By Professor
Doom
Ah the fragile college “snowflake.” These
precious students are so delicate that they must be protected from shock at all
times, must be provided safe spaces filled with puppies and Play-Doh. If you
check alternative news, you can find endless videos of these creatures, as well
as campuses eager to protect their genteel sensibilities from exposure to new
ideas.
But surely the alternative media
exaggerates, right? Surely these mythical creatures, if they exist at all, are
only at loopy private colleges? I mean, we do have a few “real” schools left in
higher education, and those schools take knowledge seriously, laughing at the
mere idea that students shouldn’t be exposed to concepts they don’t like?
Welcome to Cambridge, a tip-toppiest top
tier university:
--Egads, I’m citing Fox News.
The lunacy
here is extraordinary. While I know it’s impossible to teach a subject an
infinite number of times, if it were possible, it would have been done with
Shakespeare. For quite literally centuries, students have found themselves
exposed to Shakespeare multiple times in their education. If it were really
possible to do actual harm to a young human being by exposure to Shakespeare,
we’d know this by now, right?
It’s dementedly hysterical that there are
people who have evidence (however denigrated) that vaccinations can hurt young
human beings, and these people are laughed at, mocked, destroyed by suggesting
maybe we should do something about it, because, hey, the evidence just isn’t
good enough.
But
in the face of centuries of evidence Shakespeare does no harm, we’re going to
do something to protect our kids from the nonexistent ravages of some old
stories?
Undergraduates were advised in a “Notes on
Lectures” document circulated to students that a potentially triggering lecture
on Shakespeare’s "Titus Andronicus" and "The Comedy of
Errors" would include “discussions of sexual violence” and “sexual
assault,” The Telegraph reported Wednesday.
It isn’t simply that we’re at the stage
that even our great schools must deal with the snowflakes, there’s a hidden
message here. See, this is a course for students who already (supposedly) know
Shakespeare, already have been exposed to these stories before.
“If a student of English Literature doesn’t
know that 'Titus Andronicus' contains scenes of violence they shouldn’t be on
the course,” David Crilly, artistic director at The Cambridge Shakespeare
Festival
These students should already know these
stories, the purpose of the academic course is discussion in additional depth.
Allow me to highlight the hidden message:
This need for trigger warnings didn’t come from a
vacuum. Students must have complained before, and these complaints not only
indicate the presence of coddle-requiring snowflakes, but also that these
students are stumbling into advanced courses without having learned the basic
material…doubtless because they were coddled overmuch in earlier courses.
I noticed, when I was at a fraudulent
community college, that the students in the calculus courses were no longer
able to add fractions or perform any other basic calculations without
mechanical assistance. In short, I noticed that the students were literally
learning nothing in their previous classes; I chalked this up to the widespread
incompetence, fraud, and corruption I saw everywhere else at the community
college.
But now, with a just bit of reading
between the lines, we’re seeing it at Cambridge, where students can come into
their second-year Shakespeare courses clearly completely ignorant of what they
should have learned in their first year courses.
But she added school officials are caving to a
trend to appease "hyper-sensitive" undergrads, The Telegraph
reported. For instance, the University of Glasgow issued warnings to theology
students earlier this year they may see distressing images of the crucifixion
of Jesus Christ.
Yes, that’s right, we’re also getting
theology students, raised in a predominantly Christian culture, unaware that
they may see depictions of The Crucifixion in their Christianity courses.
I can’t emphasize strongly enough how the
elimination of material from college coursework has debilitated higher
education. Yes, the snowflakes have to be melted off campus, but we really need
to have standards again, so that students of calculus know something about
arithmetic, students of Shakespeare know something about Shakespeare, students
of theology know something about Christianity.
"Frailty, thy name is snowflake"
--from the comments section, though I wish I’d been clever
enough to think of it.
While most mainstream news articles don’t
allow comments (the better to prevent real people from making corrections to
any false narratives the mainstream news wishes to advance), this Fox News page
allows it.
Of course, the commenters point and laugh
at the insanity here. People have always pointed and laughed at pointy-headed
academics, but this time it’s different.
Before, the laughter would be about how
the academics could take their work, in this case Shakespeare, so seriously. I
even have to admit watching English professors heatedly argue over minutely
different interpretations of one line of prose can be pretty amusing…even as
I’ll spend an afternoon calculating a precise solution to a theoretical problem
nobody else could possibly care about.
Today, the laughter is not how academics
take their work seriously, but instead is how we’re taking the snowflakes so
seriously. And everyone off campus is laughing about it.
As always, the source for this shift is
the restructuring of where the money comes for higher education. Now that any
snowflake can qualify for that money, our institutions have shifted their
priorities to take care of those snowflakes, at the expense of education.
If we just go back to when the only people
who qualified for higher education were interested in higher education (rather
than in simply not being offended), we could actually make education about
education again. Would that be so bad?
End the student loan scam.
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