It was just before lunch when I received a phone call from my wife, Deb. She was taking a lunch break from her microbiology class at the local college when she called.
You may ask "What was so important that she had to call DCE during lunch?"
I can tell you on three words: She. Was. Livid.
During the morning lecture her professor, in the midst of talking about microbiology, went off on a tangent. That in itself isn't all that remarkable. It happens from time to time. But this time was different.
The 'tangent' in this case was a political diatribe that lasted quite some time. All the professor did was spout vitriol and vile slanders on Republicans, praise the all-knowing and caring Democrats, demonized anybody who disagreed with Leftist ideology, and so on. Some of the other students were overtly agreeing with the professor, but others were uncomfortable as the diatribe continued. As the vitriol continued, Deb started getting mad.
I have to explain that while Deb is fiscally conservative, she has her liberal side (and by liberal I mean a classic liberal, not a "government-knows-best" liberal). I guess that makes her libertarian.
Did what the professor was saying piss her off? No, not really. As she told me the professor did have a few valid points (though very few). So what was it that was pissing her off? Simply this:
She had paid good money that we could not easily afford to take a microbiology class she needed in her quest to become an RN. She hadn't paid that money to be subjected to a leftist political diatribe that belonged in a Marxist Political Science 102 lecture.
She called me again a couple of hours later, telling me that she'd gone to her adviser to complain about what had happened in the class. At that point her adviser started spouting off as well. Needless to say, that pissed off my wife even more.
So what has she learned from this episode in her college career?
Institutions of higher learning are not about education, but political indoctrination.
So endith the lesson.
It is fortunate that, for the most part, the schools of hard sciences are less likely to be influenced by politics (unfortunately MIT's Noam Chomsky seems to be one of the exceptions).
I noticed some of the incipient shift to the left when I attended UConn, but it wasn't all that prevalent then. That's not so now.
But I wonder how long those schools will be able to hold out, seeing the encroachment of the Left's Lysenkoism, where political ideology defines what is scientifically 'correct' versus observation, hypothesis, experimentation, and formal theorem. We've certainly seen it with the ever more discredited 'settled science' of Anthropogenic Global Warming, where politics overruled scientific method and allowed horrendously flawed and unprovable theories to accepted as fact.
When teaching the hard sciences one receives far less of this.
As a history major from UNH, my blood still seethes over the amount of crap like this I had to endure. The worst was when a professor and a student BOTH lambasted me for having a subscription to National Review, as if I was morally suspect and mentally deficient.
Prof. Douglas Wheeler, a fair man, was one of the most avid of ab