Oberlin College Is Decadent and Depraved

Posted on | June 2, 2016 | 29 Comments

In March 2013, Oberlin College students staged a “Day of Solidarity” protest against “hate” at their elite private liberal arts school, where annual tuition is $50,586. The alleged incidents of “hate” that had prompted this protest were eventually exposed as a hoax, perpetrated by campus leftists, which was neither the first nor the last time Oberlin worked itself into a frenzy over a phony “hate” hoax. Oberlin is arguably the worst college in America — worse even than such Ivy League sewers as Yale, Harvard, Brown and Columbia — where foolish parents send their foolish children to be tutored in folly by professional fools.

It is impossible to exaggerate just how awful “elite” education in America has become, and difficult to explain why it is so bad. William F. Buckley Jr.first described the degenerate tendencies of modern elite education in his 1951 classic God and Man at Yale. As I have summarized the book’s core insight, “Buckley saw that Yale, originally founded as a Christian school, had quietly abandoned Christianity and adopted a new religion, liberalism.” The outlines of this problem were clearly apparent to Buckley at Yale while Harry Truman was still president, yet academia did nothing to halt the decay of moral and intellectual standards, so that when university campuses erupted in riots in the 1960s — young radicals terrorizing their liberal elders — conservatives could say, “We told you so.” Liberals can never admit they’re wrong, so the lessons that should have been learned from the ’60s were ignored, and meanwhile the radicals were burrowing into the academic bureaucracy. Beginning in the 1990s, a series of purges swept through higher education. The humanities and social sciences were eviscerated and corrupted by the proponents of “critical theory.” If any student wished to learn anything about history without a Marxist filter, he had to do so by reading old books, as all the recent “scholarship” was devoted to reinterpreting the past through a prism of race/class/gender.

Meanwhile, in the name of “multiculturalism,” the curriculum was restructured, admissions criteria were altered and hiring policies were systematically biased in order to create a statistically acceptable representation of “diversity” on elite campuses. We should note, by the way, that the pursuit of “diversity” in admissions was never difficult at community colleges or second-tier state universities. It was only at the top-tier state schools (e.g., the University of Michigan and the University of California-Berkeley) and at highly selective private schools (e.g., the Ivy League) that admissions quotas became controversial. Many in academia accepted and promoted the idea that all ethnic groups had a “right” to be proportionately represented in the student body (and on the faculty) of universities, so that “underrepresentation” was considered proof of discrimination and social injustice. Equality of opportunity was not enough, equality of outcomes was demanded, and this egalitarian mission required the destruction of moral and intellectual standards in academia. Higher education has become a pervasively dishonest enterprise, a corrupt racket wherein parents, students and taxpayers are systematically swindled in order to provide lucrative employment for administrators and faculty whose income is dependent upon the illusion of “prestige” surrounding such schools as Oberlin College.

How bad is it at Oberlin? Nathan Heller of the New Yorker risked a visit to the lunatic campus and here are a few excerpts from his article:

On February 25th, TheTower.org published an article that included screenshots from the Facebook feed of Joy Karega, an assistant professor of rhetoric and composition at Oberlin. The posts suggested, among other things, that Zionists had been involved in the 9/11 plot, that isis was a puppet of Mossad and the C.I.A., and that the Rothschild family owned “your news, the media, your oil, and your government.” The posts did not sit well with everyone at Oberlin, where, weeks earlier, a group of alumni and students had written the president with worries about anti-Semitism on campus; the board of trustees denounced Karega’s Facebook activities. As a teacher, however, she’d been beloved by many students and considered an important faculty advocate for the school’s black undergraduates. The need for allyship became acute. And so, with spring approaching, students and faculty at one of America’s most progressive colleges felt pressured to make an awkward judgment: whether to ally themselves with the black community or whether to ally themselves with the offended Jews. . . .
g, at Oberlin, I tracked down Cyrus Eosphoros, the student who’d worried about the triggering effects of “Antigone.” . . . Eosphoros is a shy guy with a lambent confidence. He was a candid, stylish writer for the school newspaper and a senator in student government. That day, he wore a distressed bomber jacket and Clubmaster glasses. His hair was done in the manner of Beaver Cleaver’s, with a cool blue streak across the top. Eosphoros is a trans man. He was educated in Mexico, walks with crutches, and suffers from A.D.H.D. and bipolar disorder. (He’d lately been on suicide watch.) He has cut off contact with his mother, and he supports himself with jobs at the library and the development office. He said, “I’m kind of about as much of a diversity checklist as you can get while still technically being a white man.” . . .
If the new campus activism has a central paradigm, it is intersectionality: a theory, originating in black feminism, that sees identity-based oppression operating in crosshatching ways. Encountering sexism as a white, Ivy-educated, middle-class woman in a law office, for example, calls for different solutions than encountering sexism as a black woman working a minimum-wage job. The theory is often used to support experiential authority, because, well, who knows what it means to live at an intersection better than the person there? . . .
In the post-Foucaultian tradition, it’s thought to be impossible to isolate accepted “knowledge” from power structures, and sometimes that principle is turned backward, to link personal discomfort with larger abuses of power. “Students believe that their gender, their ethnicity, their race, whatever, gives them a sort of privileged knowledge — a community-based knowledge — that other groups don’t have,” [music Professor James] O’Leary went on. The trouble comes when their perspectives clash. . . .
Aaron Pressman, a politics and law-and-society major, told me that he has always felt free to express his opinions on campus, but has faced “a lot of social backlash.” One of his ambitions is to become a public defender, and he has studied the free-speech work of the A.C.L.U. Last year, when he noticed a broadly worded clause about flirtatious speech in Oberlin’s new sexual-harassment policy, he advocated for more precise language. (His research told him that such broad prohibitions were often used to target ethnic groups.) “A student came up to me several days later and started screaming at me, saying I’m not allowed to have this opinion, because I’m a white cisgender male,” Pressman recalled. He feels that his white maleness shouldn’t be disqualifying. “I’ve had people respond to me, ‘You could never understand—your culture has never been oppressed.’ ” Pressman laughed. “I’m, like, ‘Really? The Holocaust?’” . . .
“Oberlin does a really good job of analyzing intersectionality in the classroom — even in discussions, people are aware of who’s talking, who’s taking up space,” Kiley Petersen, a junior, told me. “But there’s a disconnect in trying to apply these frames of intersectionality and progressive change to departments and this school as a whole.” Some students have sought their own solutions. Earlier this year, a sophomore, Chloe Vassot, published an essay in the college paper urging white students like her to speak up less in class in certain circumstances. “I understand that I am not just an individual concerned only with comfort but also a part of a society that I believe will benefit from my silence,” she wrote. . . .

