Prager U

[_canpakes]

Oh, my. I just realized that I’ll need to trade out my bathroom hardware, as my toilet is clearly labeled, “American Standard” -

https://www.americanstandard-us.com/bat ... &plimit=21

I’ve been crapping and pissing on the American Standard all of this time ..! What would my graduate friends from Prager U say?

[_Some Schmo]

I’ve been crapping and pissing on the American Standard all of this time ..! What would my graduate friends from Prager U say?

If you've ever had to go in the woods, you were literally crapping/pissing on America. Oh, the disrespect. Where are my clutching pearls when I need them?

Where does your head need to be in order to believe people want to use that toilet exclusively to disrespect America? (I suppose the type that would donate to "Prager U Gotta Be Kidding Me")

[_Ceeboo]

Professor Abrams (Conservative tenured professor at Sarah Lawrence college in New York) recently wrote an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times.

I post it below (In full for complete context - sorry for the length)


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Opinion
Think Professors Are Liberal? Try School Administrators
The ideological bent of those overseeing collegiate life is having the biggest impact on campus culture.

By Samuel J. Abrams
Dr. Abrams is a professor of politics.

Oct. 16, 2018

I received a disconcerting email this year from a senior staff member in the Office of Diversity and Campus Engagement at Sarah Lawrence College, where I teach. The email was soliciting ideas from the Sarah Lawrence community for a conference, open to all of us, titled “Our Liberation Summit.” The conference would touch on such progressive topics as liberation spaces on campus, Black Lives Matter and justice for women as well as for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual and allied people.

As a conservative-leaning professor who has long promoted a diversity of viewpoints among my (very liberal) faculty colleagues and in my classes, I was taken aback by the college’s sponsorship of such a politically lopsided event. The email also piqued my interest in what sorts of other nonacademic events were being organized by the school’s administrative staff members.

I soon learned that the Office of Student Affairs, which oversees a wide array of issues including student diversity and residence life, was organizing many overtly progressive events — programs with names like “Stay Healthy, Stay Woke,” “Microaggressions” and “Understanding White Privilege” — without offering any programming that offered a meaningful ideological alternative. These events were conducted outside the classroom, in the students’ social and recreational spaces.

The problem is not limited to my college. While considerable focus has been placed in recent decades on the impact of the ideological bent of college professors, when it comes to collegiate life — living in dorms, participating in extracurricular organizations — the ever growing ranks of administrators have the biggest influence on students and campus life across the country.

Today, many colleges and universities have moved to a model in which teaching and learning is seen as a 24/7 endeavor. Engagement with students is occurring as much — if not more — in residence halls and student centers as it is in classrooms. Schools have increased their hiring in areas such as residential life and student centers, offices of student life and success, and offices of inclusion and engagement. It’s not surprising that many of the free-speech controversies in the past few years at places like Yale, Stanford and the University of Delaware have concerned events that occurred not in classrooms but in student communal spaces and residence halls.

Intrigued by this phenomenon, I recently surveyed a nationally representative sample of roughly 900 “student-facing” administrators — those whose work concerns the quality and character of a student’s experience on campus. I found that liberal staff members outnumber their conservative counterparts by the astonishing ratio of 12-to-one. Only 6 percent of campus administrators identified as conservative to some degree, while 71 percent classified themselves as liberal or very liberal. It’s no wonder so much of the nonacademic programming on college campuses is politically one-sided.

The 12-to-one ratio of liberal to conservative college administrators makes them the most left-leaning group on campus. In previous research, I found that academic faculty report a six-to-one ratio of liberal to conservative professors. Incoming first-year students, by contrast, reported less than a two-to-one ratio of liberals to conservatives, according to a 2016 finding by the Higher Education Research Institute. It appears that a fairly liberal student body is being taught by a very liberal professoriate — and socialized by an incredibly liberal group of administrators.

The severity of this trend varies among different types of academic institutions. My research found that two-thirds of administrators at public institutions and schools with religious affiliations self-identified as liberals, which was lower than the three-quarters of administrators at private, secular institutions who did. I found no real differences among school types, such as small, private liberal arts colleges as compared with large research universities. School ranking did make a small difference, with administrators at more selective institutions reporting a higher percentage of liberals than did lower-ranked schools.

