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Universities: Devoted to Truth or Social Justice?

joG said:
She certainly convinces me that the USA is in grave danger, if that kind of thinking is wide spread in top academic elites. That is as bad as it comes.
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Yup. Nailed that one.

Now just look at the whining, crying for safe spaces, therapy dogs, play doh and coloring books required to calm their students after the election results were announced. The bitter fruit of the liberal / progressive indoctrination they've received their entire educational lives.

The problem has it's roots are earlier than just the college and high school levels. Might even be as early as day 1 of their public education.

I'd agree that with this unsound thinking, that the USA is in grave danger, not only just now, today, but certainly in the future as these indoctrinated children are released into the real world, and eventually assume leadership positions in business and government.
 
Our higher learning institutions have definitely been overtaken with emotional protectionism over free thought. Just look at the recent violent riots against Milo Yiannopoulos's supporters as an example. Regardless if you agree or disagree, radical ideas and alternative views to mainstream thought are extremely important for academia to stay relevant, and for academia not to just turn into a cesspool of bias fueled mental masturbation in a designated safe space.

One could argue that gradual increases in censorship in western culture with a combination of government sponsored thought control via old-media is one of the largest causes to the creation of modern SJW anti-culture.
 
Chernobog said:
Our higher learning institutions have definitely been overtaken with emotional protectionism over free thought. Just look at the recent violent riots against Milo Yiannopoulos's supporters as an example. Regardless if you agree or disagree, radical ideas and alternative views to mainstream thought are extremely important for academia to stay relevant, and for academia not to just turn into a cesspool of bias fueled mental masturbation in a designated safe space.
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You say that as if Milo Yiannopoulos is propounding some new kind of theoretical political idea or hypothesis, rather than rabble rousing, inciting hatred and demonising religious and racial minorities. He's not a theorist, he hasn't even a bachelor degree. He's a low-rent demagogue and ersatz fake-journo. Just because someone wants to speak on a campus doesn't mean they have a god-given right to be invited to do so, nor that no one else should have the right to challenge him doing so.
 
Andalublue said:
You say that as if Milo Yiannopoulos is propounding some new kind of theoretical political idea or hypothesis, rather than rabble rousing, inciting hatred and demonising religious and racial minorities. He's not a theorist, he hasn't even a bachelor degree. He's a low-rent demagogue and ersatz fake-journo. Just because someone wants to speak on a campus doesn't mean they have a god-given right to be invited to do so, nor that no one else should have the right to challenge him doing so.
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The issue is that Milo is not only being invited, but paid to come and speak. What right does someone have to resort to violence in order to prevent him from speaking at an event that other students paid him to come and speak at? No one has issues with people peacefully protesting to show their disapproval but acting out violently and purposefully trying to disrupt these events is unlawful.
 
Gathomas88 said:
It's known as the "victory by definition" fallacy. It basically involves trying to arbitrarily redefine reality in such a way that it's impossible for a certain position to be wrong.

The Chinese tried this in the Korean war, for example - Arguing to the UN that it was impossible for China to be the aggressor in the conflict, because China is, "by definition," a "peaceful" nation.
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Much the same thing is said about the 'Religion of Peace' these days. Islam is good and anyone who says different is guilty of a hate crime. The only change is that in the fifties the West did not take the PRC at their word while these days most of our 'leaders' fall over themselves to deny Islamic barbarism.

Btw I haven't heard the 'Islam means peace' lie lately. Maybe too many people now know that the word actually means 'submission'.
 
Your Star said:
Truth=Social Justice.
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Social Justice does not even equal Justice.

Take wealth redistribution, which is a common topic of social justice.

There is no justice in taking the wealth of someone who earned it to benefit someone that did not. The only way that can be considered morally justified is through the lense of social justice. From the perspective of actual justice it constitutes theft.
 
Harshaw said:
Something that's been of interest to me ever since my own campus days.

Why Universities Must Choose One Telos: Truth or Social Justice | HeterodoxAcademy.org



Read the whole thing.

Here's a Harvard student who makes no bones that Truth -- and academic freedom -- should give way to Social Justice:

The Doctrine of Academic Freedom | Opinion | The Harvard Crimson
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I never had any 'campus days'. How fortunate I was that the leftist educational establishment never had the opportunity to warp my young mind.

These days I follow moocs which often, when the subject is one of the social 'sciences', reveal the full horror of what I escaped.
 
DA60 said:
How about profit?
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My suspicion is that there are lots of motives. The main one would be to attract wealthy students and make them successful to attract new ones and so on and on. Most other behavior would follow from that.

