COP: Hanson's Take On OWS

Richard Butrick

"...Hanson contrasts his college experience of ~30 years ago with the curriculum of today's colleges

I note in passing that not only were there no black, Latino, gender, green, film, gay, peace, or leisure studies courses, programs, and empires, but also a general impression that no one would wish to pay for such classes that imparted little real knowledge about the inductive method or the necessary referents of literature, history, and science. So many of these classes were therapeutic. Some were downright accusatory: go back through history and as melodrama point out the bad and good guys (based on present-day liberal standards), or study how modern capitalism should be replaced by a more humane model - in environmental, financial, religious, racial, class, and gender terms." The Classical scholar, turned social and political analyst, Victor Davis Hanson, has an interesting take on the mindset of the collegiate component of the OWS movement. Hanson opines that the young graduates that seem the most vehement in their anger have the sneaky realization that they have been had. They have been suckered into obtaining expensive useless degrees.

Many are furious that they have or soon will have very expensive degrees, bought at the price of either exorbitant loans or near insolvent parents who paid the $100,000-200,000 for today's BAs. The students cannot rage against the modern corrupt, but ideologically sacrosanct, university. There, diversity czars outnumber French professors. Academic success is calibrated by avoiding introductory undergraduate classes - and all for the "student."

About the only jobs available to those snookered into getting therapeutic rage-based degrees in PC think would be jobs as community organizers. Hanson contrasts his college experience of ~30 years ago with the curriculum of today's colleges

I note in passing that not only were there no black, Latino, gender, green, film, gay, peace, or leisure studies courses, programs, and empires, but also a general impression that no one would wish to pay for such classes that imparted little real knowledge about the inductive method or the necessary referents of literature, history, and science. So many of these classes were therapeutic. Some were downright accusatory: go back through history and as melodrama point out the bad and good guys (based on present-day liberal standards), or study how modern capitalism should be replaced by a more humane model - in environmental, financial, religious, racial, class, and gender terms.

As Hanson states, these students cannot fume at the "ideologically sacrosanct university" nor can they admit that they themselves are the dupes and hence project their fury at seeing a useless future on those that have not been duped.

They are mad at the system that they were taught oppresses them, but also at themselves. Who would not be after spending so much money for something of so little value? Nothing is more embarrassing to watch than arrogance coupled with ignorance - and spiced with occasional glibness and the slow realization that they've been had.

Hanson describes their situation as being

flat-broke, indebted, and politically prepped but poorly schooled students wondering where is the good life and why a Wall Street fixer, or computer nerd, or company man civil engineer makes so much more than they, the anointed, do.

So they rage on - and on and on...

Catch the tail end of this video of a college age protester in a spittle spuming rage at Wall Street.

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2011/10/hansons_take_on_ows.html at October 25, 2011 - 01:56:12 AM CDT