Sucks to be Berube, I guess. The Red Dragon that is Marxist Higher Indoctrination is slain! Slain! Slain by the power of idiotic Internet cartoon graphics.
After the last couple of elections, it’s become clear that the
greatest challenge for conservatives is taking back the culture.
One of the greatest obstacles to this lies in our universities,
which have been taken over by their politically correct faculty
members. The solution will come from new technologies, and a
classical curriculum, such as that offered by a newly launched
school, LibertasU.
Right.
If you click that last link in the block quote, and I sure wouldn't if I were you, and thank Christ I'm not you because your taste in clothing is ghastly and I wouldn't wear that shit on a bet, you slob, you will be wafted to the Home Web Site of Libertas University, which is not, as it happens, a "university." It is instead a place where if you give them money, they will make you adopt an Online Gravatar that makes you look like an utter tit while they yell at you about how Shakespeare didn't like hippies.
Two models dominate American higher education, and both are
broken. The first is the hugely expensive bricks-and-mortar
university, which drives parents to take out second mortgages to
pay for their child’s tuition and which, without teaching him
anything much of value, indoctrinates him in a sloppy
anti-religious leftism.
That's your basic Berube model right there, Wavy Gravy bin-Stalin motherfucker.
The second are the conventional,
asynchronous (not real-time) online programs being adopted by many
of these same institutions as a means of reducing costs.
Holy horsehockey! Have we somehow stumbled upon something even phonier than MOOCs, in much the same way that the Pyramid Scheme has been made redundant by the Trapezoid?!!?
Nope. Because whatever might be wrong with MOOCs, this is far more baby-brained.
Unlike a bricks-and-mortar school, LibertasU exists exclusively
on the web, which means it eliminates all the costs of operating a
standard, physical campus, to say nothing of the enormous waste on
administrative expenses. This translates into lower tuition and
also provides students, no matter what their age or where they are,
the opportunity to study with first-rate educators who, themselves,
can be located anywhere in the world.
It is also not a place where you can earn any actual college credit.
So good news, this is a place where you can save a lot of money by giving shysters cash for letting them award you an Internet Gold Star, which you can translate into a solid line on your resume by trading in all your vital organs for a half-ton of circus peanuts, which I presume is something else you can probably make happen on the Internet if you are sufficiently persistent, loony, and gullible.*
This, though, is the Best Part.
Teachers and students are present at the same time in scheduled
classes which are held in immersive virtual reality environments
where each person assumes a body or avatar and is able to walk
around, raise their hand to speak, and interact with others, in a
group setting. People report the experience to be “just like being
there,” without the cost and disruption associated with travel to a
bricks-and-mortar classroom.
There is provided, excitingly, a depiction of these "bodies or avatars."
Gosh.
I have pondered this image for a while now, and while all of it is intriguing, I find most fascinating the image of the legless person proudly sprouting from the buttocks of the student sitting at the desk over on the right in the background. You go, girl!
In the Main Tableau, we are pleased to contemplate a clearly terrified black guy in a hoodie. This fellow is confronted by a lynch mob of white people valiantly attempting to grope for their concealed handguns, but who are unable to do so, as they appear lamentably paralytic from slugging Nyquil gin fizzies all weekend at the virtual frat party.
Shazam.
And what are they learning?
• Dante: Divine
Comedy, Divine Spirituality: The Inferno – Part 1 of a three
part series to be given by Robert Royal (founder and president of
the Faith & Reason Institute in Washington, D.C. and
editor-in-chief of The Catholic Thing.
And fair play! I have always very dearly wanted to see The Catholic Thing square off against The Presbyterian Hulk.
• The
Enemy Within: The Portrayal of Espionage and Subversion in the
Contemporary Popular Culture – to be given by James Bowman
(resident scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy
Center in Washington, and The American Spectator’s
movie and culture critic).
It's good that they have a Resident Scholar over there; if the Free Market prevailed, this specimen of last-century Culture Warring would be fit perhaps for a gig as the Exalted Itinerant Hobo of the Get a Job Institute of Applied Capitalism.
And then there is this, which to be properly savored, needs to be chewed upon with the full awareness that this whole project is billed as a Necessary Step towards Wresting Back the Culture in Order to Win Future Elections for Conservatives.
• Shakespeare’s
British Monarchy: Justice and Statecraft in Richard II, Henry IV,
and Henry V – to be given by John Alvis (professor of English
and director of American Studies at the University of Dallas, where
he has taught since 1969).
Good luck there, fellas.
To be honest, I feel a tiny bit bad about making fun of this harebrained attempt to make 1980s-vintage right-wing faux-hi-culture boondoggerel all Hip by delivering it via the Cutting Edge Technology of 2005. When your batty grandpa tries to mount a laser cannon on his dirigible, you can't help but kind of root for the demented old coot.
And it's nice to see someone failing to get the memo that the hep new far right thing is damn the humanities, full STEM ahead.
But then again, remember, this is a con. A pathetic con, but a con nonetheless. There is, you of course realize, no more reprehensible Web-site than NewsMax, whose business model is to make old white people crazy and paranoid so it can sucker them into parting with their retirement funds, either through consipracy theory propaganda or else ratshit medical quackery?
At any rate, I'm quite proud of "boondoggerel" and it's going on my CV, see if it isn't, damn you.
*Like, say someone applying to law school.
