While I was exploring the continuing problems of Antioch College recently I ran across this little gem or right wing “analysis” of Antioch’s current economic problems by one Reed Alexander in the comments section of Megan Bachman’s update on the continuing economic problems of Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio in the Yellow Springs News on 29 March 2021:
"After all these years of “reinventing” itself – Antioch administrators still don’t “get it.” Antioch offers an antiquated approach to education – its sole mission is to indoctrinate young people with leftist propaganda. Other schools focus on providing students with cutting-edge skills to compete for jobs of the future, while Antioch judges success on the number of minds it can infiltrate with socialist ideology. A losing proposition.
A nephew of mine in roughly eight years ago attended Antioch because he thought it would expand his horizons to think more broadly about the world. Instead, because he was wasn’t liberal enough, he was ostracised (spelling corrected by me) by both faculty and administrators. Diversity of thought is not a goal at Antioch. Sad."
While it is probably sad to some that Antioch College continues to have problems, problems which go back to the 1970s, what is also sad, if not surprising, is the abstract and decontextualised political and ideological correctness that undergirds Alexander’s response to Bachman’s article on the economic and demographic struggles at Antioch College. Where to begin?
First, Antioch is not the only college that is experiencing economic and demographic problems these days. So is, for example, the College of Saint Rose, a small Roman Catholic college in Albany, New York that no longer, to cite one example of curricular cleansing, has a Sociology Department. So did the University at Albany in the same city. SUNY Albany once had to cut its language and theatre programmes among others because of financial problems in the wake of an economic downturn and decreasing state monies.
Second, not all colleges and universities that I suspect Alexander would put in the “liberal” camp are having financial and demographic problems. Reed College in Portland, Oregon, one of the other colleges, along with Antioch and Swarthmore, Burton Clark analysed in his classic The Distinctive College, has a $569 million dollar endowment. Swarthmore has an endowment of over $2 billion dollars. Both have healthy student enrollments, healthy and productive faculty, and healthy academic departments. Another "liberal" university, Brandeis University, has a $1.2 billion dollar endowment post-Madoff.
Third, all cultures, subcultures, countercultures, societies, nations, the military, prisons, corporations, and educational institutions socialise. One might argue, for example, that The King's College (home of demagogue Dinesh D’Souza once upon a time) and Bob Jones socialises its students into variants of right wing Christian ideology. Unfortunately, and unscientifically, those demagogues with a political and ideological correctness axe to grind prefer to refer to certain forms of socialisation, forms of socialisation they don’t like (ah there once again is that pesky emotionalism that dominates right wing “thinking”), in other words, as “indoctrination” or “brainwashing”. A more value neutral and scientific term for the common phenomenon of cultural reproduction of the young or initiation of new members into cultures, organisations, and institutions, is the tried and true one of socialisation. That term, however, isn’t politically and ideologically demonic and frightening enough for right wing demagogues like Alexander.
Finally, the reasons some colleges and universities are having problems these days are multiple. First there are the demographic factors. I give you student decline and greater competition for the potential student pool. Second, there are the economic reasons. Some colleges and universities are poorer than others, some have less endowment monies and other monies to work with, and some are seeing decreases in state support in absolute and relative terms. Third, there are the cultural factors. Colleges and universities have different degrees of social and cultural capital in the minds of applicants and their parents. It is more appealing to those who have been impacted by branding, ideologies of ancientness, and other cultural phenomena to apply to and go to Reed or Swarthmore as opposed to Antioch or Ball State University.
I realise this brief discussion of colleges and universities and their trials and travails will have little and, more likely, any impact on the abstract politically correct demagogues of the world and those who pied pipper and ditto their ideologically grounded rhetoric. Still, people like Alexander, people who seem to prefer their analysis to be ahistorical, contextless, empirically deficient, and ideologically correct, make for, I hope, an interesting blog in the age of Kornbluth’s marching orange tinted bsing morons.
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