Welcome to European Tribune. It's gone a bit quiet around here these days, but it's still going.
Display:
Maybe it was more of an Anglo thing, but from the 70s onwards you very nearly couldn't do any of the humanities without being exposed to left-wing critiques and positions.

Right wing faculty positions weren't common, except possibly in science and engineering, and there they were never talked about in class.

The London School of Economics used to be a bastion of the far left. That was partly because of radical student action towards the end of the sixties, but partly because the culture was already pre-existing from the 30s onwards, and being an intellectual meant you were almost certainly a communist or communist sympathiser.

From the start of the 90s MBA culture started to erode that, and now it's becoming formulaic and marginalised, and is being replaced with a much more small-minded and pinched entrepreneurial spirit.

This has done so much damage to universities that the current meme is - why bother? You'll get a better paid job more quickly with vocational experience.

Which is quite true. But there's no longer much sense of going to university to learn, or question, or challenge - it's strictly about finding yourself a shelf on the job market in the hope that someone rich and important notices you.

by ThatBritGuy (thatbritguy (at) googlemail.com) on Sat May 10th, 2008 at 05:09:45 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Others have rated this comment as follows:

Display:

Occasional Series