While this works for the vast majority of colleges including Hillsdale, this isn’t always possible for the following reasons:
Some colleges mandate students stay in dorms for all 4 years unless one meets one of the rare exceptional conditions necessitating living off campus.
2 Some colleges won’t treat you like an adult even if you live/move off-campus. For instance, Liberty U’s handbook clearly states off-campus students have mandatory curfew(must be off campus by midnight unless special permission is provided), aren’t allowed to participate in political demonstrations unless the demonstration’s cause is approved by admins and permission to participate is granted, limitations of visitations of one’s off-campus apartments by members of the opposite sex or vice versa, the campus authorities reserve the right to conduct inspections of off-campus residences to ensure no drugs/alcohol* or “contraband” contrary to the religious teachings of the college. The latter includes some Christian music including those made by fellow co-religionists. Was surprised to see the last part.
Possession of alcohol even if one's over 21 or association with those who possess/consume alcohol is prohibited for students while enrolled at Liberty. If caught, they can be punished and/or fined by school authorities, have off-campus privileges rescinded, and/or even possibly expelled from the U.
Your post means zilch as it presents no evidence of anything. It is just a statement of what you want to believe.
In communication means absolutely nothing. One could be in communication and communicate not to do as much as [ossible and let the riot go on, which is some say the admin did. Obviously, you are clueless about what the UCB police union is saying.
The police union lawyer would not be saying the above if this were not the views told to him by some 400 UCB police who he represents. The school police head can put out CYA statements, but clearly the police on the ground were told to stand down by someone at the school.
Next time would be interesting to watch. We will see if the USC admin learns anything.
My main point was the “house mom” function never went completely away, even at secular, public colleges. In many cases, they just renamed the position to housing director or something else. In others, you divided the responsibility among several part-time positions, RAs, and made it a job for grad students or older undergrads. Liberty is an extreme example, even compared to Hillsdale. If you don’t like their rules, I would assume you would go somewhere else.
@roethlisburger - at most schools, RAs (or whatever you think is analogous to “house mom”) don’t enforce curfews or make sure men and women aren’t spending time together at night, because those are things adults are usually allowed to do. You can say RAs are the same as house moms but they’re not–they may be derived from house moms, but by that logic Portuguese is Latin.
However, unlike the house mothers of the early-mid-'60s and before and the much more restrictive and patronizing rules which did treat undergrads much more like children back then, the current RAs, housing directors, etc are much more hands off in comparison.
Also, with a few exceptions like Hillsdale or Notre Dame, gender segregation in dorms and restrictions on visitations/curfews are non-existent and if mentioned, tend to be regarded even by the late '60s as a vestige of a much more stuffy and “big brotherish” time in the words of the early '60s era Oberlin alum.
You are a teacher (think I read that once in a post you wrote) and actually think the above? Wow!
What critical-thinking teacher believes that just reading something means it is understood by the students reading it? Just because something is deemed to accepted as original in meaning, it must first be explained what it meant originally, which requires historical contexts to be included because words change meaning over time and must be explained what was meant at that time. Plus, the original meaning must be contrasted against what it does not mean, i.e., what it could be confused with, in order for the students to have proper overall context of the meaning.
Furthermore, what critical-thinking teacher thinks that memorizing something means the person memorizing it actually understands how to implement the information and how to properly incorporate into his knowledge base what he just read?
In short, an in-depth reading of the Constitution as an original document requires much discussion for students to understand. For example, the 9th and 10th amendments are ones that 99% of people do not understand exactly when they come into play. The Founding Fathers explained this quite clearly in the Federalist Papers and a good teacher would explain that full context to students.
They might not be identical to “house moms”, but they still treat dorm residents like kids in a thousand different ways. Go read the college life threads. Someone’s roommate is a slob, or stinky, or plays their music/tv/computer games loud, or puts their phone on speaker at 7am in the morning, or whatever, and inevitably the response is to go talk to your RA. In the real world, landlords get their money from whoever’s name is on the lease and none of that is their problem. Even “men and women aren’t spending time together at night” is something RAs deal with, because in the college life threads you see complaints about a roommates BF/GF spending more nights there than the other roommate is comfortable with or one roommate being sexiled. Again, not the landlord’s problem in the real world. In the real world, landlords generally don’t deal with underage drinking/drug use unless someone called the cops(sworn police officers, not university rent-a-cops).
