I remember how it was -- JR
Virginia College Announces Students Can Major in ‘Cannabis Studies’
The sale of marijuana for nonmedical purposes is illegal in Virginia, not to mention at the federal level. But that hasn’t stopped Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia, from developing an entire major and minor totally dedicated to training students to participate in the marijuana industry. Students who choose this field of study will graduate with a bachelor of science in cannabis studies. And, no, that’s not a bad joke about students who spend their college years stoned.
When Roanoke College announced the program earlier this year, leaders of the college hailed it for providing education in an area of great need. “I commend the faculty for developing a transdisciplinary academic program that fills a significant educational gap,” said Kathy Wolfe, vice president for academic affairs at Roanoke College.
Students who major in cannabis choose from two tracks. First, they can study the “science” of the marijuana industry, which focuses on the “botany, biology, and chemistry” surrounding growing marijuana. Second, they can explore “the social justice and governmental policy around cannabis legislation.” In other words, they can spend their four years of college either growing marijuana or participating in roundtable discussions about the supposed injustice of the prosecution of marijuana-related crimes. As for the former, the college assures that only hemp varieties with 0.3 percent tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), or less, will be used. It claims that these plants will “have no psychoactive effects” so as to comply with federal law. (Students will still, according to the college, be “provide[d] … with the scientific training needed to be successful in the industry.”)
In order to receive a B.S. in cannabis studies, students can take courses such as “Cannabis and It’s Regulation,” organic chemistry, cell biology, “Cannabis and Race,” “Cannabis and Disabilities,” “Cannabis and Pop Culture,” “Insects and Cannabis,” “Ethnobotany,” “Cannabis and Society,” and “Inequality in Criminal Justice.”
The college uses the term “cannabis” rather than marijuana at least partially because it claims the word “marijuana” is “a racially charged term with a checkered past.”
The college is quite clear that the major will train students to cash in on the marijuana trade. It advertises to students: “Our program, which is the first of its kind in Virginia, will allow graduates to capitalize on a rapidly growing industry.” Roanoke College receives state funds via the Virginia Tuition Assistance Grant, meaning the state of Virginia will be paying to train Virginia students to participate in business activities that are illegal in Virginia. Yet Roanoke claims that its program will benefit the state: “Roanoke College aims to guide the commonwealth to improve understanding and application of knowledge around cannabis.” The college also plans to use federal funding to train students to grow and sell the Schedule I drug.
Roanoke College claims that marijuana shows “great promise as a medical remedy,” yet the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has yet to approve its use for the treatment of any condition, and a 2022 study showed that marijuana is totally ineffective for the treatment of pain, depression, or anxiety.
Studies have shown that about 30 percent of adults who use marijuana recreationally will develop an addiction to the drug. In addition, 44.7 percent of people who use marijuana move on to other illegal drugs
https://spectator.org/virginia-college-announces-students-can-major-in-cannabis-studies/
**************************************************Academics Embrace New ‘Deficit Framing’ to Justify Underperforming and Immature Students
It is an open secret among college professors and university administrators that college students aren’t what they used to be.
They struggle with lengthy reading assignments and basic vocabulary. They don’t know rudimentary algebra. They can’t add or subtract fractions. They complain that deadlines, hard exams, and required attendance are impediments to their success.
Yet, although some professors view these deficits as problems to be fixed, many in academia have embraced bits of pedagogical fluff intertwined with fashionable DEI that suggest there is something demotivating if not bigoted about acknowledging deficits as deficits and holding students to basic academic or professional standards, while implying bad grades and a lack of maturity on the part of students are simple quirks educators just need to better accept.
One such fluffy concept is that of “deficit framing,” sometimes referred to as “deficit thinking” or a “deficit model lens.” As defined by education researcher Chelsea Heinbach in a 2021 interview, deficit thinking is “the belief that there is a prescribed ‘correct’ way of being — also known as the norm — and anyone who operates outside of that norm is operating at a deficit.”
These individuals, she said, are perceived by those engaged in deficit thinking as needing to be fixed or having to “‘try harder’ and ultimately conform to the practices of the dominant culture.”
Heinbach went on to advocate for “changing the norm to accommodate others,” suggesting that minority, disabled, first-generation, international, and nontraditional students with responsibilities related to work or family are all harmed by the maintenance of such norms.
In 2023, Aaminah Long, a PhD student in higher education and student affairs at Indiana University, Bloomington, echoed similar sentiments on a blog hosted on her university’s website.
