“Big Game” fever is striking campus. Every year, we play the nearby school of Berkley (inexplicably abbreviated “Cal”) in, well, I guess it must be in football, and the school goes crazy. Huge signs reading “BEAT CAL” hang from all sides of our clocktower. And a huge clock sits in the center of campus, apparently counting down the hours until the game begins.
Outside our dorm is a painted sheet reading “Calstration” and featuring an unclear but unmistakably violent picture of something happening to the Cal mascot. This sheet was apparently painted during an event entitled “Beat The Sheet” which sounds like an open-and-shut case of misplaced aggression.
I walk to class listening to my new iPod, thinking I’ll finally get a chance to enjoy it. However, I feel completely dorky wearing it, even when I tuck the headphone cord into my shirt, and when I get to class I realize I’ve completely scuffed up the case. Sigh.
My old friend and sometime-mentor Dan Connolly once IMed me to ask what IHUM (Introduction to the HUManities) was all about. He wondered if it was like a course he’d had to take where they asked him how to solve world hunger. Quite the opposite, I replied, it’s training in moral relativism. “Should we really solve world hunger? Would solving world hunger do more harm than good? What if people want to be hungry? Shouldn’t we protect the freedom of hunger?”
The questions are absurd of course, but even with my firm political grounding, it’s tempting to swept away in them and it takes significant effort to sort them all out. I’m sure that others whose political senses are less developed eventually succumb to some extent.
After all, the course is titled “Freedom, Equality, and Difference” and is thus the obvious choice for anyone concerned with fighting for those values. And so, once they have you, they try their best to talk you out of it, to confuse you sufficiently that you just give up trying to help people.
Others confirm this account. A friend says that in a similar class, called SLE (Structured Liberal Education), they bombarded you with so much philosophy that you ‘couldn’t believe in anything when you were done.’ Kat once told me that the only philosophy that ever made sense to her was nihilism. After seeing all this propaganda, that’s not entirely surprising.
What benefit does an university funded by large government contractors like Bechtel get from talking people out of their moral values? As the saying goes, “The answer seems all too plain.”
posted January 23, 2005 07:56 PM (Education) (4 comments) #