Reveal Your Uncool Conservative Beliefs Here

i didn't hear huntington's name (or bernard lewis') once until after i graduated! and i went to a relatively conservative undergrad institution.

i heard of huntington only after 9/11. i did read fukuyama as an undergrad (on my own initiative) and it was sort of a handy introduction to hegel, iirc.

Marcos when did you work at Hampshire? That was where I attended undergrad (07-11). Heard at least one fellow student of mine use the nickname "Judy Buts"

I have never heard of Samuel Huntington.

i think, outside of prestigious ivys and their ilk, you can pretty much graduate most colleges without reading any book other than a textbook.

― ryan, Tuesday, February 14, 2017 1:01 PM (fifty-six minutes ago) Bookmark

this isn't true but even if it were, there is a reason why students aren't required to buy a bunch of books outside of their textbooks
they are expensive

you guys are revealing your educational privilege if you don't think there are plenty of non-traditional students who benefit substantially from college. my workplace was recently identified as #1 in the state in helping to raise the socioeconomic status of our students. #1!!

i'm sure in some circumstances some colleges and some college degrees can raise a student's socioeconomic status. i think for many other colleges and many other students they are a trap to stick students with thousands of dollars in debt and, depending on their major, for an education that offers no value in the marketplace.

i understand that and yes, that is true SOME of the time
but to make sweeping generalizations is to discredit the very useful hard work SOME people are doing to improve their lives and their families' lives. it's making students like mine even more invisible than they already are. and i rightfully object to that.

Marcos when did you work at Hampshire? That was where I attended undergrad (07-11). Heard at least one fellow student of mine use the nickname "Judy Buts"

― softie (silby), Tuesday, February 14, 2017 3:00 PM (nine minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

haha i was there from 08-09!!

xp let's all endeavor to make un-invisible both those students benefiting from college educations and those trapped by them!

ok let's :)

i'm admittedly a little bitter bc i have an obscene amount of student debt even still. but the light at the end of the tunnel is in sight - i will be absolutely done by 2021 assuming i don't pay them off sooner.

I think the extent to which skills that were not (and to some extent, still are not) taught in primary education are now necessary not just for employment but for some level of engagement in social society is underrated.

For every debate we have about whether an academic writer was well-known by humanities majors, there's at least one college student out there who would benefit from a basic reading comprehension course. Some of this need is coming from the failure of public schools to keep up with shifting curriculum and testing requirements while under heavy fire. But a lot of it is the realization that individuals need a lot more career and skill mobility than in previous times.

we're entering an era of highly resistant diseases and weakening antibiotics with no new ones in the development pipeline - a return to a more sexually conservative culture might not be a bad thing, and might be an inevitability. i just hope it happens in a way that's not perverse, ignorant and misogynistic (i'm not optimistic there)

why do we need that when we have condoms?

sorry i know this is a safe space for uncool conservative opinions

if those worked we wouldn't be where we are

it's gonna be all those senile boomers in retirement communities incubating antibiotic resistant syphilis

Small world, I went to Amherst around the same time.

I have more uncool conservative beliefs than cool liberal ones

they're uncool with self-identifying conservatives too though

The Pioneer Valley is the secret center of the universe

I'm quite sceptical of drawing/painting tablets. Some people can do drawings that look like they were done on paper but a lot of the colour and painted style images just look wrong and ugly to me. But I'd hope you can paint like an old master on them.

I think you're thinking of Donna Haraway, who wrote the Cyborg Manifesto,

oops yes I totally am

plus, I never read butler or haraway when i was in college (still haven't) but i did read lol camille paglia in college, shame on me

this isn't true but even if it were, there is a reason why students aren't required to buy a bunch of books outside of their textbooks
they are expensive

not to be all uncool radical about this but the textbook racket has got to go. also a half dozen paperback books is about the same price as a massive and needlessly expensive textbook.

back to uncool conservative: higher education in particular needs to involve in-depth at-length seminar-style close reading of gobs of text and not glossy bullet points to be regurgitated on multiple choice tests.

btw i like butler fine but really recommend haraway. she's a trip. there's a new book where my former dissertation advisor interviews her that's quite good.

Here's an uncool conservative belief: don't bother w butler; outside one clever application of jl austin she hasn't got much going for her

But, like, 99% of theorists are one-trick ponies, and Butler's trick was REALLY good.

I have no idea what's in chapter one of Discipline and Punish, for instance, but I had to read chapter two over and over and over...

xp to ryan
yeah i agree that the textbook industry is a racket but that doesn't change things really

just because it's easy for YOU to get a handful of paperbacks on the internet doesn't mean it's easy for every student enrolled in a course, much less every student in 12 different sections of a course to do so in a timely manner before their classes start. your leisure time and consumer expertise are showing.

i was so broke and textbooks so expensive when I was in college (12-15 years ago), I often bought older versions of the textbook on half.com and just figured I'd deal with any headache due to things missing from my book.

it was the only way i could take the classes really.