Deficit models, she wrote, “are particularly problematic as they subscribe to the notion that students and their environments are responsible for their failures instead of acknowledging the role of dominant power structures in constructing those environments.”
“Instructing from a deficit model lens,” wrote Long, “is especially harmful to marginalized students, overlooking their cultural strengths, diminishing the value of their lived experiences, and invalidating their communities’ sense of agency by assuming that educational institutions are the only ‘valid’ sources of knowledge and rejecting long-standing cultural practices and ways of knowing.”
One of Long’s recommendations for instructors to move away from such deficit models was to embrace another fluffy idea and “[f]oster a growth mindset.”
In its simplest form, the notion of a growth mindset may be innocuous if not beneficial, as it suggests students should view academic challenges as opportunities for growth and see their intelligence and class performance as things that can be improved with effort.
Yet, in practice, some educators who seek to cultivate a growth mindset in students can take the endeavor to rather absurd places.
Stephanie Erickson from the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, for example, has decried “[p]olicies such as not accepting late homework, deducting points for late assignments, and not allowing for revisions on large stakes assignments” as these policies “go against a growth mindset” and “implicitly value specific norms surrounding work ethic, time management, and learning approaches.”
In practice, such interpretations of a growth mindset merge with another bit of pedagogical fluff known as ungrading, which holds that grades can be demotivating to students and has spurred some professors to do away with due dates, stop penalizing late work, and start allowing students to self-grade.
Collectively, when these kinds of fluffy ideas are translated into policy at a university, department, or even just a classroom level, they at best provide a pseudo-intellectual justification for taking unprepared, underperforming, or immature students and moving them along without ensuring they develop the basic academic and professional competencies they lack.
At worst, however, the embrace of such pedagogical fluff, given its overlap with DEI, can disincentivize those in academia who notice deficits in their students from acknowledging the problem publicly and penalize those that do thus ensuring obvious deficits in student ability and character remain.
For example, in a recent incident at my own academic institution, Northern Illinois University, when philosophy Professor Alicia Finch stated at a faculty senate meeting, “I’m just not convinced they [intro students] know how to do college. And I sometimes think, well, maybe we need a coordinated effort to teach them,” she was inevitably and publicly dressed down by our Vice President of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, Carol Sumner, for her “deficit framing” of students.
“We just had a conversation yesterday at looking at how we’re student-centered and what are we doing for student success,” stated Sumner prior to reading a quote on her phone from a source she didn’t bother to name.
“It says,” she began, “‘Using an asset-based approach to student success requires more than the institution simply identifying that the students are having challenges, but explores the ways to which structural and systemic issues impair and derail student success. It does not position the issues or challenges being due to deficits within the individual students.’”
Sumner suggested “practices, policies and pedagogies” that focus on fixing student deficits, actually “reinforce colonialism, subjugation and the inferiority of minoritized students.”
She then went on to “reposition” Finch’s question as “How are we as institutions identifying the challenges and structures that we put in place where students are not successful.”
In other words, there isn’t a problem with students entering college grossly unprepared. The problem is college is too challenging. Those that say otherwise are colonizing subjugators.
Anyone who seriously might want to address student deficits should think twice. And the students that enter college unable to handle lengthy texts, basic vocabulary, or rudimentary algebra may very well graduate that way.
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Why abolishing boys schools is an act of woke madness
Greg Sheridan
The campaign to abolish single-sex schools, especially boys schools, is a sign of the madness of ideology and the badness of groupthink.
It reflects the dreary, dull, lifeless, joyless, small “S” Stalinist bureaucratic conformity that progressive ideology routinely attempts to impose. It’s a rush to insanity, where pressure will come on every successful boys school to become coeducational.
Let’s state the obvious. Boys schools, girls schools and co-ed schools can all be extremely good, mediocre or terrible. It’s a good thing for our educational environment, and for countless families and students, that different types of schools flourish.
Gender Equality Advocate Michelle May says. “The argument is that currently it is not done on merit,” Ms May said. “It’s still very much a boys club. “As long as we’ve got More
It seems a pity that some boys schools with long, good traditions now feel obliged to go co-ed. They may be feeling cultural pressure.
Let me confess. I spent the majority of my schooling at a Christian Brothers school in Sydney that was for boys only. It was a great school, with wide socio-economic and racial diversity, and certainly taught its students respect for women and girls, and respect for everyone.
