Originally Posted by Anonymous
Originally Posted by Anonymous
Originally Posted by Anonymous
Kid is good - no surprise. I don't get committing to a school like UNC when he could have gone anywhere (ND, Duke, Ivy, etc.). To each his own ....


This is where guidance by a parent is imperative. This kid is good enough to commit yet picks the school that just happens to be current D1 champs. No one can say how much more he will develop in the next couple of years. Depending on his academic status and projected future potential in the class room; its a parents responsibility to guide the student athlete to the best fit possible. Perhaps in this case; UNC was a good choice if the parameters where all weighed in.

Our early commit was just as good in the classroom as on the field and we thought a shot at IVY was in his best interest as long as he stayed the course wrt both aspects.

We sat as a family and looked at all the pros and cons of each school and what he liked about them and if it fit into what he thought might be a place where he could pursue numerous academic options. He chose IVY and we stressed that at any moment if he thought it was too much pressure; that he could change course. So far so good...one year away from his goal now and more happy with his choice than when he made it.


Perhaps a good choice for your son. However, have you really looked into what's happening at "IVY" schools lately? Are you aware of the extreme radical leftist environment that exists at many of these schools? Are you aware that the freedom of ideas and self expression are only available to those that follow along with the leftist agenda? Are you aware that if your son does not support this agenda within his course work he will be held accountable with poor grades? Are you further aware that the support of any idea other than those approved by the radical left are met with extreme social backlash? Most certainly you are unaware.


well, small dissertation on this topic would be fruitless, thus we should consider the following:

Professors (especially in fields where this is relevant, like social science and humanities) are overwhelmingly leftist, and a non-trivial number are very left-wing (~18% of social scientists identify as Marxists).
Some departments focus on research which exclusively deals with leftist thought (gender studies, much of sociology, much of African American studies/critical race theory, much of English literature).
Speakers, rallies, and protests on campus are pretty much exclusively left-wing.
When there are speakers, rallies, or protests on campus which have a right-wing bent, there is a non-trivial chance that they will either be interrupted and drowned out by protesters or shut down by the administration.
The culture of universities is overwhelmingly leftist. Defending non-leftist views will not make you popular: it will probably alienate quite a few people.
Now I want to qualify these remarks:
First, event though professors tend toward leftism, this usually makes no difference at all in how their classes are conducted.
While some departments are functionally left-wing think tanks, there's nothing wrong with that: who cares if sociologists publish a lot of studies on the racism of the death penalty or something along those lines? The real problem is that the ideological homogeneity of these and other departments has made them resistant to hiring non-conformists (in this case, conservatives). One of the reason why leftism is dominating the academy is because leftism has deliberately excluding rightism from entering.
There's no problem with left-wing speakers on campus. However, these are the only views that students will ever be exposed to in the course of attending university. Right wing speakers and events face tremendous opposition from both students and faculty which makes it almost impossible for them to actually hold events on campus.
Take the Milo Yiannopolis incident at DePaul (I'm not a fan of Milo, but consider the incident): DePaul administration tried its hardest to justify disinviting the speaker from campus, then demanded a two-thousand-dollar fee for security for the event (this is apparently not ordinarily demanded for a speaker, and they asked only at the last minute), then they insisted that the College Republicans read a humiliating letter discussing the university's commitment to diversity and non-endorsement of their views before Milo be allowed to speak. When protesters showed up and interrupted the event and (possibly) assaulted the speaker, security did not remove them, because they were told by university administrators to not intervene. After the event, the president of DePaul released a letter about the incident, in which he stated that although it was unfortunate that the College Republicans' event was disrupted, Milo's views were in tension with the values of the university: it hardly seems appropriate to take time to criticize the speaker whose forum was illegally and forcefully shut down, and it's definitely not something the university would have done for a similarly controversial leftist.
There's no problem with college students being left-wing. Each new generation tends to be more liberal than the last, and there are good things to say about this. However, campus politics is often overly emotional, and simple political disagreements are used to justify excessive outrage, personal hatred, and harassment: this almost always takes the form of leftists hating and harassing non-leftist students (or students of a left-wing cause harassing students who are critical of that cause). Invoking trigger warnings, offense-taking, virtue-signaling, and extensive apologies for privilege are ways to 'get ahead' in the eyes of one's fellow students: the more offended or apologetic a student is, the better his or her social standing, and, since offense-taking requires an accused offense-giver (whose standing suffers as a result), this means that social status is intensely competitive. It means that student relationships become fundamentally antagonistic.
The problem isn't that universities are left-wing. Leftism is only incidental to the problem on campus: there have been times in history when similar problems have taken a right-wing form (I am thinking of the Prussian/German university system from the late-19th century to the early-20th century). But universities today are ideologically homogeneous, and the administration officially sanctions the repression of certain points of view.

It is not just the IVY's but all of the traditionally liberal universities that will have similar environments with each their own gauntlet of social issues to be navigated

A student with his own mindset will take from his or her school experience that which will offer them the most. That the campuses have become a liberal world will not deter most from their goals.