The oppression and rebellion of students in today’s universities
Anyone who argues that the university is a breeding-ground for liberal opinion would be correct, but not for the reason that most would think. Instead, students today, as always, arrive at school expecting to find that their heads will be filled with wonderous knowledge of the arcane and delightful, when in reality they experience nothing but humiliation and degradation at the hands of a disinterested, money-hungry administration and an aging, tenured faculty with no reason to accept, let alone welcome, a change in the academic status quo. The resulting hatred of authority and disinterest for material perceived as stale and obsolete by the student therefore bears no resemblance whatsoever to an immaturely developed or naive political fantasy, but rather wears the grim aura of a belief forged in the harshest reality. Today’s ‘Liberals’ are not the hedonistic rebels of 1969–in fact, in many instances, it’s the unrealistic dreams of professors whose last major paradigm shift occured in that very same year of 1969 that are the target of scorn by a frustrated and alienated youth. As Jerry Farber puts it in his highly controversial article, the university is ‘WHERE YOU LET THE DYING SOCIETY PUT ITS TRIP ON YOU.’ At least in my experience (admittedly at a private college), this statement is all too true. When considered in such a light, what the student is presented with at college is actually the very definition of conservatism, of stagnation, of modern-day ‘Republican’ values. It is against this that today’s students rebel, in their own ways…openly expressing contempt for incompetent instructors in dining halls and classrooms, engaging in hobbies and pursuits that stimulate them outside of the standard curriculum in record amounts, and regarding the entire process as a business arrangement constructed to exchange large quantities of their money for an ‘auratic’ piece of paper that holds promises of future wealth and well-being.
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