There is a growing concern about University’s treating students like emotional wrecks triggered by any routine terms or opposing views. Leed’s Trinity journalism department however has reached a new level of manic mollycoddling with a warning to all faculty that they need to avoid using capital letters because uppercase letters may “scare them into failure.”
The school is concerned that writing a word in caps could cause “worry” in students about the difficulty of an assignment.,
This type of over-protective attitude is creating a generation of emotional basket cases who cannot deal with the stress of everyday life. It is a disservice to our kids.
Snowflakes, it looks more like a blizzard.
NB, ‘Leeds Trinity University” was, prior to 1970, what was known in this country as a ‘teachers college’ or ‘normal school’. It’s an emblem of the hypertrophy of British higher education and the failure to sort the different currents of tertiary schooling in Britain into institutions of a dedicated type and personality. Leeds is a city of some size (a shade larger than greater Denver), but you needn’t have a multiplicity of institutions in a city that size devoted to the university’s conventional pursuits: academics, music, divinity, medicine, law, and (in the modern era) agronomy, veterinary medicine, architecture, and engineering. The capacity of the University of Leeds (whose pedigree dates to 1831) as we speak almost suffices. Federations of vocational schools could satisfy the rest.
I’m with Mike Rowe that there needs to be more support given to trade schools. People are getting useless degrees in women’s studies or basketweaving that don’t parlay into making a living. Trade schools are looked down upon by the elite, but if the world goes to heck in a hand basket, it’s the skilled trades that keep things running.
Again, women’s studies programs are a supply side problem, Karen. They are patronage for favored political interests. About 1.8 million baccalaureate degrees are awarded each year in this country. Fewer than 2,000 are awarded in women’s studies. Very few students take an interest in this crap. As for ‘basket weaving’, it’s just barely possible that the School of American Crafts at the Rochester Institute of Technology is offering courses.
About 65% of the baccalaureate degrees awarded in this country are in vocational subjects. They’re not useless, but many fields are oversubscribed and in some cases the degree is a paper-hoop and the course content is suffused with humbug. Business degrees account for about 20% of the total and > 30% of those awarded vocational degrees. In rough descending order of incidence you have nursing degrees, teaching degrees (elementary teaching modal), the vocational wing of communications, physical education / recreations / kinesiology / exercise science, information technology, the vocational wing of psychology, criminal justice &c.,
In re degrees in academics and the arts, about 30% are in the natural sciences, about 8% in mathematical disciplines, and shy of 20% in the quantitative social research disciplines.
Maybe 15% of those awarded baccalaureate degrees in this country are studying performing arts, studio arts, the humanities, or the social sciences with weaker operational measures of competence.
DSS – degrees in the non-book fields is as hard or harder depending on your native abilities. Let us say you want to be an actor. Well, you have to take probably 6 3-semeseter hour acting classes, which you will be required to pass with a C or better, and majors are put in the same class. Then you have to take stage movement, stage combat, history of the theatre, costuming (where you will be required to design one set of costume plates for a play and display them for criticism to your classmates), technical theatre, introduction to theatre. And you will be expected to act in at least one production each semester, which burns up some of your study time (remember you are taking other university courses). And you will be expected to work in a technical capacity on at least one production while you are taking tech theatre. There is a weekly lab that goes with this class where you will be building sets, painting scenery, hanging lights, etc. When you take costuming you will expected to spend at least 3 hours a week in the costume lab sewing costumes. And don’t forget, you are expected to attend all productions that you are not in. There is also a deconstruction of the production held about a week after production ends which are expected to attend. At this the professors and master’s candidates will rip everyone to shreds in front of all in attendance.
OFF Topic………..What about the princess’s e-mails?
FishWings – it is interesting the number of people who used private email, including Obama, Comey, probably half the senior FBI and DoJ. Just as long as she sorts out her yoga schedule and wedding planning the government can have the rest, after she destroys 33,000.
Sure, Fish Wings. Here is Professor Turley’s take on the matter:
http://insider.foxnews.com/2018/11/20/turley-ivanka-trump-use-private-emails-baffling-not-same-level-hillary
I agree that it was baffling for her to conduct any business, no matter how trivial, on a private email. However, due to the precedent set by Hillary Clinton, she could send the plans to the latest nuclear sub to her nanny and not get prosecuted.
Similarities – she discussed government scheduling business through a private email.
Differences – She didn’t lie about the private email, she didn’t withheld records of those emails from the government, destroy private emails discussing government business, set up a series of private servers in her bathroom, where anyone with access to her house with zero security clearance could access them, she didn’t have tech guys without any clearance back it up to the Cloud, which is like shouting the contents on the street corner, she did not distribute classified information, she didn’t lie and claim she didn’t recognize classified material or markings, she didn’t destroy thousands of those emails while under subpoena, she didn’t wipe her pirate server where she hid her communications with Bleach Bit and Acid Wash, and then lie about it, shrug her shoulders, mug for the camera, and ask, “Do you mean, did I wipe it with a cloth?”
What Ivanka did was wrong. It is not in the same galaxy as what Hillary Clinton did. After Hillary Clinton got off for acts several orders of magnitude greater and in violation of multiple federal laws including the mishandling of classified information, they had better not look hard at Ivanka, who never discussed any classified information at all.
That said, really Ivanka?
Hope this clarifies the question obviously preying upon your mind today.
She is an unpaid adviser to her father. No one has yet demonstrated that the e-mails were anything but personal communications.
Fish Wings has remained silent after the rug got pulled out from under their triumph.
If journalism students are frightened by capital letters, how will they be able to cover the news which includes murder, mayhem, mutilation and majascules?
The economy of newsgathering has collapsed in the last 20 years. The J-school students may include some people mad to earn a living in that occupation, but a larger number who are clueless about their prospects or have flunked more demanding or practical courses of study. The better part of a generation ago, you’d occasionally see a bit of commentary from an editor to the effect that the J-school graduates he’d hired and fired did no better and no worse than the English majors he’d hired and fired. Maybe all such programs should be closed down.