The Myth of Multiculturalism?

Forget whether or not “diversity” is a positive or a negative; in today’s highly balkanized U.S. society, is such a concept even remotely plausible anymore?

“Multicultural education demands a school staff that is culturally competent, and to the greatest extent possible racially, culturally, and linguistically diverse. Staff must be multiculturally literate and capable of including and embracing families and communities to create an environment that is supportive of multiple perspectives, experiences, and democracy. Multicultural education requires comprehensive school reform as multicultural education must pervade all aspects of the school community and organization.” 

-- The National Association of Multicultural Education

“To every action, there is always an equal and opposite reaction.”

 -- Newton’s Third Law of Motion

In 2007, Robert Putnam, he of “Bowling Alone” fame, released a report titled “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century.” Within said study, he made the following cheery proclamation: “Increased immigration and diversity are not only inevitable, but over the long run they are also desirable. Ethnic diversity is, on balance, an important social asset, as the history of my own country demonstrates.”

However, in the very next paragraph, Putnam completely obliterates his own thesis: “In the short to medium run, however, immigration and ethnic diversity challenge social solidarity and inhibit social capital.”

The findings from “E Pluribus Unum” are distressing, although in realist terms, not surprising in the slightest. Per Putnam, ethnically diverse communities in the U.S. tend to have less altruism, lower levels of community interaction and greater mistrust -- even among neighbors who do happen to be of the same race, ethnicity or national origin. Although the author says new forms of “cross-cutting,“ all-inclusive social identity can ultimately surmount this temporary[?] community distrust, Putnam -- as do many of the most ardent proponents of “multiculturalism” -- remains suspiciously non-descriptive when it comes to what these one-size-fits-all social identities resemble, let alone the sort of cultural mechanism necessary to ascribe these new “definitions of self.”

The vague doctrine of “multiculturalism,” which is sometimes used interchangeably with the term “diversity,” has become one of those unquestioned de facto crusades of contemporary American existence -- this intangible quest for colorblind equality and justice that, for reasons that I have yet to hear adequately explained, serve as a social necessity.

On paper, of course “multiculturalism” sounds great: everybody accepts everybody for who they are, regardless of their ethnicities, races and cultural histories. A terrific policy, through and through, except for one thing: as a social construct, “multiculturalism” is an impossible ideal to implement, yet alone institutionalize.

The fundamental problem here -- and this is something that, for whatever reason, I never hear anybody discuss -- is this bizarre hypocritical message within the “diversity” ideology. You see, the proponents of multiculturalism say that we best ought to downplay our racial and ethnic differences as part of holistic society, but at the same time, the philosophy demands individuals to respect the distinct cultural differences of others. In essence, we are being told that racial, ethnic and national identities don’t really matter, but at the same time, they should be celebrated as individual qualities. Multiculturalism, in a way, is something of a variation on the old “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” military policy: you can be as culturally distinct as you want at home, but out and about in society, you have to curtail your own ethno-racial identity.

Universities and colleges are easily among the worst offenders here. Not only do professors yammer on and on about the moral righteousness of multiculturalism, many schools actually implement policies based upon the absurdly abstract ideals of diversity -- and depending on who you ask, there are many that allege those multicultural protocols of, ironically, being racist themselves.

Of course, that’s not even addressing the obvious cognitive dissonance going on here: although the institutions praise the gospels of “diversity” -- that is, the amorphousness of the student body -- those same institutions are also home to an endless variety of student organizations that are wholly anchored around the cultural and ethnic differences among the student body. In class, kids are told race and nationality don’t matter, and as soon as the bell sounds, all of the Korean students flock to the Korean Student Association table and the African-American students rendezvous with their chums in the Distinguished Black Gentlemen Club. That multicultural education (or “indoctrination,” if you’re to the right of the political aisle) appears to have failed in its ambitions of creating a student melting pot -- go to any college campus in the U.S., and you’re more likely to encounter a social scene that resembles an egg carton: Hispanic students in one pocket, Caribbean students in the next, and the Jewish students in another.

