Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Could you elaborate with an example of the communist viewpoint?
I never experienced anything like that. I don't think my professors cared what the student political opinion was.
It clearly left a chip on your shoulder, though. Sorry? But doesn't sound like you're that much worse off for the experience.
In a way it's a lesson for life. We will all have people in a position power over us or that we have to work with who we will not agree with. It's something that just has to be managed & dealt with. Sometimes that means stifling your opinion to get through without incident. Might as well learn that sooner than later.
I find it interesting that you recommend that in college, where one should find an open forum for opinion and disagreement, you recommend "stifling your opinion" to get through. Is that not the very thing that conservatives claim -- that only opinions that conform to the liberal viewpoint are allowed; that conservatives should "stifle" their opinions? I don't think anyone objects to open discussion where all viewpoints are heard and all evidence analyzed, but they do object to being "stifled."
Chip? No, but it did hurt my GPA because I refused to parrot back what he wanted to hear which was basically "US evil, communists good." The class was Western Civ from 1600 but mainly focused on the evils of the French court and the French revolution and how that shaped Karl Marx's thoughts and how it foreshadowed the Russian revolution. Pretty much skipped everything else that happened in the last 400 years. Waste of my class time and money.
Just because you personally haven't experienced it doesn't mean it doesn't happen. I didn't claim all professors but that it does happen often enough, and as you noted, dissenting opinions must be stifled, that it gives the impression of being the official position of academia.
I won't deny that it happens on the right--nor do I approve. But the left dominates the universities. Everyone knows that. Even honest leftists admit it. The right has very little power on campuses.
Well, at my alma mater, the folks with power are the Regents of the University of California. They generally reflect the Establishment and the powers that be, and they're hardly a bunch of leftists. One of them is Dick Blum, Senator Dianne Feinstein's husband, and while he may be a Democrat politically, he's hardly a Marxist, Socialist, or whatever favorite insult that you want to use to describe someone whose views don't align with yours (in fact, he's a big private equity investor).
Not to mention that several employee groups at the UC campuses are striking over pay and working conditions. You'd think that if the UC ruling people are really leftist as you claim, perhaps they'd treat their workers better, if we were to take your tautology more literally?
I find it interesting that you recommend that in college, where one should find an open forum for opinion and disagreement, you recommend "stifling your opinion" to get through. Is that not the very thing that conservatives claim -- that only opinions that conform to the liberal viewpoint are allowed; that conservatives should "stifle" their opinions? I don't think anyone objects to open discussion where all viewpoints are heard and all evidence analyzed, but they do object to being "stifled."
I've lived most of my entire life around conservatives, whether my parents, grandparents, in-laws or bosses. The gays are ruining America, people want to get paid $15 an hour for nothing, et etetera and so forth.
Oh you should have seen my dad's face when I was a senior in high school and I brought a Hispanic girl home as my prom date. My dad and I never truly got along again after that.
I found college to be one of the few places where I felt my ideas were valued and not ridiculed. Still counts to this day, where I deal with mostly conservatives in my day to day life. "Obama is a Muslim communist" etc.. As if you can be both... communists are atheist.
Quote:
Chip? No, but it did hurt my GPA because I refused to parrot back what he wanted to hear which was basically "US evil, communists good." The class was Western Civ from 1600 but mainly focused on the evils of the French court and the French revolution and how that shaped Karl Marx's thoughts and how it foreshadowed the Russian revolution. Pretty much skipped everything else that happened in the last 400 years. Waste of my class time and money.
Doesn't sound fundamentally inaccurate. The French Revolution was quite a watershed moment and inspired many 19th century radicals.
Sounds like you do indeed have a chip or else you wouldn't remember it that well. I took World Civ and not Western... I don't remember discussing Marx but I assume we did to some extent. I do remember discussing Mao Zedong, so we must have had to.
I probably would have found such a perspective as you described to be refreshing, although I tend to think the best professors inspire future learning outside of class, not present their take as the authoritative final word, which sounds like this one did.
400 years is a long time and the information has to be curated to fit into 3 hours a week over 16 weeks. Decisions have to be made about what to cut and what to include. It's the professor who makes those editorial decisions, not the student, regardless of the students editorial criticism. The outcomes by which he will assess student work is also up to him. If your response was not germane its no wonder you didn't get an A.
