
Don’t Let Students Run the University - pseudolus
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/05/camille-paglia-protests-represent-dangerous-trend/588859/
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neilv
A proper undergraduate program today must counteract a lot of awful cultural
nurturing, from contemporary 'news' and 'social media' \-- not coddle students
who arrive thinking they know all about learning, thinking, issues, dialogue,
and what their role should be.

I actually stopped donating to my (still) favorite university, over a last-
straw incident of permissiveness, when some students there were in the news
for shouting down a controversial invited speaker, and forcing the talk to
end.

Instead of those students appearing to get a good corrective dose of education
about the basics of university, marketplace of ideas, critical thinking,
etc.... one of the students instead did a media tour, to try to establish
themself as an activist leader personality, and solicit funding for their
personal career brand.

I'd been donating token amounts to the university, despite money being very
tight, as a symbolic show of appreciation for the opportunities and support
they'd previously given me. But, when this incident happened, I'd recently
happened to be in a position to give a small amount of help to an acquaintance
who was a kernel hacker and transgender, and who'd become homeless (and was
worried about where their next meal would come from, and then how to do more
coding to get another job, when they had to worry about being any laptop being
violently taken from them). I asked myself why I was giving any money to
posturing university students who, despite their very privileged university
opportunity, failed to have basic education smacked into them.

(I'd planned to write a letter to the university president, encouraging
education-smacking, and also to resume donations once I had much more funds to
apportion to various purposes, but none of that has happened so far.)

