Jesuits have always cared about marginalized people. The focus is on inquiry and critical reading — not indoctrination. For example, the Gender studies group condemned the over-turning of Roe v Wade, while others at the school applauded it. It will be debated, but students are not taught a right answer. |
I don't defend academic standards because I'm a political conservative. FWIW I consider myself a social democrat and a person of the left. My political heroes are FDR and Willy Brandt. But woke ideology comes at the expense of rigor and serious textual reading. Valorizing identity over quality. |
When it looks like a nut and sounds like a nut, it is a nut. |
Will all those who are criticizing postmodernism (which is not actually an analytical framework, but rather a general disposition shared by certain analytical methodologies) and cultural studies please furnish working definitions of them here? The over-jargoning of academic discourse is neither unique to cultural studies nor necessary for its practice. Bad writing is bad writing no matter its subject, content, or argumentation. But cultural studies is part of the intellectual justification for reading literature in its social and historical context. |
Surely these schools have the proper approach! |
What's Reed like nowadays? It was known to be academically traditionalist with a left-wing student body. But its student body protested against the humanities curriculum a few years ago and the administration ceded to most of their demands. |
Not "faddish" lol. |
I have an MFA in creative writing, from a program that was very lit heavy, and ugh -- I wish I could disagree with you. But I can't. |
Ah… so non-Catholics are indoctrinating… because you say so? Sorry, but I don’t buy it. What I see in my kid’s humanities classes at an ultra- “woke” SLAC— as reflected by papers he’s sent me to read — are closely reasoned arguments relying on primary source material, and to the extent that there are criticisms, they are comments like “provide more evidence for this” or “what about X alternative explanation.” Nothing remotely resembling indoctrination. It seems to me that what bugs people complaining about “woke” colleges is the decline in pro-US, pro-Christian, hetero-normative, pro-white majority, pro-capitalist indoctrination. |
I'm the OP and that's ridiculous.
I think there's really a two-front war in defending the integrity of the university. On the right, you have those who want to teach sanitized history or creationism. Then there's the woke left who want think the proper teaching of the humanities should be replaced by faddish identity politics. I reject both. |
The PP just told you what they don’t like about woke colleges: students are taught the “right” answers and there is no tolerance for debate. And why are you reading your college kids papers? Weird. Get a life and cut the apron strings. Or more likely by your writing style and logical fallacies you are in college or high school yourself. |
You can laugh but I agree with the PP (and with atheist Richard Dawkins) that countries like the UK and US *are* nations with heavy socially Christian traditions. Obviously it isn’t the officially religion, but even with fewer churchgoers and professed “believers” than there were 30 years ago, it is still a nation based on Christian norms. Also the PP who dismissed concerns as “mad just because the emphasis is no longer on western, capitalist view as a positive”—or something like that…yes, I’d say that’s a pretty huge problem when American society is built on the free market and the liberal free-thinking philosophy of seeking truth and exploring and debating ideas in search of it as pretty much the basis of our shared American values and what we all want to promote in higher education. So yes—when we see that our American institutions of “higher learning” have been ideologically captured by individuals who are pushing an anti-American, anti-capitalist, anti-western dogma onto students and passing it off as enlightenment, it is very concerning. Incidentally, this is not exactly surprising given that ex-KGB agents literally spelled out this exact plan when being interviewed by Phil Donahue in the late 1970s. But I think many boomers and GenXers dismissed that as laughable—and just didn’t buy that they could pull that off HERE on our own soil. It sounded like a crazy conspiracist plot, honestly. Until suddenly it isn’t. |
I'm not religious or a political conservative, but a broken clock is right twice a day. |
Suppose you found a school that taught lit the old fashioned way. Yay? But so what? You going to send your kid there? Even “properly taught” non-woke lit is not worth paying $80k/year for. Better to study it offline for free if that’s what interests your kid. |
OP may want to stick with STEM. |