In 1970, after campus antiwar protesters ransacked and set fire to the administration building at the University of South Carolina, the school's president appointed a task force to find a solution to student unrest.
Last year, when the University of Oregon assigned Between the World and Me for the common read, it paid Ta-Nehisi Coates $41,500 for a campus appearance, and afterward students complained that the university hadn't gotten its money's worth.
In a session titled "Understanding and Supporting Student Activists in the First Year," Carli Rosati and Quan Tran of Ohio University presented a study using "Interviews, photo elicitation and heat maps" to analyze activists' "Feelings of belongingness." They triumphantly reported that "Involvement in student college activism encourages personal, professional, and identity formation," which led them to a much-welcomed conclusion: "Higher education professionals need to view themselves as allies to the cause of activism."
Just as in 1970, when the riot at the University of South Carolina inspired the initial program, college presidents' first response to student protests is to throw money at first-year programs and their colleagues in the cocurricular bureaucracy-the offices with names like Student Life, Student Success, Diversity and Inclusion, and Multicultural Affairs.
In surveys taken after the group discussions about the Coates and Rankine books, more than 80 percent of the facilitators agreed that the "Discussion taught things that students could use in campus life," but a majority of the students disagreed.
Affirmative-action programs were supposed to help minority students flourish, but instead they're setting up the students for failure by admitting them to schools where they're competing against better-prepared peers.
Students may not be learning anything useful, and they're wasting time on discussion groups and field trips and activism instead of studying, but their tuition is paying for bigger staffs and programs to keep them on campus.
https://www.city-journal.org/first-year-experience-16032.html
Last year, when the University of Oregon assigned Between the World and Me for the common read, it paid Ta-Nehisi Coates $41,500 for a campus appearance, and afterward students complained that the university hadn't gotten its money's worth.
In a session titled "Understanding and Supporting Student Activists in the First Year," Carli Rosati and Quan Tran of Ohio University presented a study using "Interviews, photo elicitation and heat maps" to analyze activists' "Feelings of belongingness." They triumphantly reported that "Involvement in student college activism encourages personal, professional, and identity formation," which led them to a much-welcomed conclusion: "Higher education professionals need to view themselves as allies to the cause of activism."
Just as in 1970, when the riot at the University of South Carolina inspired the initial program, college presidents' first response to student protests is to throw money at first-year programs and their colleagues in the cocurricular bureaucracy-the offices with names like Student Life, Student Success, Diversity and Inclusion, and Multicultural Affairs.
In surveys taken after the group discussions about the Coates and Rankine books, more than 80 percent of the facilitators agreed that the "Discussion taught things that students could use in campus life," but a majority of the students disagreed.
Affirmative-action programs were supposed to help minority students flourish, but instead they're setting up the students for failure by admitting them to schools where they're competing against better-prepared peers.
Students may not be learning anything useful, and they're wasting time on discussion groups and field trips and activism instead of studying, but their tuition is paying for bigger staffs and programs to keep them on campus.
https://www.city-journal.org/first-year-experience-16032.html
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