You can read the whole depressing thing. What’s most depressing about it is that people actually pay money to attend Oberlin. Heck, $50,586 a year is nearly a thousand bucks a week, and imagine all the fun things you could do with that kind of money. You could develop a heroin addiction, for example. A teenage junkie could spend four years shooting up and, by age 22, would probably be less confused than a typical Oberlin graduate.

Oh, sure, it’s probably a bad thing to be addicted to heroin, but you never hear a junkie babbling about “frames of intersectionality,” do you?

Category: Education

Comments

29 Responses to “Oberlin College Is Decadent and Depraved”

Evi L. Bloggerlady
June 2nd, 2016 @ 4:51 pm

Overpriced too; $49,928 tuition alone.

There are vestiges of Western Civilization. Attend a great books program if you are not going for hard science or engineering. Even if the schools run it through a prism of PC crap, you are still reading the great books. Hillsdale would be my #1 pick.
DeadMessenger
June 2nd, 2016 @ 5:27 pm

The excerpts from the Heller article are breathtaking in both stupidity level AND total irrelevance to life and society as a whole. I can only conclude that these kids weren’t spanked enough as children, nor taught that they were, in fact children (and still are), and not the parent.

But I did have to give perceptive snaps to the girl who felt that society would “benefit from her silence”, though, in reality, she was only virtue signaling and doesn’t plan to shut up any time soon.
mole
June 2nd, 2016 @ 5:51 pm

The rot started when they allowed the various grievance “studies” areas to take root.
Race and gender studies were just covers for “wreck the joit” pimps to thrive.

Oh, that and granting people like Ex-Weathermen tenure rather than hanging them from lamp-posts.
RS
June 2nd, 2016 @ 6:23 pm

Recall that Oberlin was the place where the student body became vexed over “cultural appropriation” in the dining hall, including Vietnamese students repairing to their fainting couches over the fact that the Bánh Mi were made with “inauthentic” Ciabatta rolls instead of . . . wait for it . . .authentic French baguettes.
Steve Skubinna
June 2nd, 2016 @ 7:17 pm

Why is it needful to manufacture false evidence of this oppression? Why make up rape hoaxes and bogus hate crimes in the midst of this vile repressive white male dominated society where they are supposedly so prevalent?

The same question can go to AGW fraudsters as well. And to gun control panic mongers, who keep promising blood in the streets and shootouts over parking spaces, and never delivering. Or for that matter, to Rather and Mapes who pursued the Bush TANG story for three years and came up with nothing better than some laughably inept forged memos.

What kind of personality is so vested in a narrative that in the absence of actual evidence says “No problemo, we just make some up and hey! Smoking gun, man!” Where is that small still voice in the back of the head that says “You’re really screwing this up. Maybe you better rethink your basic premise?” Nah, hang that noose on your doorknob and when caught, say you were just trying to start a dialog.
Dana
June 2nd, 2016 @ 7:32 pm

When I matriculated at the University of Kentucky, in the fall of 1971, the admissions criteria were simple: anyone who was graduated from an accredited high school in the Bluegrass State, and who took the ACT, would be accepted. UK even made it easy: if you selected UK as your first choice on the ACT, it was considered an automatic application!

