Although American colleges and universities once turned out thinkers bright enough to put men on the moon, they have rapidly descended from citadels of knowledge into crybaby kingdoms where emotional identity is prized and knowledge is rarer than gold.
Since pulling our kids out of public elementary to homeschool them, sending them to leftist colleges wasn’t at the top of our list of desires as parents. After years of studying public education and witnessing firsthand the indoctrination happening even at the elementary level, we didn’t want our kids participating in the nonsense that has become higher ed if we could avoid it.
Unfortunately, since electrical engineers are rarely apprenticed, college became a necessary evil for our oldest son, so he enrolled at a local university. Obvious problems began early.
The hoops he had to jump through to get enrolled in classes with the toothless specter of COVID-19 hovering were ridiculous. He was told he had a scholarship, but it took nearly a month of emails and phone calls ping-ponging him between numerous people to find out exactly what that was and how it would be applied to his tuition.
The number of virus-related emails have been obnoxious, and even though Oklahoma has relatively few COVID-19 cases and very few deaths, he’ll be required to wear a mask on campus in any “common spaces” for the foreseeable future.
Truly, then, it wasn’t a surprise to see an email including the following information:
The New Orientation Program hopes you are enjoying your summer! As you prepare for the fall, we would like to offer you the opportunity to participate in our Freshman Spaces. These are designed to help you meet other [sic] who share the same identity as you — whether that be race, sexuality, or living community — in an encouraging, safe environment. During this time, you will meet other students and professional staff members who share your identity and give you an insight to [sic] being part of the local U Community.
Students could register for various on-campus “living communities” as well as human “identities” including Asian American, black, Latinx, Native American, and “LGBTQIA+.” The email didn’t sit well for several reasons.
1. The Meaning of Identity
My kid is a white, heterosexual male. Where does he fit into the college’s “encouraging, safe environment”? Do we just expect him to be left out because of his universally diminished status? Does that mean he’s automatically unprotected from bullying by classmates or professors because he doesn’t fit into one of the special categories?
Further, my kid is the only person with his identity. Merriam-Webster defines “identity” as “the distinguishing character or personality of an individual: individuality.” Asian Americans don’t all share the same identity. The same goes for black people or white people or people with any other group label.
Words have consequences, and using the term “identity” to establish a group-think perspective is antithetical to the ideal that rights are given to individuals by our Creator and guaranteed by our Constitution.
This pernicious identity rhetoric is central to Marxism. Once individual rights become group rights, whichever group is not in favor can be demonized even to the point of murder with little effort. Just ask Ukrainians. The American founders warned of this fact on numerous occasions, yet many people, particularly youths, have lost all knowledge of our country’s amazing founding, mission, and purpose.
2. My Tax Dollars Pushing Propaganda
This local university is a public institution. Our tax dollars and my son’s hard-earned tuition payments will go to support this utter crap. And it’s not just crap, but deliberately bigoted, targeted crap that has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with education in any sense of the word.
Not only that, these taxpayer-funded institutions promote values that directly contradict any instruction I’ve given my children, who were brought up to interact with people as individuals made by God, not groups created by intellectually stunted, collectivist wannabes.
When more than half their classmates take the ideological communion handed out by professors who sound more like Patrisse Cullors than Aristotle, only three choices remain: Use civil discourse to retain and advance their ideals, sit quietly in the back of class and give expected answers to get needed grades, or go along to get along. When the first option can mean not only social isolation, but criminal charges, the last option becomes the road most traveled.
3. No Good Alternatives
There are simply no good alternatives open to my kid. If he withdraws his application from this school on principle, we’ll not be able to afford the private institutions that aren’t preaching group-think mantras. Unfortunately, electrical engineering doesn’t have much in the way of realistic training, and online learning often doesn’t work for students.
4. Poor Excuse for Education
Not only did an institution of supposed higher education send an email to incoming freshman with not one but two obvious writing errors, but like countless other universities, this one is turning what was once a bastion of knowledge into a cradle of ideologically motivated garbage that shuns real knowledge in favor of meaningless emotional drivel.
Sadly, learning is no longer important to most people in this country, even those in the education profession. The idea of reading a book or studying for the sake of learning is now largely passé. Consequently, millions of Americans are too ignorant to know they’re ignorant, and a large portion of these wander in and out of college administrations and classrooms, paid to dole out nonsense instead of knowledge.
By encouraging students to needlessly divide along ideological and political lines to feel safe, university administrators have confined them to an echo chamber that arrests their ability to think for themselves and reduces what should be a rich, intellectually and socially diverse experience to a monochromatic world populated by Borg-like automatons. Instead of treating students as though they’re infants unable to adjust to a new setting, university administrators should welcome them with a call to intellectual diversity.
Although I intend to write a letter to the university’s administration regarding its email, at this stage in our country’s evolution, there is very little we parents can realistically do about this situation. It appears that those of us who resist identity politics today will be suppressed and silenced until we’re forced to come out fighting.
This may not be the worst scenario, though, since unlike current college students, we are actually equipped with practical and book knowledge. Once we fight back, the foolishness and ignorance universities have substituted for actual education can only lead to their defeat.