Really, the problem with “multiculturalism” as a practice is that it offers us something that pretty much all of us consider worse than what we have at the current. For “multiculturalism” to become a 100 percent successful ideological practice, that means complete and utter uniformity AND the elimination of history. Indeed, the only way to get people of all races, nationalities and ethnicities to meld into a singularity is to eradicate thousands of years of rich distinct cultural legacies in favor of some newfangled “shared identity” -- as consumers, or pop-culture aficionados, or tech-heads, or freedom fighters for the hard-to-describe-and-even-harder-to-implement concept of “equality.” Yes, these may indeed be important qualifiers to some, but I hardly think anyone would gladly abandon their sense of self derived from one’s religion or family heritage in favor of a blander identity centered around their mass media proclivities or disposable income expenditures.

The ironically antagonistic multicultural message, as such, has backfired in many ways; instead of fostering a pan-racial social system, it’s actually cemented core ethnic and racial distinctions even further in the United States. As Newton explained above, the scientifically inevitable has transpired: you force kids to worship at the altar of “inclusiveness,” and you wind up with a sizable subset of young folks with an incredible disdain for the entire “multicultural” ideal.

The problem with “diversity,” it appears, is that it’s an uneven attempt to institutionalize a characteristic -- that is, tolerance of intercultural differences (which, I might add, is not the same thing as “understanding,” and most certainly not the same thing as “acceptance.”) The general vagueness of the doctrine is reason alone for most individuals to dismiss it as flighty idealism, but it’s death knell is ultimately the fact that people -- of virtually all walks of life -- DON’T want to form a new “social identity,” and they most certainly don’t want to form said identity at the cost of their own distinct personal heritages.

Is it really that weird or offensive if people of similar backgrounds prefer to hang out with each other? A shared language, or a common history, or even a certain geographical familiarity is sometimes all that’s needed to form a bond with another individual, and is it really that much of a problem if people tend to associate with those that share said commonalities as opposed to those who don’t? If we’re going by the social scientific, “race as construct” ideology, it’s actually a unified, shared cultural narrative that makes up one’s ethnicity, anyway: as such, people really don’t flock with people of the same skin hue as they do people with the same social prologues that they have.

The rub with all of this “multiculturalism” hubbub is that it insinuates that race and ethnicity don’t matter, when, as apparent by the general public’s rejection of “diversity” as a social imperative, race and ethnicity does matter. Nor does multiculturalism shine a light on perhaps the true driver of social relationships in the United States, which is socioeconomic class -- a construct that is far more revealing (and institutionally enforced) in determining one’s social interactions than skin color or native tongue anyway.

At the end of the day, the unstated grievance most people seem to have with the multicultural ideal is that they view it as an imposition on who they are. Instead of reinforcing their sense of selves, the “diversity” measures (which are generally championed by those who live and work in among the most homogenous environments) appear to be goading them into a mushy, uniform identity that pays no homage to things like “history” or “tradition” or “customs.” In short, “multiculturalism” is, in their eyes, an attempt to decimate their actual identities in favor of a blander, less distinct self-conceptualization.

And in a nation of so many dedicated “individualists,” why in the world would anybody want to celebrate an ideology of depersonalization, anyway?

Read More

The Marginalization of the Heterosexual, White Anglo-Saxon Protestant Male?

Are the relatively recent cries of oppression just a bunch of bellyaching, or is there actually a granule of truth to the majority’s accusations of persecution?

The future, it appears, doesn’t look to good for Caucasian males.

According to United States Census Bureau projections, the total percentage of white people in the U.S. in 2060 will be just 43 percent -- making white people a plural “minority” for the first time in the country since white folks killed off all the Indians way back when.

According to researchers at the University of Pittsburgh, the birth rates for males in the U.S. have dropped considerably over the last 40 years, with 104.6 male births being born for every 100 girls born in the U.S. in 2001. However, in 1970, the ratio was 105.5-to-100, and among white births? The ratio dropped from 105.9-to-104.7 over the same time frame.

