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http://www.cotwa.info/2013/08/brandeis-hiring-sexual-violence.html

Tuesday, August 6, 2013
Brandeis Hiring a Sexual-Violence Bureaucrat, by John Leo
As found here:

Brandeis University is hiring a full-time administrator to deal with sexual violence on campus. This might imply that an upsurge of sexual assault is under way on this very quiet, very liberal campus. But that is not the case. Brandeis has the usual elaborate safeguards against such offenses-- conditioning at freshman orientation, a strong and vocal feminist contingent, educational programs on sexual assault, a rape crisis hotline, stern judicial procedures that seem pitched against the accused, and a recorded rate of sexually violent acts of less than one case per year (though some insist the real total is higher).

Still, Brandeis feels it needs a "Sexual Violence and Prevention Services Specialist," who will apparently run conferences and rallies, seek grants and lead programming tailored to the needs of individual groups into which the modern university likes to divide its students, such as "LBGTIO, students of color, international students, student-athletes" and so forth. Announcement of the new hire came from the campus Feminist Sexual Ethics Project.

Candidates for the job, it says, must have a "sophisticated theoretical understanding of the cultural and social causes of sexual and other gender-based violence," which we take to mean a feminist perspective on men. The Project seems to hold a similarly dubious view of religion. It says: "If we are to create a society in which ethics and social structures are based on freedom and dignity, we need to recognize the extent to which slave-holding values have shaped and continue to influence religious policy."

Those who believe that multicultural and feminist excesses on the modern American campus are almost always funded by the Ford Foundation will not be disappointed. Ford is helping to pay for this one too.

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"If we are to create a society in which ethics and social structures are based on freedom and dignity, we need to recognize the extent to which slave-holding values have shaped and continue to influence religious policy."

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http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/95nov/warring/conscien.htm

April 1955
Conscience and the Undergraduate

by John Sloan Dickey

(snip)

It is a common thing for our undergraduate committee handling the investigation and recommendations on disciplinary cases to sit into the early morning hours of the night. There is no duty on a modern campus more distasteful to an undergraduate than sitting in judgment on the shortcomings of his peers. He is keenly aware that "but for the grace of God, there go I" and he probably still retains a strong trace of the American schoolboy's loyalty to the group as against the authority of the school. And yet I have never known an outgoing undergraduate judiciary chairman whose capacity for both compassion and just judgment was not admired, indeed envied, by students and faculty alike.

Recently this committee sat until 2 A.M. considering whether to recommend the dismissal from college of a boy who had gotten himself into serious trouble. It was a hard case all around, and it was only after an independent investigation, a hearing of the boy, and lengthy deliberation that the committee finally decided the interests of the college required dismissal of the student. Before he went to bed that night the undergraduate chairman on his own initiative called on the boy's parents at the Inn to report the decision and to give them the kind of explanation he would have wanted his parents to get if he were being dismissed. This is more than responsibility; this is conscience.

[Do current disciplinary committee members feel anything like the "responsibility" and "conscience"? Or are they more attuned to being PC-correct? Do students feel anything like admiration for the chairmen of such committees? ]

(snip)

Today's undergraduate has no choice about going or not going into the armed forces. He must go, but his attitude in going is important. At Dartmouth, we who have worked with all our seniors in the Great Issues Course know that today's senior goes into the service of his country understanding far more than did his father or grandfather why he does so. He knows why it is all so necessary and yet so unnecessary. He puts two or three years of his life into what he is told needs to be done without becoming embittered, without retreating either to "know-nothingism" or pacifism, and with a growing awareness of the role of conscience in all his doing.

An undergraduate generation capable of coming to terms with itself and its elders on the issues of man's brotherhood is surely capable in the course of a lifetime of coming to terms with the universe as children of God.

(snip)

The early American colleges were generally very clear about their commitment to a moral and religious purpose. For several hundred years the primacy of this purpose was both attested and served by three constitutional elements in the life of these colleges: 1) the tradition of preacher presidents, 2) a curriculum heavy with religion and moral doctrine, and 3) compulsory church and chapel. I refer to these elements as "constitutional" because for a long period, above and beyond men, their influence permeated all that these institutions were and did.

