posted by like_that
I agree with most of you what said except the bolded. I don't think this girl or people like her are a byproduct of colleges becoming "job mills." She is more likely taking courses that have no real application to the real world (aka not a job mill type course), which has led to this type of behavior.
My point isn't just that they've become job mills, but we still treat them like they're places of actual "higher learning." Being "college educated" still carries this understanding that you're better equipped to speak on a variety of subjects in the public square.
But while we pretend that those coming out of them are such, the only focus of going to college has become to get a "good job." We treat a four-year college like a trade school. Now, she might be majoring in something that has little or no vocational application as well, which would just tell me she's not doing either one very well, but her attitude here aligns with plenty who do graduate with more vocationally-applicable degrees, which tells me it's more than just that she's majoring in something ridiculous. It's that she's obviously not in college to learn how to hone her rhetorical skills or better shape her ability to use logic and reasoning ... the sorts of things that were effectively the point of colleges when they were founded in their modern iterations.
Whether someone is going to a four-year school to major in computer science, accounting, or interpretive unicorn dance theory, they're still apparently not engaging how to become a better-reasoning, sober-minded, critically thinking adult. Four-year schools have become little more than trade schools for majors that don't offer trade school options, and they regularly put out drones: unable to think rationally, but damn, if they can't crunch numbers or work in STEM.
posted by geeblock
I don’t think things are that much different I just think it’s our perception of them. College campuses have always been very progressive and radical whether you are talking anti war, civil rights or all kinds of things throughout the 60s and 70s. Before that you had old white people going around with signs protesting people with beards as hippies and communists ect.. I don’t see it as the end of the world or anything different than what has always been
The position is not the objection, though, and only going back 50 years will show more similarities than if we were to go back further, sure. This isn't the sort of thing that happens within a single generation.
But progressiveness and/or radical defiance of socially normative positions isn't the problem. As you've said, that's been the case for decades, as many social and moral reformers do come out of universities. The problem is (a) the lack of willingness toward discourse, and (b) the lack of willingness to apply a well-reasoned, thoughtful logical framework in order to arrive at those conclusions. The beauty of the anti-war and civil rights movements is that both had well-reasoned foundations, both on a practical level and on a conceptual level. Unfortunately, that's not what's taking place here.
And just to be clear, this is happening in all major schools of thought or political "tribes." I distinctly remember a college professor calling Barbara Bush a racist and saying she raised war criminals during the day or two after her death. A Republican talking head of some sort (I don't recall if it was someone actually in office or just a pundit) replied, saying that her statement went "beyond" free speech, because it was disrespectful or distasteful or some such. He appealed to an emotional response as a rebuttal to a fact claim. Even if you don't have enough space to fully address it thoughtfully in the Twitterverse, an appeal to emotion is hardly a sensible justification for saying it goes beyond free speech.