Those 2060 Census projections tell us that the male to female birth ratio will remain locked at 104.7-to-100 for the next 45 or so years, but at the same time, the contemporary ratio of males to females in the U.S., ages 18-to-65 right now is just 98.9 men for every 100 women. And looking at retirement-age statistics, things get even worse: regarding the nation’s current 65-and-older population, there’s just 77 men for every 100 women in the U.S.

From 2010 to 2100, the United Nation’s Department of Economic and Social Affairs predicts that the male-to-female gap will close just marginally, with the ratio predicted to increase from 97-to-100 in 2010 to about 99-to-100 by the dawn of the 22nd century. The wildcard here is the average life expectancy, which from 2010 to 2100, is supposed to jump from 81.3 to 90.8 for females, while expectancies for males are projected to increase from 76.2 to just 85.7. Coupled with a seemingly slight increase in the net production rate (the number of females born per woman is predicted to increase from 1.00 to 1.02), and you have yourselves a fairly unavoidable predicament: whatever shape America’s future takes, it’s one that’s pretty much guaranteed to have less males in it.

On the global level, UN predictions have the United States population swelling to about 400 million or so in 2100. Besides Russia and France, it’s the only country with a sizable Caucasian population to make the list of most populous countries by the time the 22nd century kicks off -- while mass population increases are predicted throughout Africa, Southeast Asia and the Middle East, overall population totals in Europe and the Americas are expected to bottom out, and hard.

No doubt reading the proverbial scrawling on the wall, some of the more extreme-minded white folks out there have begun to pitch fits about this all-but-inevitable demographical switch-up, resulting in the explosion of both men’s rights (or “anti-misandry”) organizations and pseudo white nationalists groups over the course of what seems to be just a few years…heck, maybe even the last few months, for that matter.

On one side of the fence (and on opposite sides of the Atlantic), an expected reaction to the biological decline of whites has been nativist movements in the U.S. (where groups like VDARE declare that Hispanic immigrants and African-Americans of supposed lesser intelligence are destined to burn U.S. culture to the ground) and continental alliances like “Stop the Islamification of Europe”, who are convinced that Caucasian genes are soon to be extinct due to dwindling European birthrates in conjunction with mass Muslim immigration. To be fair, organizations of the like have been fairly visible for quite some time, but it hasn’t been until fairly recently that said organizations have taken up this deathly serious, pseudo-genetic jihad against absolutely unstoppable statistical realities.

Of course, it’s quite difficult to talk about white males without also talking about two of the utmost “qualifiers” for Anglo-Saxon-hood -- those being heterosexuality and Protestantism. Needless to say, quite a number of miffed, hyper-heterosexual, hyper non-Catholic honks have taken to the Internets in protest, accusing the proliferation of the “homosexual” and “atheist” agendas as global endeavors to eradicate “whiteness” from the face of the Earth.

With that in mind, it’s a little hard to see where all of this “persecution” is supposedly taking place: currently, homosexuals across the “gay spectrum” -- meaning, ostensibly, everyone from “barsexual” college girls that occasionally French kiss one another to post-op transsexual Ultimate fighters -- make up less than 4 percent of the national populace. By comparison, an estimated 30 percent of Americans -- including a whopping 42 percent of U.S. males  -- have suffered from alcoholism at some point in their lives, while about 3.5 percent of the U.S. population, a sum tantamount to the nation’s estimated LGBTQI populace, are purported to suffered from some form of PTSD. Despite representing a good 96 percent of the entire national population, however, this hasn’t prevented a great number of extinction-threatened white men from claiming to be victims of some nefarious plan to “homosexualize” American culture.

Even Protestants (*) -- in 2008, representing a plurality of the total American populace -- claim to be objects of persecution in this, the waning days of supposed white male superiority. This, despite projections from the Pew Research Center that assert that the number of Christians in the US is expected to INCREASE from about 250 million right now to an assumed 329 million in 2050 (and making things really interesting? The same forecast predicts China -- yes, that China -- to have the world’s second highest per capita Christian population by the midpoint of the 21st century.)