[What was stated as Duke's original purpose? Would a large portion of the liberal arts faculty now want to put that aside as the legacy of slavery, paternalism, and white oppression (critical race theory)?]

(snip)

The deeper significance of these traditions has become apparent only as we begin to be aware that with the passing of these constitutional elements from the campus, the college's concern for conscience was left without tangible, pervasive, and enduring witness. Nothing comparable was substituted for the outmoded agencies, and this gap in the context of purpose remains an uncorrected weakness on most undergraduate campuses today. This seems to me to be clear unless we are ready to say either 1) that the college's historic commitment to furthering the moral and spiritual growth of an undergraduate truly ceased with the passing of these particular witnesses, or 2) that in serving this purpose we can rely exclusively on the ebb and flow of its awareness in individual teachers and administrators rather than on the more traditional combination of men plus the prod of institutional form and purpose. Either of these seem to me bad education.

(snip)

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http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2013_06_01_archive.html

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 19, 2013

Astonishing

The liberal arts are “endangered,” according to a new report. The New York Times describes the document’s high profile: “Requested by a bipartisan group of legislators and scheduled to be distributed to every member of Congress, it is intended as a rallying cry against the entrenched idea that the humanities and social sciences are luxuries that employment-minded students can ill afford.”

And who was the co-chairman of the commission that produced the report? None other than . . . Richard Brodhead.

In what other profession would a figure as utterly discredited by his actions—at least to anyone outside the profession—as Brodhead then be tasked with writing a major policy document justifying the existence of a key portion of that same profession?

Perhaps, it might be surmised, a reason why the liberal arts are “endangered” is that they embody a profession in which accountability seems like a dirty word.

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http://www.heraldsun.com/news/x145781430/Brodhead-defends-the-liberal-arts

Brodhead defends the liberal arts
Mar. 21, 2013

DURHAM —
Duke University President Richard Brodhead offered a vigorous defense of liberal arts education Thursday, calling it essential “equipment for living.”

In a 40-minute address to the annual meeting of the university faculty, Brodhead emphasized that a liberal arts education “aims to engage multiple forms of intelligence to create deep and enduring habits of mind, an active, integrative, versatile spirit naturally disposed, when it comes upon a new fact or situation, to go to work trying to understand it, updating preexisting understandings in this new light.”

The value of this kind of education, Brodhead added, “is not to be measured by income alone; least of all income one year after graduation.”

Instead, he said, “its value is that it supplies enrichment to personal lives, equips students to be thoughtful and constructive social contributors and enables them to participate fully and creatively in the dynamic, ever-changing world that awaits them when they graduate.”

(snip)

There has been, he said, a “breakdown of the public’s confidence that higher education has self-evident value.”

[Studying critical race theory doesn't have self-evident value?]

(snip)

Part of the faculty’s work, Brodhead added, is to “remind ourselves and others what, in the deep sense, education could really be.”

Brodhead reminded the 100 or so members of the university’s Academic Council that “liberal arts education is a broader public need than the American public shows any sign of recognizing. It is about building broadly capable people who can live up to their personal potential and fill all the roles a complex, changing world will require.”

Baldo

Aug 7 2013, 11:45 AM

It's an interesting subject and unfortunately had much to do with the John Hope Franklin center, which was ground zero on campus for the Duke Lacrosse Hoax & Frame.

In case one is not aware Cathy Davidson was a proud exporter of merging the Humanities with the Sciences because of the reality Liberal Arts is declining in colleges. She & others understood they needed to piggy-back on the Sciences due to that the "need" for them continue to exist. Of course that is silly, liberal Arts is failing because the Universities are not home to true scholarship, witness the works of the 88. World Class Scholars like Payback exist, but fakes & phonies like Brodhead harass them. No one can ever convince me that the world of the Liberal Arts are not as vital as they ever were, they just don't fit in with Marxist revisionist ideas.

Davis wrote this which is only available on subscription

A Manifesto for Technology in the Age of the Humanities (if only humanists will claim our Age)

http://chronicle.com/article/A-Manifesto-for-the-Humanities/17844

Like all Manifestos it leads to decline