The battle for new college

I don’t think it’s fair to call reacting to whining which ultimately yields unfair treatment on the basis of an immutable characteristic… as whining in remotely the same sense.

If it is, then you’re basically saying the only reasonable reaction to whining because someone claims they’re oppressed or marginalized is to either support that person or shut up.

That is by no means fair, and it is a completely ineffective response.

 

Yeah, I don't remember when I first heard the term "gaslighting," but it wasn't that many years ago I started hearing it from the left and had to look it up. It took some time but sure enough, I later started hearing conservatives use it. I wasn't sure if they were using it sarcastically to troll or rather came to find the word legitimately helpful.

One thing is clear to me. Many conservatives (not all) view schools (particularly secular, public schools) as being the root of many social changes and much of what they see as evil. I think religion is as big of an issue as race and gender. It's not that they want government to be neutral; they want the government indoctrinating students in their favor because they believe education institutions are predominantly why Americans society has become more socially liberal.

People have been complaining about prayer being taken out of school since before I was born, and I think they've come to realize that if the Supreme Court isn't going to turn back the clock for them, their best bet is crippling public schools so private schools are the ones left standing, and many of them will be religious. Almost like a silver bullet, they seem to blame schools for young people turning away from church, listening to rap music, and changing attitudes about sex and gender norms. If they can't use tax payer dollars for religious schools and can't eliminate public schools, they can just take over public schools but still indoctrinate kids to their views. I think this goes back to the persecution complex issue because they can't seem to fathom that maybe others simply reject the merits of their arguments.

 

I’d be good with A space. Lmao.

 

It doesn’t take 20 years at UF to call out BS when you see it.

 

The fact that education is more of a “free-flowing marketplace of ideas than a corporation” is frankly not surprising. It should be that way. Corporations have very different goals from education. A big part of higher education is exploring different ideas and possibilities. Granted, that’s a big part of many corporations too, but it’s entirely secondary to the interests of shareholders and profit, so it’s much lower on the priority list for mature corporations.

Education is about ideas and truth (or at least it should be), corporations are about profit. The fact that you’re even comparing the two as though they are similar says that education is nowhere near where it should be.

And again, my ideal vision of universities is different from DeSantis. It is not one where things like CRT or equity-based theories don’t exist. It is one where they do exist and are somewhat equally countered by contrasting ideas.

 

Truer words have never been spoken, typed, texted, or tweeted. I think most right thinking folks would agree

 

My favorite was when they repackaged Rules for Radicals as Rules for Patriots (the Tea Party actually made this required reading for staffers), then spend years trying tie every democrat politician to Alinsky and attack them for using Alinsky's tactics.

 

The problem is that educational institutions have lost trust (in my opinion rightfully so).

So we basically have game theory playing out right before our eyes. Traditionally, at least relatively speaking, people wouldn’t want to indoctrinate children, weaponize schools because they understand that preserving the innocence of children is important, and they don’t want that to be turned against them.

Conservatives are looking at what’s been happening, and they’re saying “they’re indoctrinating our kids, who knows how long this has been going on, so now I’m confronted with the following options:

1. Continue with the status quo, liberal indoctrination without conservative indoctrination.
2. Try to stop the liberal indoctrination, or counter it with proportional conservative indoctrination at the higher education level. Merely stopping the liberal indoctrination will be seen as conservative indoctrination anyways. Why? I’m yet to see widespread condemnation from the left of schools going too far, even when they are blatantly going too far. It’s all framed as normal, even when it clearly isn’t.
3. Stop liberal indoctrination and replace it with conservative indoctrination. We’ll be treated the same as option 2, and we get a bigger political win.”

I personally favor option 2, I think that’s the morally correct way of handling this, but I’m not going to sit here and pretend I don’t understand option 3. I completely understand option 3.

Democrats love using every weapon in their arsenal chastising their opponents, then say “you better not go further than you are now.” If they’ve already exhausted everything in their arsenal, they’re giving their opponents no reason not to go further. They’re going to call it “conservative indoctrination” no matter what. If they’re going to cry about it anyways, might as well give them a reason to cry. At least you actually get something out of it that way.