(*) Why Protestants instead of just Christians, in general? Primarily because larger throngs of non-Caucasians are Catholic rather than Protestant - indeed, outside of every predominantly Anglo-Saxon country on Earth (which is most of them), it’s pretty much a guarantee that if someone’s Christian, they’re going to be one of the Catholic denomination (or some other nationalist orthodoxy which doesn't really resemble Protestantism at all.)

In the face of such a perceived decline in global power (let us not forget that most of the world’s most powerful conglomerates are still owned by white men, and perhaps the white man’s “greatest” cultural imposition -- the English language -- remains the international lingua franca of business and politics) it’s not surprising that so many frightened white folks take refuge in these extremist ideologies. Indeed, this perceived “diminishment” of Caucasian influence has led some -- including Anders Breivik -- to retaliate with extremely deadly force. Alas, while many culturally threatened white men turn to pseudo (and sometimes, just straight-up) racist causes and organizations to quell the pain of their own envisioned downfall, others have instead been drawn to what can only be called a horrifically misguided rejoinder to feminism.

The Men’s Rights Movement isn’t necessarily a new thing -- according to the world’s most reliable source of information, it’s been a fairly sizable cause since at least the 1970s -- but it hasn’t been until recently, as in, the last five or so years, that the cultural spotlight has been focused on the matter.

Now, we're not saying that Jimmy Buffet should contact his lawyers are anything, but...

With organizational monikers like “A Voice For Men,” “The Men’s Rights Association” and “The National Center for Men,” thousands of wannabe Al Bundys have congregated together, establishing what is, in essence, their own chapters of the National Organization of Men Against Amazonian Masterhood. And unlike the protagonists of “Married…with Children,” the supporters of such organizations treat their cause as a serious political matter, tackling hard-hitting issues like domestic abuse laws and paternal guardian rights with the sort of gruff self-righteousness that would surely make Gloria Steinham envious. Well, probably more furious than envious, but whatever.

The MensRights subreddit  -- populated, as of May 2013, with almost 70,000 subscribed readers -- teems with vein-popping declarations of reverse gender discrimination.

“Female Teachers Give Male Pupils Lower Marks, Claims Study” reads one post.

“Norway’s first female admiral was hired illegally,” reads another.

“Lauryn Hill gets 3 months for failing to file taxes. Wesley Snipes got 3 years,” reads yet another.

On a “fact sheet” posted on the same forum, a number of examples of “male discrimination” are listed. Among other tidbits, the frequenters of the site note the following as “proof” that gender inequality is a reality, only tilted against those with penises:

- Circumcising male babies “against their will” is illegal, while female circumcision remains illegal. (Note how the language makes no clear distinction between the forced genital mutilation of women and the common medical practice of removing a day old infant’s foreskin.)

- Female-owned businesses receive free money from the government, simply because they are owned by females (as verified by a Reason Magazine op-ed, far and away the least biased news source in the history of humanity.)

- The majority of homeless are men. (No doubt due to some mysterious, international cabal of men-haters, and having nothing at all to do with the poor, individual decision-making of said homeless individuals.)

Of course, these organizations say nary a damn thing about the pay wage gap, which in case you haven’t heard, favors men by a ludicrous margin. Nor do these organizations bring up the fact that a majority of Fortune 500 companies are owned by males (almost exclusively of the Caucasoid variety, I might add), and that while women represent a clear majority in the total U.S. population, females only account for about 38 percent of the 113th Congress.

Now, do these men’s rights advocates have some basis in their accusation of legal and educational practice discrepancies among the sexes? Well, seeing as how 59 percent of graduate students in America are female, and that mothers receive primary custody anywhere from 66 percent to 88 percent of the time in U.S. divorce hearings, I think it’s stupid to say that they’re not onto something. That said, if there is such a pervasive bias against men in American culture in general, than how come men, despite being a statistical minority, still maintain almost utter control of the nation’s economic and political institutions?

...and I will give you one guess as to which major cable news website this little exchange comes from...

In that, you start seeing the fundamental absurdity of the “discriminated man” theory. Granted, there may be some institutional peculiarities at play, but by and large, social power is still vested, almost exclusively, in the hands of males in the United States. The same can very much be said of Christians, white people and heterosexuals -- together, a quartet of allegedly persecuted majorities that claim to be marginalized by those that are actually marginalized as peoples.