Public universities would have a different set of coals and depend on who is in the decision making body.
 
DA60 said:
How about profit?
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Profit: Good. Company and workers pay more taxes to the benefit of society. Loss: Bad. Tax revenue decreases as workers are laid off.

(This makes a bit of a wild assumption: that the money raised in taxes is spent wisely. I think that with Trump in charge there is a better chance that it will be.)
 
Anyone that says that 'greed' is not the number one goal of those who run universities is naive in the extremis.

Salaries of Public-University Presidents Rise, Student Debt Spiraling | Time.com

If these heads are SOOOOO noble and concerned about their students above all else - then why do their salaries average over $500,000 per year (the question is rhetorical - the answer is 'well duh' obvious)? If they really cared about their students soooooo much than they would take $80-100,000 and love it. Not these (mostly) greedy, two-faced jerks.

American universities exist for profit and greed more than any other single reason.

And I do not care if you think differently...because you are wrong.


And btw, I went to an American university for business...galactic waste of time.

Unless you KNOW you want to be something that requires a degree (like a doctor/lawyer/etc.) you are an idiot if you go to university to 'find yourself' (unless someone rich is paying for you to go).
 
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Nap said:
The issue is that Milo is not only being invited, but paid to come and speak. What right does someone have to resort to violence in order to prevent him from speaking at an event that other students paid him to come and speak at? No one has issues with people peacefully protesting to show their disapproval but acting out violently and purposefully trying to disrupt these events is unlawful.
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I think that if we were discussing the issue of Islamist speakers being invited onto campuses, you might take a different stand. Milo incites violence, positively encourages it when it's directed at people of colour or women, and yet when the roles are reversed, he's suddenly some sacred cow that needs protection.
 
Andalublue said:
I think that if we were discussing the issue of Islamist speakers being invited onto campuses, you might take a different stand. Milo incites violence, positively encourages it when it's directed at people of colour or women, and yet when the roles are reversed, he's suddenly some sacred cow that needs protection.
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I have watched several of Milo's speeches and have yet to see him call for violence. In fact it is quite the opposite, he usually make fun of the left and their propensity for violence.
 
Harshaw said:
No, ma'am. "Social justice" is an inherently subjective construct. Truth is not.
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It all depends on which definition of 'Truth' you are talking about. IF you are talking about 'facts',.. then truth is not. If you are talking about the metaphysical moral and ethical/religious versions of 'Truth', then yes, it is.
 
Nap said:
Take wealth redistribution, which is a common topic of social justice.

There is no justice in taking the wealth of someone who earned it to benefit someone that did not. The only way that can be considered morally justified is through the lense of social justice. From the perspective of actual justice it constitutes theft.
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I agree with everything you say, and still believe that social justice should pursue wealth redistribution--in fact, doing so is just.
 
Universities are devoted to selling enhanced credentials....a degree and an experience.

Education only sometimes factors in.

"The Truth" is negotiable.

THAT'S the problem.
 
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Well, private ones can teach - more or less - whatever they wish.

I think public ones should teach only the truth and leave Social Justice to the individual.
 
Okay so when the Confederate Army, sorry Democrat Party no longer looked to win the South and majority of the Country they went full fledge Communist and attacked the Northeast/Great Lakes area factories with propaganda (sure they didn't come out and say that they were pinkos, no they started off with Union talk, and looking out for the little guy's rights vs the rich). Easy to jump on board with that pitch, right but what really sold the deal was J.F.K. the first ever Catholic President embracing the Unions while coming out publicly in defense of the Blacks while Nixon was simply a bad Republican candidate.

Had J.F.K gone against Teddy, Honest Abe, etc he would've probably lost but he went against a weak Republican and was able to fool many into thinking that the Confederates how some how changed and now cared about minorities (and in JFKs defense maybe he truly did care & that's why the DNC created CIA had him killed along with MLK).

Sad that many Blacks still vote DNC today, and the DNC doesn't care about them. Simply look at abortion rates the Blacks suffer the most and use tax dollars to convince poor black women to kill their babies.

Sad.

Going back to the topic, so schools have greedy teachers that are fooled into Unions to defend their pay & easy cushiony jobs. In return the teachers promote Communism in a slick way, many without even knowing that they are actually doing that. The DNC will say its progressive maybe even a bit of socialism, but what it truly is (like if you reached the top of the Scientology or Masons,) is evil at its core.

That's why I call Democrats, Demon Craps!

Anyways, most teachers especially in Universities are Democrats & they are brainwashing your children. That is why so many young kids vote Democrat & riot (protest) in defense of the brainwashing they've been given. They are told by their parents to shut up and listen to their teachers & repeat/memorize everything that they say without question.