In my view the failure was not with his perspective, probably based on far more study than you've ever done on the subject, but with his approach to assessment that left you and likely other students resentful. That is a problem with the way college professors used to be taught to teach.
But such is life sometimes. I have to write stuff at work that I don't agree with either and sure as hell can't tell my in-laws what I really think when I go to their house.
Quote:
Just because you personally haven't experienced it doesn't mean it doesn't happen. I didn't claim all professors but that it does happen often enough, and as you noted, dissenting opinions must be stifled, that it gives the impression of being the official position of academia.
That was 1 class out of the 40 or so you had to take to get a bachelor's degree. As I said, I can't think of any from my undergraduate classes. So between us we've got about 1.3% of our classes that featured some actionable left wing bias.
Since when does western thoughr exclude all the things the OP is trying to avoid? Surely the purveyors of western thought have eyes to see that there are all types of people on planet earth. Or is the OP just looking for anticipated racist curriculum?
Since Marxism originated in Europe, it probably should be part of a Western philosophy, political science, civilization course. Right?
There are people teaching these social theory classes who are not interested in equal opportunity but for equal outcomes which we(and they) know doesn't work and leads to total destruction, poverty, dictatorships, no innovation or upward income mobility.
I think the OP's concerns are legitimate, not because one would have to take courses specifically focused on social justice and diversity but because a general agreement with leftist ideology might be required for a student to get a good grade in a perfectly ordinary course like economics.
For example, I might argue that if the government doesn't have the tax revenue to pay for something, they can't have it. They can borrow but eventually have to pay the debt back - out of tax revenue. They can cause inflation but that is a tax on people who have saved money. There is just no way around the accounting identity that says revenues = expenses in the long run if not the immediate run.
Yet I'll bet there are economics professors at almost every university who'd flunk a student who made that argument. (I am a trained economist and I am just repeating something David Ricardo said in 1810.)
I think what is being overlooked in this discussion is not the need to study broadly. Pretty much everyone from all sides agrees with that. Nor the need for open dialog. What people are really concerned about are individual professors who turn the class into a forum for their ideas and only their ideas. The you must agree with me or fail the class type. Example, most of my own college experience was politics neutral, even when studying subjects that had political content. As it should be, it's about understanding, not converts.
Except one history professor. He was a communist. Pushed a communist viewpoint as the only correct one on every topic in history. And if you disagreed, well your grade went down. No disagreement allowed. That's the type professor people are worried about.
Those are rare. I never had one. No one I know did. Kind of laughable, actually. People forget that places like Berkeley were part of the military-industrial complex, back in the 50's and 60's. The reason there were protests in Berkeley in the 60's wasn't because it was a radical school. It wasn't. And still isn't. It was because it was a very conservative school. Its conservatism birthed the Free Speech Movement, which was a reaction to faculty and Board of Regents' not allowing students to recruit for or seek donations for political causes on campus, among other issues.
Last edited by Ruth4Truth; 05-13-2018 at 11:48 PM..
I went to University of Illinois. The diversity requirement was met with World Regional Geography which was a bit left leaning but not intolerable so. Of course there are a ton of marxist student organizations and professors but I never felt that I had to listen to them nor contort my views to them to fit in nor pass a class.
I had to learn about Europe for 13+ years even though my ancestry is primarily from Africa. Are there really people who can't stand to take one humanities course that isn't about Europe? Talk about first world problems.
I had to learn about Europe for 13+ years even though my ancestry is primarily from Africa. Are there really people who can't stand to take one humanities course that isn't about Europe? Talk about first world problems.
lol. Where did you go to school, that you had Europe shoved down your throat for 13 years? I never had to take any courses about Europe. The closest I got, I guess, was advanced French language class, where we had to study French literature and geography. That was it. In college, it was required to take a global history course of some sort, but it didn't have to be European history. So I took African history, which was enlightening. I still know virtually nothing about Euro history. I'm sorry you had to put up with that.
Oh, ok, I guess in Sophomore year of HS, we read Beowulf, and other old Euro lit. That and the French class, were the sum total of any Europe-related topics I came across in school.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
