It's sad to see what the student council at Howard University -- a place once "very much influenced by the values, traditions and social codes of the black community" -- considers an important priority, and how their elders define "help[ing] these students grow to be mature adults."
It's even sadder to see what some Christian colleges consider a "freshman orientation." (Videos contain offensive language, actions, and themes.)
Comments:
And yes, the GA orientation video is bad. (I would've commented on it a week ago, but I was on paternity leave. Cigars, anyone?) It is just another example of loss of Christian identity that is occurring in many church-affiliated colleges in general, and in ELCA-affiliated schools specifically. Even back in the '80s, I remember visiting a Lutheran college during my senior year in high school, and stopping by the beautiful Gothic chapel for a noontime vesper. A more lonely place you will never see. Apart from that, there was really nothing on campus that would set the school apart from any number of small, secular liberal arts colleges in the Midwest.
A former chairman of the GA board of trustees commented on another board I frequent (don't tell Gina) that the trustees were uniformly appalled, and the group will not be offering the orientation session in the future. I guess that's worth something.
Isn't the purpose of a college education to prepare a person for life as an educated adult? I can guarantee that this kind of thing is exactly what post-college adults face. Some employers even have mandatory re-education classes for violators.
What's missing here, of course, is the *preparation*. Neither of these institutions (a word that no doubt causes Christopher to shout "You got *THAT* right!!") does anything more in these examples than to put new arrivals in a situation and compel them to deal with it. There's no intellectual foundation given here - and hence, no real education is happening. And that's because a true intellectual look at these issues would expose the administrative hypocrisy.
(And, channeling my inner Dave Barry, "Swedish Warlord" would be a good name for a rock band.)
As for the article about Howard's (and other colleges') dorm rules, I think it's worth digging deeper. Why do we have dorms anyway? I can't think of a greater antithesis to a college education than the dorm.
These are a product of the post WWII era when colleges/universities grew rapidly due to the GI Bill and the push for more defense technology. Before that dorms were a rarity.
But they built dorms to handle the large influx of students, who were taught that they needed a college degree to get a new job. Now you find many articles on the "Higher Education bubble," and you see that this growth in "education" was really just another Ponzi scheme. Dorms provided a good money-maker for colleges, and a chance to give jobs to liberal/unemployable grad students in the social sciences.
While this is reasonably well understood and documented, what isn't so much is how all of this played a big role in changing the routine of courtship and marriage. In short, it wrecked most of the long-standing traditions.
Worse still, Christians bought into the new paradigm, all in. They expected to send their kids off to a "good Christian school" so they could find a Godly spouse.
Well, your second link sheds some light on those good Christian schools. Unfortunately, understanding the connections between college, courtship, and cavorting aren't so accepted, and this will probably be dismissed as more rambling by Torch.