Even in the midst of all those afore-mentioned demographical changes that are almost certain to occur over the next 100 years or so in the States, the status quo doesn’t seem like it will be getting any less status or quo than it is right now. Unless the combined minorities of America form some sort of militantly anti-whitey voting bloc between now and 2050, it seems very unlikely that Caucasian Americans will lose any of their grip on national economic and political power over the 21st century. While there may be less men than women, and more non-whites than there used to, it’s not really a sure bet that this demographical change will effectively result in more women in “minority” populations obtaining political or cultural power. In fact, through the global expansion of Christianity and English, it’s quite likely that Anglo-Saxon Protestants could actually increase their worldwide, geopolitical clout over the next decade: whatever perceived cultural power the supposedly oppressed white man may lose in a hypothetical “Eurabia” or “Aztlan,” the WASP would almost certainly make up for with a heightened cultural presence in Asia and, irony of ironies, central-Africa.

Realistically, outside of a few, comparatively minor legal policies and institutional practices (which in no way, shape or form seem to have any profound influence on the gender dynamics of social power in the U.S.), there can hardly be considered a systemic oppression of males in America, at all. Rather, most of the cries of “male persecution” are nothing more than the piping of radicalized losers, who attempt to mask their own social ineptitude under ridiculous, synthetic causes such as “involuntary celibacy” or “reverse racism.”

There’s something to be said of a peoples that can be a geographical, economic and social majority -- with utmost control of a nation’s cultural institutions, to boot -- and still claim to be a marginalized population.

And whatever that “something to be said” is? I assure you…it’s probably not worth wasting your time to hear.

Read More

Five Things Your College REALLY Doesn't Want You To Ask About

The five questions GUARANTEED to make your university officials nervous...

Sometimes when I walk to class, I can’t help but notice those long-assed lines of new students, all corralled into the queues as they anticipate their chance to get into the university. Periodically, I’ll see a bunch of orientation leaders giving guided tours to prospective students - easily identifiable, since they all drag around these huge, neon yellow shopping bags form the campus book store - and I’ll feel sort of like the main character in “All Quiet on the Western Front,“ when he returns to his high school to lecture the next generation of cannon fodder on the merits of their own upcoming demises.

You don’t know how difficult it is for me to restrain myself. Every time I see one of those campus tours, I just want to run up to them and yell “Lies! Lies!” at the top of my lungs until I’m dragged off screaming into the night. There’s so much I know now that I didn’t know way back when, and since I received the greatest gift of all - hindsight - for Christmas, there’s a few questions I would have liked to retroactively asked my tour leaders when I was being oriented that I’ve decided to pass on to you, the next generation of American collegiates.

Alike some silver-tongued military recruiter, you’re probably going to get promised the moon, the sun and the stars in a gift basket by your campus tour guide. That said, there are five questions you can pose at any minute that would bring the tour to a complete and sudden halt, and quite possibly make the tour guide piss his or her pants in abject horror. These are the questions that I, your senior superior, has tormented himself over, the riddles that have never been solved by my college brass, or the upper echelon of any other university in the U.S., for that matter. Want to make your college administrators very, very uneasy? Want to see an orientation leader almost swallow his or her own tongue in utter nonplus? Want to turn your professor into a quivering puddle of unflavored gelatin, with only one sentence? Well, these are the verboten five questions that are absolutely, one hundred percent validated by science to cause academic pandemonium whenever they’re asked.

I would advise you to ask these questions in moderation, using them sparingly for those moments where you really need some time to back yourself out of whatever corner you’ve found yourself stuck in. Or, for maximum anarchy, try asking every single one of them on the first day of your introductory courses, and await that wondrous moment where you can literally see your professor experience a mental breakdown.

An inquisitive mind is a dangerous thing. And with these questions in your arsenal, you’re no doubt going to be one of the baddest kids on campus, amigo.

Question Number One:

“Why are there so many MORE female students on campus than males?"

