Classroom Jokes and Campus Oaks
As I’m finishing this article, beanie-capped protestors have chained themselves to construction equipment in midtown Atlanta during morning rush hour. They must wreak havoc over plans for a police training facility—to be located far from the project they interrupted, far from midtown crime, and far from the commuters and workers trapped by this selfish tantrum. These protestors destroy others’ work, waste public resources, and behave like toddlers to carry on a radical anti-policing crusade—in other words, they do all the things the academic left has been doing for years.
I’m sitting in a parking garage in Auburn, Alabama, and as I write, it’s pouring. Just before this deluge, I finished a five-mile walk around a campus that was the birthplace of so much good in my life. It’s a joy to walk its familiar paths now that I’m several chapters into the story—well past the youthful intrigues and romantic speculations of college life.
When you’re a college student, life’s every possibility lies ahead, and if you’re the brooding type, it’s all documented. My generation bore its soul in journals; younger souls (and bodies) are now bared in social media confessionals. The vicissitudes of youth craft dreams of a future paved in romance, and hopefully with the gold of a college degree. According to my ancient journals, I had quite a future mapped out, down to my husband’s hair color (got that one wrong).
Walking through this campus decades later, I feel it all again— a million little impressions formed among beautiful oaks and brick buildings. I remember just as vividly the dreamy speculations and nagging questions of my college years. At fifty, I’ve resolved some of those puzzles—or rather, God has; but as a young coed, answers escaped me, so I channeled my worries into sweaty runs along the gravel and concrete paths around campus. I still walk them every time I visit, always a little awed by my thirty-year friendship with old trees. If only they knew!
I suspect today’s college students know even less than those old trees, though. Their world has contracted to the size of apps, bereft of the magic and freedom that was once the oxygen of college life. When I watch today’s students walking—head down, eyes on phone—I wonder if they’ll ever enjoy transportive strolls down memory lane. With the state of today’s campuses and the malcontents filling their faculty rolls, will they even want to?
College campuses have always been home to the left’s otherwise unemployable star gazers to some degree. I had a few goofy professors in the College of Liberal Arts—one often finds them in abundance there, and mostly in the English or social science departments—but mine managed to teach class without letting it all hang out. We didn’t live inside phones, and real life dealt an instant rebuke to the most ludicrous ideas. We also moved through the day untethered to social media, filled class binders with handwritten notes, and remained mostly ignorant of our professors’ sexual proclivities. The syllabus didn’t reveal a professor’s pronouns—our eyes did.
Not so for my own children; even on a relatively conservative campus, they can now hear the continual drip of dreary leftism. One professor, who cancels class regularly, focuses her “composition” lectures on life with her autistic, transgendered child. Another professor whines that “The few. The proud. The Marines” is an “ablest” and non-inclusive message—as it should be, where fitness is concerned. A pronoun-praising lecturer is effusive, if nothing else; during the first roll call, she cloyingly fawned over tongue-twisting ethnic names; “that’s so beautiful!”
Fortunately, most students haven’t yet lost their sense of humor, so mockery abounds. From their predictably odd looks to their dreary pontificating, leftist professors—and especially the apprentices known as Teaching Assistants— offer plenty of rich material for memes. This is perfectly natural; those who wrote dissertations in “Fat Justice” should expect the ridicule they earn. Still, most parents didn’t shell out $50,000 for comedy, though we must credit today’s students for making lemonade of lemons.
If only the real world could just laugh it off, though; if only there were no real consequences for the drivel of college lecture halls. As I’m finishing this article, beanie-capped protestors have chained themselves to construction equipment in midtown Atlanta during morning rush hour. They must wreak havoc over plans for a police training facility—to be located far from the project they interrupted, far from midtown crime, and far from the commuters and workers trapped by this selfish tantrum. These protestors destroy others’ work, waste public resources, and behave like toddlers to carry on a radical anti-policing crusade—in other words, they do all the things the academic left has been doing for years.
Be seeing you
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