 

I was part of organizations in college (at the head of which were liberal) that specifically reached out to these groups because of their influence. A huge part of the reason for that influence is money. How do they get money? DEI, and equity based pushes, whether directly or indirectly.

 

Their goals are entirely different.

Discussions like “what is love?” Make sense in the context of a college, not a corporation.

Corporations do a lot of good, but their goal isn’t “diversity of ideas.” Diversity of ideas, sometimes, many times, is a means of achieving greater profits, the primary goal.

These are different things, that operate differently, providing a net good to society in different ways, and having different priorities. Yet here you are claiming hypocrisy of some sort as though they are comparable. Then you say they’re not comparable. But apparently cons are hypocrites because they like one thing but dislike another despite not being comparable?

 

Liberals and progressives have also adopted the tactics of conservatives and Republicans too in certain cases, its almost like if people see something appearing to work, they will immitate it.

 

A start to remedying that is drawing a line where you think liberals have gone too far in education instead of immediately going on the defensive every time a conservative brings anything up.

All of these discussions go something like this when discussing elementary schools:
1. Do you have evidence of this happening?
2. Do you have evidence of this happening on a widespread level?
3. Okay, it’s happening on a widespread level, but it’s completely normal and theres nothing wrong with that. Don’t like it, homeschool your kids or send them to private school.

 

I think those who've historically been in power and been included can certainly complain if they choose. That's their right. I don't even disagree that there are legitimate discussions to be had when it comes to issues such as affirmative action or Title IX.

In any event, I can also push back and give my perspective. I think the cries of victimhood and persecution from many White men and Christians are hypocritical and completely ignore historical reality, the effects of that history, and even current biases in our power structures. I also think it's dismissive and insensitive at best to characterize efforts to address centuries of systemic oppression and exclusion with a word like "whining," which has a clear negative connotation in this context by insinuating the complaints of marginalized groups are invalid - and/or suggesting that there's some sort of moral equivalence with oppressing people versus trying to ameliorate and mitigate the results of that very oppression.

Personally, I also find it tiring but somewhat funny for the right to be lecturing the left for being intolerant and overly sensitive when they cheered the former president calling athletes petty names and saying they should be fired for taking a knee. Not because it was unfair government treatment against anyone but because they were offended by the message. Trump also sued Bill Maher for making a joke about him that was obvious parody. Instead of seeing that lawsuit as snowflaky behavior, Trump is somehow viewed by many on the right as a fighter and an anti PC champion. He has skin as thin as anyone in politics today. And don't get me started about how social conservatives have mocked children for years about not being tough enough and needing to understand the real world but think their kid is going to be traumatized if they learn that gay people exist.

Both sides have their extremes, but I think the left is at least somewhat self aware. It's having internal debates about how woke is too woke and how to balance redressing past wrongs with efforts to continue to move toward MLK's dream. That is literally something Obama has talked about and even cautioned the left about. Many conservatives, on the other hand, were ready to immediately stop talking about race as soon as the Civil Rights Act was passed. Time to move on and better if we don't talk about it.

I think many on the right seem to view themselves as not playing the victim game, view themselves as too tough and too serious to be snowflakes, and many seem completely unaware of their own tendency to blame others for their problems or short-comings. They may rant about gay marriage but are relatively silent about no-fault divorce laws and the divorce rates in their own families and communities. So blame gay people. If their kid is a drug addict, they may blame immigrants. The list goes on. I'm bias, of course, but many conservatives seem completely oblivious to the fact that they're even on the field in this "game." And it's even more troubling since I think they have a lot less to be upset about.

 

I mean yes, when institutions with a uniform hard left bias control all of the major social media outlets and search engines, and skew news feeds and search results based on that bias, yeah that’s kind of a problem.

You guys do it too and I think you’d agree with that. But that’s kind of the point, if one side whines, while the other doesn’t and we’re left with hard left institutions controlling the vast majority of dissemination of information and academia, the right shouldn’t be surprised when they’re losing every time.

Democrats like to think they’re so popular with young people because their ideas are just popular with young people. But they get real feisty when threatened to put their money where their mouth is in the form of conservatives removing those built-in advantages.

How many times have I heard on this board, “indoctrination doesn’t work?” Yet all of these same people are arguing tooth and nail about how we can’t have conservatives indoctrinating kids.