more than emotion, slogans and hysteria in your argument.

“Spatial politics”, my fat African-American ass.

Snowflake Report

Freaks & Loonies, Pussification Parade, Seen On Campus

Good grief, why bother to go if clapping is going to intimidate you?

Snowflake students at Oxford University are the latest to demand that clapping should be banned because applause noise can trigger anxiety and want ‘jazz hands’ to be used instead.
The idea for a British sign language alternative for clapping involving the waving of hands was put forward at the student union’s first meeting of the year on Tuesday.
Sabbatical Officers Roisin McCallion, Vice President for Welfare and Equal Opportunity and Ebie Edwards Cole, Chair for Oxford SU Disabilities Campaign, successfully passed the motion to mandate the encouragement of silent clapping.

My suggestion is that for “clapping”, substitute “slapping”, but no doubt some fainting fairy is going to have a problem with that too.  And if the noise of clapping triggers that much anxiety in them, I wonder how they’d react to gunshots.

And note the caption for a couple of the pics:

Sabbatical Officers Roisin McCallion (left), Vice President for Welfare and Equal Opportunity and Ebie Edwards Cole (right), Chair for Oxford SU Disabilities Campaign, successfully passed the motion to mandate the encouragement of silent clapping

Yep, that’s what education is all about.  “Sabbatical Officer and VP Welfare and Equal Opportunity”, my aching ass.

And to think that one of my greatest dreams once was to attend Oxford.

News Roundup

Bad News, Funny Stuff, Marxists, Science!, Seen On Campus

…wherein I couldn’t be bothered to post anything more than a one-line comment.

1)  Stanford pushes separate physics course for minority students — the problem won’t be finding “minority” students for these classes — I fully expect them to be dumbed down to 10th-grade level so as to pass as many as possible– but I’m more interested in where Stanford will find the minority lecturers to teach  them.  (Also:  which  minorities?  Can we insist that Physics For Minorities 1.0 must include Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Persian and Jewish students instead of just the stupid  minorities?)

2)  Global Warming High Priest Loses Court Case — He refused to reveal his “source” data because it was all invented and he knew that it wouldn’t even stand up to scrutiny by a freshman Statistics class.  Quelle surprise.

3)  BritPM Politely Tells The EU To Eff Off — this after hearing that the U.S. will give them a quick, yuge and profitable trade deal.  In essence, Boris said “No deal?  No exit fee.”  (The EU will have difficulty staying together without Britishland’s annual contribution, which is why they’re trying to stop Brexit, as any fule kno.)

4)  Joe Walsh Announces Presidential Run — Hey, he warned us that he would, many years ago.

Couldn’t do much worse than any of the Socialist candidates, IMO.

5)  Lefties Start Turning Towards Violence — …and Kim buys more ammo and goes to the range.  (Incidentally, when I took the Browning High Wall .45-70 Govt to the indoor range a couple days back, I told the nervous young clerk that the bullet wouldn’t go through  the back wall, but it might push it over.  Only the laughter from the older guys stopped him from doing something silly.)

So Much For College

Music, Seen On Campus

I admit that I can’t see the appeal in ginger nebbish Ed Sheeran’s music — I mean, it’s not horrible in the way that, say, Taylor Swift’s music most certainly is, but I find it… pleasant, yet unremarkable.

 

My opinion, though, doesn’t matter:  the little bugger has made more hit records and more money than he can burn with a flamethrower, and clearly, his music has touched a lot of people despite his looking like Third Dweeb From The Left in a Harry Potter movie, so I have to give him that.

What gives me the giggles, however, is that when he studied music at college, he failed.

 

It says a lot about him that he hasn’t bought out the college, fired the entire faculty and burned all the buildings to the ground.  I guess that being a zillionaire is its own revenge.