I am rather surprised to find that I'm writing only the 59th review of this book on Amazon. It was finished, according to the author, 2 months before the inauguration of President Trump. I think that Mr. Greer does a good review of social problems confronting students, professors, and administrators on college and University campuses in 2016....but of necessity, only a Karnak could have anticipated what kind of explosion would happen following the inauguration of the new President. Violence on campuses has increased, the clearly illegal over-state-line busing of protestors has increased (recalling that law which prohibited the state-line crossing ban of the 1960s protests during the "Civil Rights" era).
I read to educate (myself, first) and this book fulfilled that goal very well.....and as I write the review, I find that although my on-campus experience would be considered ante-bellum by some standards, I recall controversy on campus during the annual Kappa Alpha ball (Confederate uniforms included) on a campus not well known for any public controversy. While attending an Ivy League University, the daily newspaper was almost sure to have a cartoon or column bemoaning the fact that this school was too-often confused with its in-state public university rival. Walking up and down fraternity row daily never seemed to bother me, because I was actually there for an education, and had left a top-tier small, isolated school for the often frightening, "I threw myself in the pool without learning to swim" experience of attending an urban Ivy. "Identity" politics during those years consisted of discussions about whether declaring a religious affiliation would have put one into a rumored "quota" group.
As one who maintains contact with University students, not in a power role, but a user of one of the on-campus libraries at the University of Texas at Austin, my impression is that this is a well-researched and fair coverage of problems besetting any Caucasian-appearing male attending college (I use this to mean an institution offering no graduate degree, such as Hillsdale College) or University (which Williams College should be called today) that offers at least masters degrees. That's how it used to be.....However I will read the Daily Texas as I did the Daily Pennsylvanian, although Williams was quiet enough as not to need a daily paper.
If you have a child who may be attending an institution of higher learning in the next 3 or 4 years, or you haven't been on-campus or plugged-in to what's happening on them except for what you see in the "fake news," you need to be reading this book. If you are one of these students, I pray that at 10th grade you can actually read this book and comprehend it--but the odds aren't looking good in 2017. What I found the most disturbing
chapter and continuing theme in Mr. Greer's work was the problem of "victimhood" and "identity" politics that have entrenched themselves. When I was a freshly-minted Ph.D., fully-credentialed with fine work history, I found the door to the academy closed to me. I could easily have, as one famous politician has, claimed a minority status, but I still, in my head, lived in the meritocracy in which I was brought up, and in which my father believed. I was surrounded by it when I was in junior and senior high school, where easily 33% of my classmates lived in intact homes with a breadwinner who had at least a master's degree, likely in STEM, and doctorates abounding. Meritocracy to me was the normal state of affairs, but I also knew it wasn't a widespread phenomenon, hence my deliberate jump into the urban university.
Fortunately, Mr. Greer does discuss solutions. One is eschewing higher education altogether, and from a strictly economic standpoint, this may be good advice for certain students (he mentions Peter Thiel's funding of entrepreneurs and their successes). A second, of which I was not aware, was the the listing of institutions by FIRE, an easy way to look up an institution's record with respect to free speech. A third, which I think deserves more coverage, is a re-evaluation of what a college or University education is supposed to accomplish. This was a matter of great discussion when I was considering college (i.e., what is the value of a liberal arts education?). Multiculturalism has failed in many ways, and when I was a knee-jerk multi-cultie I took individualism and American identity somewhat for granted, which I do not anymore. I deliberately took my final organized educational experience in a very multicultural setting (San Antonio, Texas) when my classmates were going back to slave in the northeast for that last item on their Curriculum Vitae that would condone "legitimacy" after having sullied themselves by attending a below the Mason-Dixon Line institution--an instructorship at Harvard or Yale. And today, that Harvard or Yale imprimatur still is a gateway to quasi-elite status. However, if you didn't go to a private boarding school, you are still disadvantaged.
In my ideal world, "No Campus for White Men" would be required reading before entering college. Those who were chanting "Hi Hi, Ho Ho, Western Civ has got to go!" are responsible for part of the predicament our civil society faces today. Photos of these people in their 60s, now in positions of real power, doesn't show that they have aged well. Didn't anyone tell them they would end up there anyway. Arguments for "white genocide" and "reparations" beg the issue. What happened to the Civil Society, and the role of college education (those first 4 years) in creating the group of individuals who would be the cerebral backbone of a culture with the real zeal for self-preservation. Oswald Spengler, in the early 1920s, seems to be the first to have envisioned the decline of Western Civilization in some great detail, and one-hundred years after the Bolshevik Revolution, we're finding out he was largely correct. The society without the will to survive will fall, one way or another. "No Campus for White Men" begs one question--because the real campus is the mind, and it should never be closed. For this reason alone I recommend the book highly.
When you are young IS the time to explore the wider world without disastrous career-ending consequences later in life (my opinion), but this doesn't absolve one of good citizenship--such as, not doing things that are illegal, because they are illegal, and testing social boundaries safely, which you learn when your parents are helping you to cross streets without endangering yourself or others.
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