In a comment on Arnold Kling’s post on intersectionality today, John Alcorn writes:
A hypothesis: Ideology of intersectionality will flourish more at (residential) colleges than at the workplace, because residential colleges are structurally totalitarian institutions.
Alcorn goes on to explain why.
Alcorn could have substituted “commuter colleges” for “the workplace.”
A friend who has been on the faculty at San Jose State University (SJSU) for about 15 years told me recently that he happened to be wandering around UC Davis, which has a large residential component, much larger than that of SJSU. He told me that the difference in the vibes between the two colleges was palpable. He said that there is relatively little political correctness at SJSU and attributed that to the fact that such a large percent of their students commute and many of them work full-time jobs and take night courses.
That’s kind of like what I experienced at the Naval Postgraduate School, for different but related reasons. The students were (and are) all full-time workers, had (and have) a median age somewhere between 30 and 33, and were in the various militaries.
READER COMMENTS
Thaomas
Oct 8 2019 at 4:07pm
Probably the ideal is largely residential university in a city, like U Paris in the 13th century.
jb
Oct 8 2019 at 4:40pm
Yes, I think this is right. I’ve long thought that this why this stuff is particularly bad in the US, a little less bad in other English speaking countries, and not at all a problem in the rest. If no one lives at the university, you can’t even start to argue that it has any duty of care.
Matthias Görgens
Oct 9 2019 at 12:07pm
In Germany students often move town to attend university, but the majority just rents normal flats to share. Dorms exist, but are not the norm.
German students would revolt, if the uni would try to establish a duty to care.
Jake
Oct 8 2019 at 6:31pm
Having attended community college, a commuter 4-year college, a state school with a large body of commuters all within one state and another state flagship university that is almost exclusively residential, this comports with my own experience. The state school had a fair bit but not that much student activism, more than the commuter college and more still than the community college. Those three schools, however, made the flagship public university look like North Korea.
John Alcorn
Oct 8 2019 at 6:51pm
David,
Yes, the comparison that you draw, to commuter colleges‚ is more apt!
DraintheSwamp
Oct 8 2019 at 10:02pm
This is spot on with my experience. I attended UC San Diego for my undergrad, majored in economics and minored in accounting, most students that lived on campus did not work because they received massive grants from state and federal programs, funds from parents, and took out subsidized Sallie Mae student loans. After I graduated and moved to San Jose for work, I took two economics courses at San Jose State as an open university student, both from Dr. Jeff Hummel, students there were older, working part- and full-time , and had zero time for PC woke madness.
Phil H
Oct 9 2019 at 12:04pm
I certainly think that the atmosphere in a residential college is rather special and different. Which is why I get very puzzled by the people who are shocked at how students behave… Students are supposed to behave weirdly! We put them in weird institutions (“communities of scholars”) in the hopes that they’ll come up with exciting new ideas that will help the rest of us. If they do go wrong sometimes (if you happen to think that excess PC is wrong, for example), is that really so surprising? And is it even a bad thing?
TMC
Oct 9 2019 at 2:35pm
“if you happen to think that excess PC is wrong” Mindless adherence to questionable ideas? Any idea really. Yes, that’s a bad idea for an institution that’s supposed to teach critical thinking.
Mark Z
Oct 9 2019 at 4:51pm
Well, yes, going wrong is, by definition, a bad thing.
And I would say things are more the opposite of how you characterize them: it’s not as though students are experimenting with weird ideas and sometimes going awry; the “PC” going on is rather the suppression of intellectual experimentation and the merciless punishment of anyone who happens to go awry. This ‘weird idea’ is a jealous one, the idea that other possibly weird ideas or behaviors must be stamped out.
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