The whole notion of "education" in its broadest sense is going to have to be rethought.Could there be anything more contrived, more useless, and more inane than a course on "food justice"? Or rather, could there be anything more subversive than trying to insert deeper meaning into even the seemingly-innocent broccoli we eat? Must everything, right down to our cornflakes, be turned into a social justice movement predicated on combating white patriarchy?Why, yes. Because, Monsanto.The latest idiocy-in-academia is brought to us, yet again, by a Cal State institution, where your tax-dollars fund "professors" who tout "decolonized" recipes (whatever those are) and quack-theories tying a President Trump-resistance movement with a crusade to combat global food inequality. The College Fix provides more:A new course at Cal State Fullerton aims to bring to students’ attention to the “key social inequalities” involved in the production and consumption of food in the modern world.“The Social Life of Food” is taught by sociology associate professor Dr. Dana Collins, whose primary areas of expertise include gender/sexualities/queer studies; critical globalizations, post-colonial theory and development, transnational feminist activism, and urban communities, according to her faculty bio.In an email interview with The College Fix, Collins stated that the course’s objectives are three-fold: to help students “bring their sociological curiosity to food;” to allow them to “understand how all food has a social life, which includes its production within a global food system that rests upon and reproduces global social inequalities;” and to motivate them to “learn about, imagine, and act upon the possibilities of food justice!”To that end, she said, students will “watch exciting food documentaries, learn from people actively engaged with food justice in the L.A. region, and complete exciting assignments like observing farmer’s markets and food production businesses, interviewing food workers, and writing a recipe that is decolonized.”According to the syllabus, which was obtained by The College Fix, required texts include “Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply” and “Harvesting Justice: Transforming Food, Land, and Agricultural Systems in the Americas.”The final assignment asks students either to choose and analyze a “build strategy” from an apparently anti-Donald Trump website or to write an individual research paper on a particular food, “analyzing its history, transformation through global capitalist production, its environmental costs, and the racialized-gender work that is part of its production.”The anti-Donald Trump website, www.ungovernable2017.com, appears to be an online hub for “resistance” to Trump’s election and administration, and includes a pledge “to create a resistance movement that makes Trump unable to govern…We refuse to give hatred…a chance to roll back civil and human rights.”According to The Fix, the Trump-resistance site states that "the United States has always been a problematic project" largely controlled by "neo-Confederates" pushing for a "wanton reintroduction of white supremacy, right wing sic populism and fascism, and state sanctioned sic patriarchy."
Wednesday, March 1, 2017
The sewer that is the post-American university - today's edition
You can really part with your hard-earned money to take this crud:
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Damning the entire American university system which has been heavily sought after by students worldwide for decades because of some of its course offerings is like damning the Grey Lady (The New York Slime to that hateful and uber-angry demonizer Mark Levin) for its domestic political coverage, i.e., both are much more than mere politics, e.g., science, technology, arts (including architecture, drama, cinema, music, books etc.), health, sports, food, travel, etc. Did I say food?
ReplyDeleteLevin is exactly right about the New York Slime. You can get food and architecture coverage many other places.
ReplyDeleteYou ought to spend some time scrolling through the posts under the "university campuses at forefront of America's decay" category at this post, or, better yet, go to the FIRE website, or the Minding the Campus website. The infantilization of the post-American university is complete.
I have scrolled through your pissed off posts under your category. Do I get an E for effort, or an F for disputing you or a D- for being just plain wrong? It appears you're on board with the Great 180 (meaning degree turns Trump is taking us through, abruptly), when reality is the tao, or the way of things, i.e., all things evolve. Insult it if you will, e.g., eave it all alone, don't force it, certainly hone your rage at the page, but we never learn, not when we must have winners and losers and all must must be killed or jailed or banished or fired who aren't on board with certain agenda. Note well that this applies to both left and right, a failed human construct if I ever heard one. Human brains create the categories, lambast or advertise (hypnotize) them. They are not tao, i.e., truth. Nor Jesus, but maybe Paul. But there was a sword spoken of, one Jesus said he brought. And one, which lived by, one died by. Can I get a C+ for presentation?
ReplyDeleteNo, you get a U - for utter unseriousness.
ReplyDeleteNo, you get a U - for utter unseriousness.
ReplyDeleteEver heard of a concept called intellectual freedom? You are no better than the left, insisting on rethinking to align with your thinking. I could be wrong, but there seems to be a lot of censoriousness in your very nature. But who am I to judge. I'm serious, not deadly serious, about intellectual freedom. Let it all be.
ReplyDeleteOh, stop it. Do you realize that by defending infantile mewling and the complete jettisoning of any idea of standards or a basic canon of Western thought and achievement a college student ought to be competently conversant in you forfeit any polemical legitimacy?
ReplyDeleteI am defending intellectual freedom. I am not advocating any complete rethinking of education. Just that--intellectual freedom. That includes the freedom to be dumb, but dumb ideas are free to be shot down.
ReplyDeleteYou call them standards. I call that censorship of what you believe are sub standard.
ReplyDelete"Free to be shot down" - and that's what we do here at LITD every time we find and instance of these dumb - and poisonous - ideas.
ReplyDelete