Old Dominion University

[RationalBiker]

I know that this is probably far from unique, but I was trying to find a reference about ODU that I had recently read. Many of you may have heard of this institute of higher learning. It is close to my home and occupationally I have had encounters with some of the students in the past.

The reference I was looking for was that Environmentalism is soon going to be a required course for ANY degree obtained. I'm still looking for that. While looking, I found something else equally scary in their strategic plan. Here's the link followed by one of the quotes:

http://www.odu.edu/oduhome/news/2005-2009-strategic-plan.pdf

To tie our vision and goals to larger social issues, let me cite Charles Taylor’s work, The Ethics of Authenticity, which describes the 20th century’s failures as the “myth of malaise.” He says that several factors have combined to create a society that is no longer functional: the loss of freedom of choice due to the force of technology, the loss of purpose due to the replacement of social conscience by the emergence of the ego (“the Me generation”), and the loss of meaning or the fading of moral horizons. He promotes a movement away from atomism and fragmentation to unity. Yet he does not actually reconstruct the truth. Passion becomes his favored palliative to create change in the individual or group sunk in a quagmire of possessiveness, and he employs logic to deconstruct the ethics of authenticity in order to permit a strong commitment to community values. The sense of identity we all seek is rooted in dialogue and thus requires community. In like fashion, I might add, education is essentially a social process and requires not only profound thought but also good conversations with the best books, professors, and fellow learners.

And this comes from a university that includes this following as their Mission Statement:

(source is same document linked above)

“Old Dominion University promotes the advancement of knowledge and the pursuit of truth locally, nationally, and internationally. It develops in students a respect for the dignity and worth of the individual, a capacity for critical reasoning and a genuine desire for learning. It fosters the extension of the boundaries of knowledge through research and scholarship and is committed to the preservation and dissemination of a rich cultural heritage. Old Dominion University is old enough to value tradition yet young enough to facilitate change. In a spirit of creative experimentation, innovation, research, and technology, the University is ready to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century.”

(my bold type)

I know one school my son will not attend.

Is this typical of most Universities?

[DavidOdden]

Is this typical of most Universities?

It seems typical, IMO. There has been a significant movement in universities away from education and towards social indoctrination, which has become perceptably more overt in the past decade. It is now a pretty standard assumption that we're not just supposed to provide an education, we're supposed to stamp out incorrect thoughts. Since it is virtually universal, that means finding such a statement spewed by a university president is not significant, since it's also spewed by provosts, deans, professors, and other students. I would sugggest looking at specific policies to see if one university is noticeably worse than some other in this way. There may be significant exceptions -- I'd suspect that Bob Jones University is not entirely on board with current PC trends, but on the other hand it is a Christer college, so that would be an automatic blackball for me (YMMV).

Strategic plans are a dime a dozen. And remember that today's university president may be tomorrow's former university president.