In American academia, the numbers are noticeably skewed in favor of female students. In just about EVERY major, co-ed university in America, female students outnumber male students by at least ten percent, with some colleges registering female to male ratios of 70:30, 80:20 and even 90:10. The proportions are even higher in grad school, where currently, a good 60 percent of ALL Master degrees and PhDs are being earned by women.

Asking this question makes administrators really, really nervous, for a number of reasons. For starters, it gets them to fess about the whole “inequality gap” thing, which, in case you haven’t realized, is sort of a bullshit claim. For all of the ballyhoo about the oppression of females in U.S. society, they’re certainly getting a leg-up as far as educational obtainment goes, while enrollment numbers for male students continues to drop across the board. This question is really something of a Pandora’s Box, as it ultimately leads to an even thornier matter: how come more females are getting into U.S. colleges than males, anyway?

The reality…which, I assure you, you probably won’t be hearing in any college lecture…is because the education system in the U.S. makes it easier for females to get into colleges than males. More females are enrolled in advanced placement classes in U.S. high schools, and more females are accepted into “gifted programs” than their male classmates. Generally, female students are offered more scholarships and grant proposals than male students (try Googling "scholarships for women" and "scholarships for men" and see what results you get), and since more females are likely to receive majority funding from their parents than male students, guess who the colleges prefer talking to? 

And whatever you do, DON’T even think about bringing up the fact that, even though more females get into college than males, males still score higher on the SAT. Or that there's a bizarre inverted correlation where female students somehow score higher grade point averages DESPITE having lower standardized test scores than their male counterparts. Or that males outrank their female classmates considerably in math and science. Nor should you EVER bring up the fact that males generally have to support themselves through college more than females, or have far less access to scholarships and grant considerations, or often get bumped out of classes and programs to fulfill quotas that, supposedly, “balance” the class populations. That’s because in college, “gender discrimination” is still treated as a one way street, even though the numbers, quite obviously, speak to the contrary. And if you thought the “War of the Sexes” was too taboo a topic, just wait until we get to the next forbidden-in-higher-education inquiry...

Question Number Two:

“What’s the REASON for all of this multiculturalism stuff?”

A lot of colleges have implemented “global learner” policies over the last decade, as a direct result of globalization trends. According to colleges - and this is the part of the question they’re actually right about - the work world of tomorrow is going to consist of a multitude of nationalities, utilizing technologies to create a worldwide economy, where you really can’t afford to be unlearned and prejudiced against others. That response, of course, is anything but debatable. The part where things take that hard left turn is when you ask WHY the colleges have such a hard-on for “multiculturalism,” going as far as to implement diversity policies that, in extreme cases, keep people locked out of enrollment based on their race and ethnicity.

“Multiculturalism,” as a concept, is an inherently prejudiced one. The movement suggests that American youth - us honkies and black folk, ostensibly - are so culturally insulated that we don’t know the first thing about Latin America, or Asia, or the Indian Subcontinent, where a good three/fourth of the world lives. Most multiculturalism programs are based on the premise that “Americanized” youth are inherently ignorant of international cultures, and because we will be working for a Chinese, Indian or Qatari multinational in the not-too distant future, we have to read borderline insulting “diversity” agitprop to remind us to not be all hate-filled and semi-racist about things.

The thing is, my college campus looks pretty damn internationalized, and I don’t think there’s EVER been a cultural clash of any variety - unless, of course, you count when those “God Hates [Insert Plural Noun Here]” pastors periodically show up - at the university. The big punch line here is that, despite indoctrinating us with a pro-multiculturalism message as soon as we arrive at the university (at my school, an introductory course on diversity is even required for freshmen), the students remain pretty damn homogeneous with their acquaintances, often through racially and ethnically un-diversified student organizations that, wouldn’t you know, have the full blessing of the school in question.

Most U.S. colleges have diversity quotas on campus, which guarantee that members of “underrepresented” minorities make up at least a certain percentage of the complete student population within a certain program. Seeing as how a fajillion pissed off Republicans have already covered that territory, perhaps we can look at the other, other side of “multiculturalism” - you know, the side where colleges tend to recruit and display favoritism toward minority students as a means of fulfilling grant requirements for the college itself.

