How would this be bad form? If this is from a "major university" like you claimed, and if Marxism is bad, isn't it good to tell us this university so we aren't blindsided by it when we enroll our kids in it?
It's not like you'd be posting forbidden knowledge; most universities publish their required curriculum.
I am not going to be baited into bashing specific people or universities. Feel free to arrive at whatever conclusion satisfies your thinking. I don’t care.
No one is trying to bait you into anything. But when you make an extraordinary claim, you need to provide some supporting evidence. Obviously you care whether or not people believe what you wrote to some extent, otherwise why did you take the time to write it at all?
Who do you think you're going to harm? The University doesn't think there's anything wrong with what they did, because I guarantee the course requirements are publicly available.
OK, I retract "baiting". Still not going to publish anything more.
> you need to provide some supporting evidence
I don't.
> Obviously you care whether or not people believe what you wrote to some extent
I do, but...
> Who do you think you're going to harm?
My son.
> I guarantee the course requirements are publicly available.
Likely true. However the dynamics that lead to having no option but to take such a class without any balancing context --within the class or through a second class-- can only be had by experiencing the journey.
I realize what I going to say is a personal perspective and as such it is deeply biased:
To me, as a classically trained entrepreneur, neutral student of history and descendant of genocide survivors, teaching a distorted benevolent version of Marxism to kids while not teaching any of the massive downfalls, pain, suffering and death the utterly failed ideology produced is equivalent to, as an atheist, forcing religious dogma to atheists. There is nothing wrong with learning about both Marxism and religion. We should absolutely teach them, but they should be taught without distortion and in the context of other relevant knowledge.
If the goal is to indoctrinate, you exclude everything outside of the preferred ideology. If, on the other hand, the objective is to educate, you present as much of the human experience as possible, without favor for one or the other, teach students to reason critically and let them be.
As I suggested in my other response, if you are interested in a perspective on what has been going on in academia and how it happened, please watch this interview with an Oxford/Stanford/Harvard professor who chose to expose some of these issues and paid the price for it:
If you think that posting a comment on hacker news revealing that your son was forced to take a particular class that you disagree with is going to harm your son, you are being deeply paranoid.
I went back to school to finish my CS degree about 5 years ago. I was a libertarian until a few years before that, and until a year ago I was in grad school.
I was also one of very few Bush voters in a liberal leaning History department during the start of the Iraq war.
I don't need to watch a Youtube video designed to scare conservative parents to understand what is going on in academia.
It is most certainly not common at American Universities to require CS students to take an entire class devoted to Marxism. That's why I asked for evidence because it is an extraordinary claim. And it sounds like a claim designed feed the conservative paranoia regarding college.
Please stop accusing people of that which you know nothing about. It is OK to disagree. To go from there to ascribe intent and motive is, well, unfair at best.
Sorry but if you show up on a public forum and start making deragotory statments about the university system as a whole, and then refuse to provide any supporting evidence to back up those claims, I'm going to question your motive.
You seem to have a serious axe to grind with college in general.
> There you go, yet another conclusion about something you have absolutely no knowledge about.
From your public comments this is my conclusion.
You have an axe to grind with academia, because you believe that academia is indoctrinating kids with Marxist philosophy. If that's not what you believe, feel free to retract your statements.
Yes, instead you're going to bash all universities without any evidence...the only conclusion I can draw here is that your intended purpose is to sew general distrust in academia...that or you just grabbed a story from some chain email and are rebranding it as your own.
Have you considered the idea that speaking out could have negative consequences for my son, who still has a couple of years at that university?
They have already shown their cards in so many ways. One of my son's roommates during his first year (an 18 year old) both sold alcohol and drugs from their shared dorm room and consumed them in such amounts that it was common for him to vomit in his bed multiple times a week and generally be dysfunctional, much less study.
Both parents from the remaining two kids in the room brought this up to university authorities, including police. I physically went to meetings with them. The other parents did the same. We wrote countless letters. We wanted this kid to get help. He was here from another country, had no support system and was harming himself and others in incredible ways.
The university utterly ignored our requests. They told us the only option we had was for our kids to move to a different dorm room. Never mind the kid who was killing himself while dealing drugs and alcohol.
Fast forward to the end of the term, he takes a flying leap from the top of a flight of stairs and suffers serious physical damage. The university still does nothing, in fact, despite failing his courses they allow him to continue and enroll for the next term. He spends much of his time in bed, gains a tremendous amount of weight and his quality of life became unbearable. I'll stop the story at that point.
The university, did not care. We could have saved this kid's life. They had at least six people screaming at the top of their lungs for months when this problem started. They did nothing. And the kid paid the price. Well, I guess he was worth $60K per year, it must have been worth it.
This kind of thing --not this exact kind of thing-- goes on at many universities across the US. I am in touch with parents with kids in universities ranging from Berkeley to MIT. They all have stories of ideologically or financially (or both) wrongdoing. It's just the way it is.
For an interesting perspective, watch this interview with Niall Ferguson (the first half or so is relevant to this topic):