I went to college in the 90’s and there was nobody in my residential life who could remotely be called a “mom” (or “dad” for that matter). There were rules, and live-in junior residential advisers for first-year students, but nothing else.
I second @marvin100 as someone who attended college in the latter half of the '90s.
In most cases of the above from what I’ve observed and heard from other friends/HS classmates who attended undergrad at a variety of colleges, the RA will tell the roommates to work out the conflicts themselves first before involving them again.
As for the putting phone on speaker or having excessive noise at 7 am, the RA will do nothing in most cases as 7 am is past quiet time in the dorms of most colleges. That and 7 am is around the time campus construction projects/dorm renovations start in loud earnest.
In fact, one HS classmate used that to his advantage to retaliate against a next-door neighbor who kept blasting cheesy hair metal routinely till 3-4 am in the morning after finding turning to the RA or the housing office proved fruitless.
By blasting Vanilla Ice’s “To The Extreme” CD album into the next-door neighbor’s room from 7 am onward, the neighbor had no grounds to complain as quiet hours in many dorms end between 6:30 am and 7 am in most colleges I know of. Incidentally, the retaliation worked very well to resolve my HS classmate’s problem…after 3 days the next-door neighbor effectively surrendered and there was no more blasting of cheesy hair metal till 3-4 am ever.
Yes, I was using a reductio ad absurdum. And as you clearly stated, there’s no such thing as just the constitution on its own–any education about it will require interpretation, context (which involves selection and omission and is thus never truly objective), and explication, and any claims of pure objectivity or Constitutional “originalism” should be taken with enough salt to melt even the most disingenuous of snails. Thanks for getting my back on this one and I’m glad you understand the false premise of such an ideology!
@zinhead - I hope you’re not assuming that because I was criticizing the way Hillsdale seemed to be indoctrinating students into a far-right interpretation of the Constitution, that it means I’m OK with schools that may be indoctrinating students into a far-left interpretation of the same document. Doing either of those is a very unprofessional way to teach. A first class on the Constitution can be taught without an overt attempt to indoctrinate students into a right-wing or left-wing viewpoint of it. If a school wants to teach a class on the Constitution covering extreme, ideological perspectives, then save that for a more advanced class where the students know enough of the basics to be able to critically judge the different perspectives.
I didn’t find anything particularly shocking or unnerving about the O’Keefe video link you posted. It was clearly created to guide and then trap professors into saying something negative about the Constitution, and from what I could tell, none of them took the bait. In fact, the professors seemed rather taken aback when the student with the hidden camera said she was frightened by the Constitution.
BTW - I’m wondering how a video that was published on Nov. 3, 2015, manage to reference Trump and his seven Dwarves? There’s seems to be some kind of fishy editing going on.
There is a conflating here of ideology and originalism; they are not the same, but often confused because some do not like the outcome.
An original reading of the Constitution naturally leads to a conservative bent simply because, unlike many schools, the words are not interpreted and taught to mean something today that the words did not mean back then. An original meaning reading means not kowtowing to the sociology gobbledegook of today. By definition, there is nothing more neutral and less indoctrinating than teaching the original meaning of the Constitution - that is not a left or right issue.
Furthermore, it is not indoctrination to point out that changing the meaning of something is akin to not following it and is akin to assaulting it for one’s own purposes, which are different then the Framers intended.
And for those who do not seem to know, Hillsdale has issues with Constitution on both the left and right. However, the issues are different. From the right, it has an issue of overreach of intended meaning. From the left, it has the issue of meanings being changed entirely.
What I do find interesting is that people have no issue of schools that teach a full-fledged leftist view of the world and Constitution and are not expressing angst that they change their approach to be more fair, yet are saying that Hillsdale must somehow change its teaching because it chooses not to bastardize the words and meaning of the document. Is not indoctrination defined by bastardizing the words and meaning of something? And since Hillsdale is not doing that, again by definition, it cannot be indoctrinating.