It wasn’t an exclusively male environment. There were female teachers, librarians, admin staff, mothers in the tuck shop. To be rude, much less sexist, towards any of these would have been unthinkable and would have earned draconian punishment.
The contemporary debate is too ideological. If a particular school has a behaviour problem, that needs to be fixed. Abolishing boys schools generally would be wretched iconoclastic vandalism.
In the Financial Review last week an anonymous business executive called for ending single-sex schools and said boys schools should stop trying to make “men” out of their students.
How weird is this? What is it that boys are supposed to become if not men? Giraffes? Oranges?
The piece reflects the confused and counter-productive campaign against masculinity. Men, like women, can do terrible things. Men are responsible for much more violence than women. I agree we’re living through a plague of domestic violence that we must stop. But you won’t make men decent, respectful and successful by telling them masculinity itself is bad.
Seventeen years ago, in central Melbourne, about 7.30am, a biker, who had been on an all-night binge, was beating up his girlfriend. Two men came to her aid. One was killed in the process. In giving his life to the instinct to protect a woman under assault, that man was displaying masculinity, and it wasn’t toxic.
At the school I attended more than 50 years ago, the brothers, and all the teachers, stressed that men had certain obligations to women – politeness, consideration, respect, courtesy.
The brothers taught that when walking down the street with a girl the bloke should try to walk between the girl and the road. That’s so any danger coming from the road, such as a car crashing off the street, hits the bloke first.
That may all seem hopelessly outdated. But men and women are still different. Completely equal but different. The idea that the differences are mainly the result of socialisation is contemporary ideology waging war against human nature.
Almost no one really lives their life according to the new ideology. Is there a household in Australia where, if a married couple hears a strange noise in the middle of the night, the husband turns to the wife and says: “Now, darling, why don’t you go and see if that noise is a burglar. I’ll stay here by the phone. I would go myself but I don’t want us to be trapped in gender stereotypes.”
It’s good that women’s sport is increasingly seen as the equal of men’s sport. But it’s still different. No one argues that men and women should play rugby league together. The army for a long time included boxing in its training. It’s a tough sport. Maybe its concussion risks render it no longer fit for such training. But you can see it helped soldiers cope psychologically with experiencing a physical blow but carrying on. It has never been the case that men and women enter the same boxing ring and box against each other.
The variety of human experience is vast but boys and girls are different. Co-ed can work superbly, but so can schools that focus only on boys, or only girls. Boys and girls do tend, within all kinds of statistical variation, to learn a bit differently, so boys schools can focus on the way boys learn.
Girls tend to mature earlier than boys and in that early adolescent period a single-sex school allows a boy to remain a boy for as long as necessary. And then become a man.
Cardinal George Pell once remarked that “self-confidence, directness and an instinct for struggle and competition” characterised Christian Brothers schools. That’s pretty accurate.
But boys schools also offer boys a distinctive diversity. At a boys school, if there’s going to be a choir it has to be the boys singing.
The school I went to was exceptionally strong in sports. My one season as a junior rugby league player led to a broken shoulder; my parents decided I’d dispense with footy. I wasn’t very good at sport anyway but the school offered multitudes of other activities. I was always in the debating team, the chess club, sometimes the drama performances, sometimes music groups, briefly in the science club, in Christian youth groups and a million other things.
Even though I didn’t play football or cricket, and hardly excelled at the sports I did participate in, I never felt out of place. Books, learning, contention, energy, purpose, competition – it was a pro-life environment.
The teachers occasionally gave us the strap for our malefactions. Some of life’s antipathies are irrational. I greatly disliked one teacher, who warmly returned my sentiments. No doubt unfairly, I thought him a dogmatic smart alec. Perhaps we were too much alike.
I persecuted him with many pedantic questions and points of order while staying well within the rules and norms. One day, nonetheless, he sort of gave in and gave me the strap. I went home that afternoon immensely chuffed, feeling I’d won a moral victory.
There were times, of course, when we were louts and hooligans, and needed strong direction. The school was pretty strict. Sensibly so. And it had a great tradition. Wearing its uniform meant something. We cared about it. No doubt it struck other kids entirely differently.
But it gave me wonderful treasures. In its library, in primary school, I met PG Wodehouse, my lifelong companion.
We moved house and I finished at a co-ed school. It was good, too. Diversity is good. The urge of ideological censors to hammer everything into a single monotonous conformity is as misbegotten as their demonisation of masculinity, and of the need to turn good boys, indeed, into good men.
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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