What sectors of academia net the most research money? Why, science and technology of course, and wouldn’t you know it, both of those sectors in academia seem to be made up of a disproportionate number of non-Caucasian and non-U.S. born students. With students of the like, universities are really scoring twice, as most of the time, they’re not having to split the bill for the students’ tuition (thank you, minority scholarship funding!) while still being able to soak up research assistance aide moolah like a loofa.

In other words? “Multiculturalism” has more to do with the university turning a profit than it does promoting international harmony. Just let me know if you see your college promoting that mantra on its webpage, though…

Question Number Three:

“How exactly can I KNOW that my professors are qualified to teach here?”

This one seems like it would be a fairly easy question to answer. Surely, the university has to have some internal series of checks and balances, and some multi-layered, multi-nuanced blueprint for deciding what makes someone worthy of a faculty position, right?

Well...you see, American colleges have a problem. Despite having higher enrollment numbers, they’re not exactly getting higher numbers of long-term professors onboard in proportion to the increase in students. As a result, you’re seeing more and more non-professional educators in academia - which, not surprisingly, results in a few problems for the university in general.

In my four years at university, I’ve had classes taught to me by commercial producers, prescription drug representatives, a dude whose day job was at Coca-Cola and one guy that even claimed to be a “professional protestor.” Granted, none of these professors were really horrible instructors, but for the amount of money we’re paying in tuition costs, are we really getting our money’s worth out of a steady diet of part-time, adjunct professors? Furthermore, the selection process - and more importantly, the criteria for a hiring - remains undisclosed to the public. Even if there was a concrete guideline that deemed a candidate fit for instruction, there’s no way for us to know whether he or she is upholding or besmirching his or her duties, since there’s no transparency at all here.

Yes, if you check your college’s website, you’ll probably find a page with your professors’ educational background on it. But, is that really enough to determine whether or not someone is capable and/or deserving of a role as educator?

The all-time greatest example of this EVER occurred at my university about a year ago. Right before finals, an economics professor decided to express his gratitude to the class by yanking his dong out in front of God and everybody. This was AFTER he had already stripped down to a thong in a prior class, and AFTER reports that he broke down into uncontrollable sobbing in SEVERAL classes before that. There was literally NOTHING posted on the university website about his professional background, other than his educational accolades. Clearly, he didn’t need to be teaching in the first place, but the more troubling thought is how in the blue hell did he get hired by the school to begin with?

Once again, there’s no transparency, and no established model there for students to see why the administration considers the professors worthy of their positions. That’s because not only do the students not know who’s worthy of teaching, it doesn’t look like the college officials know, either.

Question Number Four:
“Where does all of that money from student fees ACTUALLY  go?”

At most U.S. colleges, you’ll probably end up paying more in student fee costs than tuition itself. In some colleges, student fee costs are actually double, triple, or even QUADRUPLE the price of tuition. Now, on your student assessment bill, you’ll see a laundry list of how much of your check goes toward funding certain causes - for example, “land acquisition,” “technology” or “recreational” fees. As such, you know how much of your money is going towards certain developmental efforts for your school, but what you don’t - or ever will know - is what exactly your student fee money will be going towards.

Regarding most American universities, the system works a little like this: every semester, an auditor draws up a blueprint that designates how much money each student needs to pay in order to support certain programs or projects on campus. Another auditor decides what project or programs deserve to get X amount of funding dollars from that original estimate. When you pay your bill each semester, the money you put into the system is supposed to be filtered throughout the school exactly as the bill represents - meaning if you were charged X amount of dollars and X amount of cents for a service, then exactly X dollars and X cents will be taken out of your check and zipped on over to whoever is in charge of handling el dinero for that project or program.

The key word in all of that is supposed to, because - as with the hiring process at most universities - there’s no way in hell to tell if your money is actually being shipped around as the school tells you. Very, very few colleges (and that probably means yours, too) have money trails that are transparent to students, which means not only do you have ZERO way to tell if your student fee money is going towards what it’s supposed to be funding, you have absolutely ZERO idea if that money is going towards the school at all.