The most pronounced difference was regional. New England has the most liberal college administrators in the nation, with a 25-to-one ratio of liberals to conservatives. The West Coast and Southeast have ratios of 16-to-one, whereas the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains and the Great Lakes all have ratios closer to 10-to-one. The only region with anything close to a balanced ratio is the Southwest, with two-to-one.

This warped ideological distribution among college administrators should give our students and their families pause. To students who are in their first semester at school, I urge you not to accept unthinkingly what your campus administrators are telling you. Their ideological imbalance, coupled with their agenda-setting power, threatens the free and open exchange of ideas, which is precisely what we need to protect in higher education in these politically polarized times.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

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So what do you think happened, if anything, to this professor after the article was published? Well, I'm not going to tell you. If you're interested, you can do a google search ad find several sources that will tell you what happened to him.

One example, of countless examples, showing what's happening at college campuses across America.

[_Doctor Steuss]

Everyone knows that if you’re going to crap and piss on America, you’re supposed to dig a trench on sacred Native American lands to do it.

If you like artsy-fartsy toilets, move to Venezuela.

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

I just want to state for the record I've defecated and urinated on America, literally, from coast to coast. Popped squats all across this nation, many times in service of this nation.

So, why is Prager up in arms over this piece? Is the piece attacking their ideals on a personal level? Why so defensive?

Whatever the case may be it seems to me that Prager types probably don't understand the history of art and why we ended up at this particular piece. As Honor pointed out, art is often times layered in its own history and is really just the current iteration of a long, connected line of art styles and works.

- Doc

[_canpakes]

So what do you think happened, if anything, to this professor after the article was published?

His office door was vandalized. Somebody showed bad restraint.

This must mean that radical leftism has permeated every aspect of our university system.

Not that some college curriculum cannot be criticized (and it should be critically examined), but as an aside, I’m wondering just what the good professor would like to eliminate from his long list of leftist teachings, and/or what he’d prefer to see substituted for them. Otherwise, he comes off sounding uncomfortable with the idea that there might exist options that differ from his own.

Ceeboo, can you shed some light on this?

[_DarkHelmet]

The organisation in the OP does not seem to offer anything resembling the university level study and support offered by the OU, does it?

Come on, Chap. Nobody ever complained about Trump University, and look how that turned out.

PragerU's new slogan "Better than Trump University"

[_DarkHelmet]

Professor Abrams (Conservative tenured professor at Sarah Lawrence college in New York) recently wrote an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times.

I post it below (In full for complete context - sorry for the length)

What does that Op-Ed have to do with PragerU? The professor was talking about liberal bias on college campuses. Is his solution to the problem to donate money to PragerU?

[_canpakes]

So, why is Prager up in arms over this piece? Is the piece attacking their ideals on a personal level? Why so defensive?

This is my question for Ceebs, as relates to both Prager and himself.

Even if I take his strangely literal meaning and run with it, I don’t see exactly how this leads to disdain for the exhibit unless I abandon some common sense reasoning.

Maybe Ceeboo can summarize Prager’s thoughts. Or maybe Prager doesn’t even have any actual reasoning backing his manufactured rage based solely on mischaracterizing a title. Maybe Prager just wants folks to react without thinking as they hand over their money. It’s the surest way to make a dime these days.

At this point, I’m beginning to think that rage is an addiction for some - left or right - and they’ll go to progressively stranger and greater lengths, over time, to get their fix.

[_Doctor Steuss]

Odds are, if you support the University of Pennsylvania's decision to remove a portrait of Shakespeare and replace it with a portrait of a black-lesbian poet, you will not find PragerU appealing.

This is the one that stands out to me in the list.

The supposed outrage isn’t because her literary achievements aren’t seen as being on par with Shakespeare (i.e. “replaced with a largely unknown author, in comparison”), or because of her politics/ideology (i.e. “replaced with a feminist”), or any number of the aspects of her writings/speeches/advocacy.

The cues to signal outrage are because she’s 1) Black, and 2) a lesbian.