My son is a 16-year-old kid with a bright future ahead of him. He’s tall, broad, and smart. I think he’s a good-looking kid, too; but I’m a dad. I’m biased.
He’s known for years what he wants to do with this life, though the last year or so has seen him narrow his focus a bit more. He wants to be a robotics engineer. What he wants to do is build science fiction-like robotic prosthesis that will allow amputees to live completely normal lives.
Unfortunately, it means he’s got to go to college, and that’s not nearly as great a thing as it used to be.
Once upon a time, the idea of your child going to college filled a parent’s heart with pride. Their child was going to be able to get the kind of job that would make life some easy living. College led to good paying jobs, white collars, prestige, and respect.
That’s not the case now.
Today, many college students graduate with mountains of debt and often have few marketable skills to show for it…and that’s the upside.
Modern American colleges still have a lot to offer, don’t get me wrong. I respect education and think people should seek it out for the whole of their lives. You’re never too old to learn something, after all. Education is a great thing.
Yet many colleges are doing far more than educating. They’re indoctrinating.
It used to be that if you wanted to study social justice, you had to seek it out. While it was still a waste of time, at least the only people subjugated to that nonsense were people who wanted to be subjugated to that nonsense. Today, they push it on students everywhere. Join a fraternity or a sorority? Get indoctrinated. Go to freshman orientation? Get indoctrinated.
There are countless stories where social justice has permeated almost every aspect of academia. I’m sorry, but I’d rather my son not have this kind of thing rammed down his throat, especially since I’ve taught him that race is a stupid measure for someone’s worth.
I hear that STEM fields aren’t that bad. After all, it’s hard to claim that the inability of a bridge to remain standing is racism and not the fact that it’s missing a key support.
I get that, and if indoctrination were the only issue, I wouldn’t worry too much. My son is a good and caring kid, so I think he’d blend in well enough.
However, colleges are a minefield of leftist claptrap masquerading as reality.
Take Title IX. If you ask most people about it after determining if they were familiar with it, they’d tell you it’s the law that requires colleges to have women’s sports. They wouldn’t be completely wrong, either.
But that’s not the whole story.
During the Obama Administration, the Department of Education issued a series of “Dear Colleague” letters that dictated to schools how they would treat various things like rape accusations and other forms of supposed sexual harassment.
The result has been a series of young men expelled from schools after running through a kangaroo court administered by people with little to no legal background. Due process? It’s like the administrators have never heard of it.
Laura Kipnis, a liberal film professor at Northwestern, knows all about Title IX. She found herself facing investigation after offering up her own opinion on a campus controversy. Since then, she’s written a book about her ordeal and the ordeals of others titled “Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus.”
The thing is, I know from experience that what Kipnis outlines aren’t the sole examples possible. I’ve seen and written about numerous others.
One really sad thing about this, however, is that harassment should be put down when it happens, yet countless conservative and libertarian students report harassment on their own campuses by progressive students. There seems to be little to no effort to quell this.
Even supposedly safe campuses aren’t immune.
So yes, I dread sending my son to college. I’ll do it, because it’s what he wants out of life, and I’ll do what I can to prepare him for what he may encounter, but it doesn’t mean I have to like it.
Frankly, college is quickly becoming a no-go zone for conservative and libertarian kids, and the progressives like it that way. After all, diversity only goes skin deep for them.