Blame the professors

April 23, 2007

Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings reports that some wingnuts have latched onto blaming the VT English program for Cho. She quotes James Lewis, who goes on for a bit about all the horrible Marxism and nihilism he seems to think is going on there. And then he says:

The question I have is: Are university faculty doing their jobs? At one time college teachers were understood to have a parental role. Take a look at the hiring and promotion criteria for English at VT, and you see what their current values are. Acting in loco parentis, with the care, protectiveness, and alertness for trouble among young people is the last thing on their minds. [ ... ]

I’m sorry but VT English doesn’t look like a place that gives lost and angry adolescents the essential boundaries for civilized behavior. In fact, in this perversely disorienting PoMo world, the very words “civilized behavior” are ridiculed — at least until somebody starts to shoot students, and then it’s too late. A young culture-shocked adolescent can expect no firm guidance here. But we know that already.

Let us all try to throw Mr. Lewis a lifeline over here to the 21^st century. He seems to be a few decades behind. The vast majority of students in American universities are not adolescents, they are adults. The university cannot act en loco parentis because the parents have little to no legal authority to make decisions for their children; at least, they can only make those decisions which the now-grown children have granted permission for them to make.

This has been the case for several decades now.

For undergraduate members of the English department, the English faculty’s job is to prepare those students for careers either as writers or as academics themselves. The faculty presume “the essential boundaries for civilized behavior” have been communicated during the time the student was a minor, as they should and as they must. It is not their job to indoctrinate students into particular conservative sociology behavior-molds.

Cho’s problem was not that he was not taught how to behave properly. His problem was that he was mentally ill and under-treated. For the millions of other graduates of similar English departments in state universities all across this great nation the system has been working pretty well.

Posted in Diary, Speaking Very Slowly