And we as a society do this to our children, which is truly stupid. We even make laws saying that they better go, and get brainwashed by Uncle Sam.
Read the whole thing.

Here's a Harvard student who makes no bones that Truth -- and academic freedom -- should give way to Social Justice:

The Doctrine of Academic Freedom | Opinion | The Harvard Crimson[/QUOTE]
 
DA60 said:
Well, private ones can teach - more or less - whatever they wish.

I think public ones should teach only the truth and leave Social Justice to the individual.
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Universities are there to educate people, to open their eyes, to broaden their horizons. It turns out that when people do that, they tend to become more understanding, more tolerant, and more liberal in their worldview. They tend to understand and able to see through the eyes of more people that in the past seemed very alien to them, "not one of us". Interestingly and ironically also, they tend to become less tolerant of narrow-minded ignorance and intolerance. Becoming "intolerant of intolerance" is often seen as an inherent paradox, especially by those who may be the subject of such intolerance. We get labeled Nazis. But I don't really see a contradiction there.

Here is the late Richard Rorty, professor emeritus of philosophy and humanities at Stanford, and former chair of the American Philosophical Association, on this kind of intolerance in the academic community:

It seems to me that the regulative idea that we – we wet liberals, we heirs of the Enlightenment, we Socratists – most frequently use to criticize the conduct of various conversational partners is that of ‘needing education in order to outgrow their primitive fear, hatreds, and superstitions’. This is the concept the victorious Allied armies used when they set about re-educating the citizens of occupied Germany and Japan. It is also the one which was used by American schoolteachers who had read Dewey and were concerned to get students to think ‘scientifically’ and ‘rationally’ about such matters as the origin of the species and sexual behavior. It is a concept which I, like most Americans who teach humanities or social science in colleges and universities, invoke when we try to arrange things so that students who enter as bigoted, homophobic, religious fundamentalists will leave college with views more like our own.

[…] The fundamentalist parents of our fundamentalist students think that the entire ‘American liberal establishment’ is engaged in a conspiracy. Had they read Habermas, these people would say that they typical communication situation in American college classrooms is no more herrschaftsfrei than that in the Hitler Youth Camps.

The parents have a point. Their point is that we liberal teachers no more feel in a symmetrical communication situation when we talk with bigots than do kindergarten teachers talking with their students. […] When we American college teachers encounter religious fundamentalists, we do not consider the possibility of reformulating our own practices of justification so as to give more weight to the authority of the Christian scriptures. Instead, we do our best to convince these students of the benefits of secularization. We assign first-person accounts of growing up homosexual to our homophobic students for the same reasons that German schoolteachers in the postwar period assigned The Diary of Anne Frank. The racist or fundamentalist parents of our students[…] will protest that these books are being jammed down their children’s throats. I cannot see how to reply to their charges without saying something like “There are credentials for admission to our democratic society […]. You have to be educated in order to be … a participant in our conversation … So we are going to go right on trying to discredit you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than discussable. We are not so inclusivist as to tolerate intolerance such as yours.”

[…] I don’t see anything herrschaftsfrei about my handling of my fundamentalist students. Rather, I think those students are lucky to find themselves under the benevolent Herrschaft of people like me, and to have escaped the grip of their frightening, vicious, dangerous parents … I am just as provincial and contextualist as the Nazi teachers who made their students read Der Stürmer; the only difference is that I serve a better cause.
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Harshaw said:
No, ma'am. "Social justice" is an inherently subjective construct. Truth is not.
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No it it's not. Not here in America.

2nd paragraph, 1st sentence of the Declaration of Independence reads...

"We hold these TRUTHS to be SELF EVIDENT, that all men are created equal."

The words "Self Evident", and "Truth" tell us that this is an Axiom. It is a statement that is regarded as so obviously true that it did not require any evidence to support. All Americans who claim they believe in the founding principles of this country must accept this statement as the Truth. It is a fact. Anyone attempting to disagree with it fails America 101.
 
MrWonka said:
No it it's not. Not here in America.

2nd paragraph, 1st sentence of the Declaration of Independence reads...

"We hold these TRUTHS to be SELF EVIDENT, that all men are created equal."

The words "Self Evident", and "Truth" tell us that this is an Axiom. It is a statement that is regarded as so obviously true that it did not require any evidence to support. All Americans who claim they believe in the founding principles of this country must accept this statement as the Truth. It is a fact. Anyone attempting to disagree with it fails America 101.
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I'm not sure if you're agreeing with me or arguing.
 
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