Yet, alas! it was continually lamented that the percentage of the student body which was black was somewhat less than 3%. The top college in the state, which admitted everybody from the state who applied, still didn’t have enough Negroes.
Fail Burton
June 2nd, 2016 @ 7:50 pm

For 50 grand you could backpack around the world for 4 years and learn one hell of a lot more than those sheltered mental cases.
DeadMessenger
June 2nd, 2016 @ 7:57 pm

What, did they think they were attending Sidwell Friends school or something? When I was in college, students ate a lot of Kraft Dinner and raman noodles. French baguettes, shyeah.
DeadMessenger
June 2nd, 2016 @ 8:00 pm

This is true, but since the entire world has apparently been irretrievably Fed Ex’ed to hell on a handcart, whattya gonna do?
Stephen Michael Kellat
June 2nd, 2016 @ 8:37 pm

Oberlin’s tuition is that high now? That’s more than I make in a year.
M. Thompson
June 2nd, 2016 @ 8:46 pm

Drink heavily, and smile about it all.
kilo6
June 2nd, 2016 @ 8:55 pm

Ich bin ein Oberliner
-President Barack H. 0bama, Oberlin College commencement address
Mullaney
June 2nd, 2016 @ 11:23 pm

You know, it’s funny. The more I knowledge I gain in my field, the more I realize how much I don’t know. Yet, these people leave school believing that they know everything about everything. It’s the exact opposite of the way it should be. These schools no longer teach anything, but simply instill a sense of intellectual superiority in people who know absolutely nothing about anything.

A university education should open you up to worlds of knowledge that you never knew existed. Instead, it seals you into a bubble where you think you know everything, but know very little. Then you become a politician. Or work at Starbucks.
robertstacymccain
June 3rd, 2016 @ 3:56 am

“Yet, these people leave school believing that they know everything about everything. “

Actually, they arrive on campus as freshmen believing they know everything, and expect their professors to reward them for it.
Fail Burton
June 3rd, 2016 @ 4:55 am

They have the certainty all fanatics have. That’s why free speech, debate, due process and equal protection mean nothing to them. Of course that will change when they’re on the wrong side of it, as the ACLU will be quick to cherry-pick.
Dana
June 3rd, 2016 @ 5:06 am

Five stars for the second paragraph.

Apparently, at Yale, English majors are Students Wildly Indignant about Nearly Everything, now upset that so much of English literature was written by Englishmen.
Beowolf
June 3rd, 2016 @ 6:28 am

So take the $1000/week, work up a good heroin habit for a year or so, go into rehab thru ObamaCare, then apply to an Ivy requesting a full scholarship based upon:

the intersectionality of your victimhood as a recovering addict who fell victim to opiods as a result of gender identity confusion and The Man’s cisgender, hetronormative shaming of your open, honest struggle to understand and learn to love oneself as a caring, other-abled person.

Full boat scholarship……with room and board included…guaranteed
VoodooEconomics
June 3rd, 2016 @ 6:44 am

I always felt college was a way to get a good job and career.

So you had a choice: shoot up heroine or major in “Underwater basketweaving by intersectionalist feminists” at Oberlin. You dont like needles so you pay the money to Oberlin. You protest a few times, lie a few times, participate in 2 minute hate. You participate in a film “What is it like to be raped” as your Senior Project. You finally get your degree. YES! Now what? You are now out in the real world. What do you do now?
VoodooEconomics
June 3rd, 2016 @ 6:45 am

And thats just in one year. You could probably backpack for most of those 4 years on that.
Quartermaster
June 3rd, 2016 @ 6:51 am

Scam the welfare system. That’s what Oberlin prepares you for these days.
I’m sure Asa Mahan and Charles Finney are spinning supersonically over what Oberlin has become. I know two of their grads, and neither is happy over what Oberlin has become.
itsatax
June 3rd, 2016 @ 7:01 am

“Eosphoros is a trans man. He was educated in Mexico, walks with
crutches, and suffers from A.D.H.D. and bipolar disorder. (He’d lately
been on suicide watch.) He has cut off contact with his mother” Sad!
More on how dumb Oberlin is
June 3rd, 2016 @ 7:49 am

[…] The last 2 paragraphs are killer. […]
SDN
June 3rd, 2016 @ 8:32 am

Sounds about right, except jelly doughnuts (berliner) have more intelligence.
m a
June 3rd, 2016 @ 9:50 am

I regret that I can’t properly attribute this quote I got off twitter:

“I used to fear that some day a young sharp college graduate would eventually push me out of a job. No so much now.
#thechalkening.”
m a
June 3rd, 2016 @ 9:51 am

…or work as a diversity officer at a major corporation currently being threatened by the government over suspected lack of diversity…
m a
June 3rd, 2016 @ 9:53 am

Heck, coming out of high school they think they know everything already. At least, the kid addressing her fellow students at my son’s high school graduation yesterday seemed to think so. God bless my son, he’s majoring in the hard sciences.
Hotspur1
June 3rd, 2016 @ 12:57 pm

I realized that college was supposed to teach me how to think critically and give me the skills to function on my own and to learn new things. These current crop of kids make me wonder if that even still exists. Well… if they think college is a tough, wait until they hit real life. Real life is a hard instructor.
Ralph Martin
June 3rd, 2016 @ 1:02 pm

I left my University education with an inquiring mind, a healthy respect for the unknown, and outright contempt for generalizing idiots.
The Osprey
June 4th, 2016 @ 3:36 am

…and no where near as fun as the Kentucky Derby.