You may think that your money is going directly to the college, but since universities have so many contractors and vendors, there’s a pretty high (read: practically guaranteed) likelihood that your money is being used to pay off tertiary liaisons, with your moolah not even entering an account at your university at all. Not that this lends itself to embezzlement or anything of that nature, of course.

So, how can the school assure you that your money is going where it’s supposed to, thus proving once and for all that it isn’t guilty of grand larceny? Well, it can’t, and since students are too busy worrying about finals and our feeling up co-eds at mixers, nobody ever really notices it, either.

NOTE: This is a really good one to drop in a particularly boring law or economics course, BTW.

Question Number Five:

“Will a degree from here REALLY get me a job someday?”

Let’s be honest with ourselves: in today’s super-glutted market, having a bachelor’s degree really isn’t enough to ensure occupational success for anybody. Granted, that may have been the case 40 years ago, but they didn’t even have Playstations back then, so who gives?

No matter the prestige or quality of your college (and if you’re reading this, you’re probably attending a really, really crappy one), a mere degree isn’t going to determine whether or not a company will hire you. In fact, educational obtainment is probably a distant fourth behind experience (you know, that thing none of us have because we’ve been stuck in college for four years), ability (which means that extracurricular activities are probably more important to your post-college success than your GPA) and work ethic, which is where actually giving a shit about what you’ve done comes into play. The comedy here, of course, is that even though employers view a bachelor’s degree as the least important of those attributes, guess what? You still have to have a bachelor’s degree to even be considered for most jobs, so LOL at the totality of existence.

There are a lot of things we tend to look at regarding our collegiate stay that we think will give us a leg-up on the competition. The thing is, even though you’ve had internships and graduated with honors, employers still don’t give that much of a damn about what you’ve done, because in today’s super-shitty economy, there’s no way they’re investing in anything other than a sure bet with a new recruit. Even though we’ve been told we’re the future and all that jazz a zillion times, most companies would STILL rather promote or hire a 40 year old with decades worth of experience in the field than they would some young gun that just waltzed out of a four-year program. Finding educated adults is relatively easy, but finding experienced adults is a far more desirable goal for most corporations in the 21^st century.

Your college administrators, recruiters and professors are liable to hoist all sorts of exaggerations and non-validated claims on you, but even the most Machiavellian of staff and faculty members probably doesn’t have the chutzpah to tell you that a degree from their institute is enough to get you where you want to be in life. Throwing out this question in class is like lobbing a flash grenade into the middle of the lecture hall - it’s going to be a long time before anybody in the room is capable of producing cogent remarks again, and it gives you just enough time to sneak out of class to go play some "Street Fighter down" at the pizza place down the road. It’s a recipe for success if there ever was one, I say.

Concluding Remarks:

Look, I’m not going to pretend that this isn’t a cynical and elitist sounding article, but dabnabit, it’s the truth. Of course college is important, and even if it doesn’t directly result in you getting out into the professional or paraprofessional world, it will at least get you to the top of the application list whenever you send in a resume for something non-related to whatever you majored in. There is a lot of stupid stuff going on in U.S. colleges, and there’s a lot of stuff that routinely goes down in higher education that threatens to screw you up for life, but compared to the alternative - being dip shit number eight million with only a high school diploma - the risks of NOT going to college far, Far, FAR outweigh whatever the risks are OF getting a bachelor’s degree in something.

Whatever you do, DO NOT think that I’m telling you that college isn’t important or worth your time. However, to get the most out of the experience (which will likely bankrupt you in the process), I think it’s pretty damned important that you ask about all of these things, and question everything that goes on at your campus. Yes, you are a student, but at the same time, you are also a consumer - you’re paying for your dean’s salary, you’re paying for student group activities that you‘ll never partake of, and you’re probably paying for things the school isn’t going to tell you about…or don’t want you to find out about, either.

College, they’ll no doubt tell you at orientation, is a time to ask questions. That much, they are right about; which is exactly why it’s your academic duty to ask all of the questions your school officials don’t want you to.

Read More