Dear Place I Spent My Youth,posted by scalefree at 8:04 PM on February 24, 2012 [101 favorites]
Things are not as good as they were when I was young, because my youth was the Best Time Ever.
I would like the world to reward me for my circumstances, despite the fact that I had nothing to do with them. They are still mine and I demand validation for them. Life is a game I won it, can't you see that? Everyone loves me, or is intimidated by me, which means that everything is the way it should be.
The fact that you have shown approval to people who do not look like me, act like me, and are clearly not Life Winners like me hurts my feelings. Make them go away and restore my sense of superiority.
If you carry on including people based on their ability to thrive in an academic environment instead of their upper-class status, I will no longer be able to lord my credentials over other people. This will not stand.
Keep putting the cunt in country club,
Selfish Racist Homophobic Narcissist
This is Jezebel voice; blame not the writer, but the publication.
Also - 'poors'? Is this a Jezebel thing? It is a bad thing regardless.
More importantly, I love the first comment underneath the President's open letter response:FYI: The Great All-Vegetarian Meals Incident of 2011. Brilliant.
Are we sure this isn’t the logic class stirring up hysteria like last year’s all-vegetarian meals incident?
Sometimes I really miss college days.
Yesterday, just as the fracas was dying down, things appeared to get serious.President Christ sounds pretty awesome.
At 11 a.m., Christ showed up at Garfield and Henle’s class and announced she was firing them. The school had been planning to go vegetarian and locavore, she said - it just hadn’t been ready to announce the news - and Garfield and Henle had blown its cover. The president said she was outraged.
A few students frowned. Could this be true?
Also, Christ went on, she had discovered that Garfield and Henle owned a share of a local farm that had been signed to supply the school with rutabagas all winter and thus had a conflict of interest. She hoisted aloft a bag of huge, round rutabagas for effect.
By the time the provost walked in and interrupted her to explain that Garfield and Henle could not be fired - they have tenure - it was clear to everyone that this, too, was a hoax.
Garfield and Henle spent the rest of class writing proofs on the board. The students quietly took notes. Christ went back to her office.
There were only two problems left: how the class would top this prank next year, and what to do with the rutabagas.
When measured in constant dollars, the cost of educating a student is about the same now as it was two decades ago. What is different is who pays. Back in 1987, when state funding paid for 84 percent of college costs, students paid $1,732 in tuition at Washington State University. Over the ensuing years, costs have shifted from the state to students. Specifically, under the governor’s latest budget proposal, the state would pay only 35 percent of those costs, while students would pay 65 percent of costs or $10,874 in tuition. Other universities have seen similar shifts in funding sources.OSU and other public universities in Oregon have faced similar declines:
Thirty years ago, state funds covered nearly half of our operating funds; today, that support constitutes only about 13 percent of revenues at OSU. (It's 16 percent at Portland State and 9 percent at the University of Oregon.)The big picture is that nationally we have withdrawn huge amounts of support from our public universities, who have had to make up the shortfall in tuition increases. That's a far bigger driver of costs than how much the people in the development office earn (and if you want to see a real crisis, try firing the entire development office and see how your budget starts declining...).
One alum I met thought the curriculum had been dumbed down as well.Well, that settles it then. I've never met an alum of any other institution who thought the curriculum had been dumbed down, so Smith must really be a terrible place!
I hold no brief on way or the other, I'm simply pointing out that it has a different rep than it has in years past and trying to cite some reasons why.Your "reasons why" are a little silly. Smith has a different reputation than it did in the past because the world changed, its old identity no longer made any sense, and it had to adapt. The whole point of the "Seven Sisters Schools" is that they were "sisters" to Ivy League schools that barred women. When those schools started admitting women, their "sister schools" went into crisis. Why would anyone attend Amherst's sister school when they could attend Amherst? Smith seems to have weathered this crisis pretty well. Some alumnae might not like the way it weathered the crisis, but a women's college in 2012 cannot be the same thing that a women's college was in 1952.
Sounds like you're dissing Smith, if not all-women colleges.No, absolutely not. I think what Smith is now is much more appealing than what it used to be. Now it attracts women who want to go to a women's college, not women who are barred by their gender from going to other elite colleges. But it would be stupid to deny that everything changed when elite all-male colleges went co-ed, and that means that aging alumnae who hanker for the good old days are just going to have to cope. The pool of young women who want to attend women's colleges includes some folks who enjoy parading around with paper mache vulvas. Barring those women is not going to bring back the days when Smith and Wellesley were the only choices that the well-bred college-bound young woman had. Smith has done a wise thing, it seems to me, by broadening their applicant pool and seeking women from all over who want women's colleges, rather than attempting to be all things to all women in Westchester County.
I don't know where and when you went to school (though that might be interesting to discuss)I'm going to assume it was before 1910, because there was a major free speech controversy at the University of Wisconsin that year which revolved around a student organization's decision to invite Emma Goldman to speak on campus. And I don't think there's any porn star today who can come close to being as scandalous as Emma Goldman was in 1910. Also, those of us who listen to NPR know that Malcolm X spoke at Brown in 1961. Universities are supposed to be about the free exchange of ideas, and there's really nothing new about college students listening to lectures by provocative thinkers who come from outside the academy.
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Signed,
jquinby, UGA, '93
posted by jquinby at 7:23 PM on February 24, 2012 [10 favorites]