I have no idea how the textbook racket is doing these days and am afraid to know

toward the end of my college years, one of my classmates (literally sat next to this dude in a couple classes) put together a textbook resale website that was just for our college at first. probably a few people at different schools did this, but his took off and did well enough he sold it.

before that, it was all trying to sell to your friends/neighbors or via bad classifieds, trying to figure out if instructors were requiring a new edition of a book, going to either the school-owned or independent bookstore to get one of the handful of used copies still in circulation, and eventually scrambling to borrow a book or two for the week it took the bookstore to get more copies

apparently my classmate's site still kind-of exists as chegg.com

they had a buyback system in the school bookstore which was garbage, you'd get like $5-10. then I started SELLING them on half.com and would make half my investment back.

textbook access is a major problem. i heard some study a year or so ago that mentioned a huge percentage of students just don't buy them because they are too expensive

going to either the school-owned or independent bookstore to get one of the handful of used copies still in circulation,

a lot of college bookstores are owned by follett too and from what i understand they are a shitty company. used textbooks are still marked up like crazy and yea like neanderhtal says the buyback system is trash

there is a movement to create and promote openly licensed and freely accessible textbooks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_educational_resources. i have some librarian friends who are deeply involved in campus efforts to promote these. students and faculty have been excited by this

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_textbook

I just remember it being a shitshow because you could go to the university bookstore right before the semester started in the hopes that the books in the "HIST 211" bin were right but it's possible some miscommunication happened and that was the book for the other instructor's session. You could never know for sure unless you got the syllabus from the first day of class. The non-university bookstore was even worse, because half the time they'd just label whatever book was returned from last semester with no knowledge of whether that was what this semester's instructor would use

norms of academia don't really change fast enough, i think because it's creepy hierarchical so no one wants to call out gatekeepers

many fields don't do close readings of primary texts even at the graduate level for good reason. but there are quality free textbooks in most topics now, imo it's immoral to assign a big expensive one at this point and you should be shamed for doing it or at the very least for writing one. i had a professor who writes a big bloated, full of colour stock images, just a stupid fucking textbook, now in its 37th edition. met his daughter and she told me he used the profits of the book to buy a summer house. fucking prick

ditto articles should all be free, pre-prints should all be posted. everyone agrees on these things and yet nothing changes

The textbook business is in the doldrums. It's close to crisis point. There is a huge amount of IP theft and reselling which has radically impacted margins. It also doesn't help that enrolments are down so there is a glut of books and fewer students. The long-term options are similar to the music industry - slash prices for digital or bring in some kind of value add like integrated LMSs. Margins have been good in the past, possibly too good, but textsbooks can take years to work on and have a limited shelf life,

xp - our textbook buyback was pretty good. me and a friend one year went to the largest freshman dorm after finals and before move out, and offered to take their textbooks back to the bookstore for them, and split the buyback fee. I think we did okay for a one afternoon half-assed sales effort. It helps to go to a school with a bunch of rich ppl.

there is no across-the-board good option, it all sucks

at another point this same friend went to the same freshman dorm and made $ selling oregano.

a couple instructors were of the "class notes should be what you need, but if you want a reading you can buy this textbook on cd-rom" variety (lol i'm old) and a few just tried giving us as many disparate materials under fair use as they could. these were... horrible and not as good as a real textbook

the problem with the open textbook bit was that some of the professors who actually liked to instruct (as opposed to doing research/publishing) would use textbooks as a revenue stream. so you ended up with books printed/bound by the official bookstore, or a required textbook where your professor was one of the authors (the case with a calculus instructor)

Yes, that's the biggest racket - assigning your own book.

the worst was this one German class where you had a specific textbook for both semesters and it came with this CD-Rom that had activities that we were required to print out and turn in.

I believe I either lost the cd rom or it stopped working or something, so I tried to find a way to acquire another copy from the publisher - no dice unless I bought a whole other textbook, they said.

fortunately a friend in class burnt me a copy - in return I did one of his homework assignments and spelled his first name wrong on it

end all four-year arts/humanities degrees and allow only 1 year max to study those subjects and, if studying arts/humanities, make a trades subject a mandatory "major," decreasing four-year degrees to something like 2 or 3 year trades (maybe vocational) degrees; subjects in trades/voc schools would only be available on estimated demand in the workforce in the student's estimated graduating year

all u need to know u can read in the Bible anyway imo

stuck in the ice age

so basically, a community college associate degree plus vocational studies? xp

well college associate degrees are 2 years of general education, including science, generally. where i'm from, you can choose a concentration, but i would do away with that

in terms of helping you get a job, quite a few science subjects are also equally as useless as arts/humanities subjects

restructuring an associates to include arts/science to maybe 1-1.5 years, then doing all requirements including main subjects for your trade to finish in 3 years would be good