This is rather hilarious because if one actually knows the Federalist Papers and the actual explanations written by the Framers themselves re the Constitution many would know immediately that their sociology-driven interpretations are just plain wrong.
Welcome to originalism - the Constitution does not get to mean what you want it to mean. If you want to change its meaning in a way that the Framers did not intend, then do it properly and go through the amendment process and let the people decide.
The originalist vs. living document argument about the Constitution is one that has not been settled and probably never will be. To teach in a beginning Constitution class that the originalist perspective is the correct one is indoctrination - just as a beginning class that taught that the living document perspective is the correct one would be.
Personally, the living document interpretation makes more sense to me, if only because the world changes, ideas and values change, and it’s too difficult to constantly amend the Constitution to reflect that.
“Personally, the living document interpretation makes more sense to me, if only because the world changes, ideas and values change, and it’s too difficult to constantly amend the Constitution to reflect that.”
I think you miss the entire purpose of the constitution. it is all about checks and balances and making it hard to change things on a whim.
" it’s too difficult to constantly amend the Constitution to reflect that." this statement sums up the entire concept for the very reason the constitution is so important! it is to protect ourselves from ourselves and a populace movement destroying and implementing its rule.
As an aside, I never understood how the view that the constitution means what it meant, period squares with the amendment process. The framers didn’t anticipate the later amendments, how could they? Yet there they are, part of the constitution.
Huh? In the Federalist Papers, they clearly state they anticipated amendments that is why they put a process in place to approve amendments, In fact, the Framers used the amendment process themselves - the Bill of Rights is the first ten amendments to the Constitution,
The Bill of Rights was added AFTER the Constitution was written and was not initially part of the document. However, George Mason did not trust government to not become tyrannical and ignore the basic rights of the people that the Framers understood to exist in their writing, and thus insisted those rights we written down and enshrined in order to limit government. James Madison disagreed it was needed, but through the amendment process, the Bill of Rights got approved and added to the Constitution.
Therefore, just by the existence of the Bill of Rights illustrates the Framers anticipated amendments, but the key is they approved changes ONLY approved by the super majority of the States, not by politicians and by fiat.
Really?! OK, who gets makes those changes and who gets to choose those new interpretations without the consent of the people being governed?
Would you trust being part of a card game where any minority group of people could change the rules mid-stream based on whatever reasoning they wanted without polling and getting approval of the super majority of people playing the game? If you would not trust being part of such a card game where the rules can be changed on a whim, why would you trust your life and governance to a similar scheme?
constitution definition: A body of fundamental principles or established precedents according to which a state or other organization is acknowledged to be governed.
IMO, the last thing you want to do is to change “a body of fundamental principles” based upon the whims of today’s values. The process of amending the Constitution is difficult by design–it is a feature not a bug.
Given that it is explicitly meant as a restricted set of fundamental principles, it is the Legislature’s role to create laws that address the current issues and values, as long as they comply with the Constitution, as ruled upon by the Judiciary.
As someone who actually practices constitutional law for a living, I find originalist interpretation to be almost entirely useless. The idea that the Founding Fathers collectively had one clear intention for every phrase in the Constitution is not validated by the historical record. The document was a mismash of compromises among scores of people, and they fudged all the difficult issues in order to reach agreement and get a viable government going.
That is why, within ten years after the Constitution was ratified, there were massive disagreements between the Founding Fathers themselves on what the powers and limitations created by the documents really were. Hamilton and Jefferson had entirely different ideas about the meaning of the exact same words in the Constitution.
The idea that someone in 2017 can go back and claim to discern the exact intent of the Founding Fathers is kind of like people consulting an oracle - after breathing in the smoke, for some reason the Founding Fathers always seem to agree with exactly whatever the originalist already wanted to believe.
Well, I am not a constitutional lawyer, nor do I play one on TV.
I will ask this however: If the words in the Constitution can be reinterpreted based upon whatever the whims and values of today are, what is the value of having a Constitution?