Chaitanya Jyothi Museum Opening, 2000
RAMANAM
In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen.
Countrymen,
ORBIS NON SUFFICIT
SOLUS DEUS SUFFICIT
It really is not true that college is for free and open conversation. Nor should it be true. College — all schools, really — is for imbibing the wisdom of the ages, the preserved and with luck well-curated experience of being human and earning peace. At college one keeps one’s ears and eyes open and one’s mouth shut.
Attending what we hear about today’s students, teachers, and administrators, and taking what we hear for being accurate descriptions of personalities and contexts involved, one wonders how either of those deserves to be in the presence of either of the others.
Certainly students described do not deserve to be in the presence of teachers. And teachers and administrators described do not deserve to be in the presence of students. If the descriptions are accurate, the parties are mismatched. They do not deserved to be and therefore do not belong in each other’s presence. How is it, then, surprising or even lamentable that their relationships are mutually destructive?
I look at this low life at Oberlin College and I think to myself:
Self, you are looking at people who are not serious about what they are doing.
Here is a college, by reputation top-drawer, operating on habit alone. Their arguments in court — which in this case functions quite as a court of public opinion — are those of someone committed to doing what they are doing because they are doing it and not because it is worth doing.
No educator would make in court the arguments Oberlin makes. They would regard such a gesture as ignoble. Oberlin regards it as normative. If reports are accurate — and they have not been falsified — Oberlin’s zest for ignobility is normative at most contemporary American Colleges and Universities.
Oberlin College is an early entry on the Adwaitha Hermitage Do Not Attend/Do Not Support List Of American Colleges And Universities (Part Two here). There is also an Adwaitha Hermitage Do Attend/Do Support List Of American Colleges And Universities.
Why would a student submit himself or herself to cultivation by someone who does not deserve their presence? Why would a teacher accept for his or her cultivation someone who does not deserve their presence? It would not happen, not in either case, not in either direction.
Conclusion: be an auto-didact except in the case that a teacher invites you to their company, at which time and place, promptly accept the teacher’s invitation. You will know a teacher when one appears in your field of vision. Likewise, a teacher will know a student when appears in their field of vision. Sacred and therefore potent is the student-and-teacher relationship.
No student would admit to their presence such teachers and administrators. No teacher or administrator would admit to their presence such students. Talk about mis-match! Their mutual destruction is neither surprising nor lamentable.
One enters a college or university in order to imbibe the wisdom of the ages, and by keeping one’s ears and eyes open and one’s mouth shut. This chatter about free and open discussion is nonsense. Education never has been and never will be for that purpose. Markets fulfill that role.
If reports are accurate — and they have not been falsified — Oberlin’s zest for ignobility is normative for most contemporary American colleges and universities. In this case, one becomes an autodidact and accepts eagerly an invitation from a teacher to join their presence if and when one has the auspicious fortune to receive the same.
Βασιλεία του Θεού
Kingdom of God
Update 1: Oberlin et al. are operating from habit, not from an educator’s professional seriousness. They just want to stay on a gravy train or jump onto one. About education they are not serious, not students, not teachers, not administrators. They deserve abandonment to self-destruction, and serious educators are obliged to create fresh institutions, new wine skins, to conduct the serious and ancient activity of education.
Update 2: An apposite observation: no one can change the world. Offering that concept to anyone, or, entertaining it at all, is philosophical and theological malpractice.
LampofDiogenes to David R. Graham
If you really mean that statement, your historical ignorance is quite breathtaking.
‘Splain to me, Lucy, how Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Buddha, Christ, and, oh, say, Thomas Jefferson did NOT “change the world”.
Whatever you’re smoking, you should be selling it, ’cause that is obviously some great s**t.
A more historically accurate argument (not that I necessarily agree with it; just that there is more historical evidence to support it than there is for your . . . ahem, “questionable” assertion) would be that history is nearly entirely made by individuals – c.f. Elizabeth the First, Victoria, Lenin, Marx, Hitler, Mao Zedong (not all contributions to history are positive).
I can’t even fathom how you support that irrational and ahistorical assertion in your own mind. Only hope it’s not contagious.
David R. Graham to LampofDiogenes
It is unfathomable. That is my point. One does not change what one is. That includes history, taken anthropomorphically.
The really great s**t is thinking you are god, in charge, master of the universe. That is fathomable, understandable.
Our true condition in existence, however, it not fathomable, not understandable. You got that right about what I am saying. We do not self-own.
StubbornlyRational to David R. Graham
Honestly, I can’t make sense of that. Are you arguing for or against the proposition that “no one can change the world”?
David R. Graham to StubbornlyRational
Neither. I am stating a fact.
mrdoug1 to David R. Graham
Is that true? How do you apply that to major historical figures like Christ, Martin Luther, Hitler, Marx, Lenin, Mao, Churchill, and so on and so forth? Is it your position that they and others didn’t change the world?
David R. Graham to mrdoug1
Yes.
Update 3: Again on changing the world:
Joe Biden: . . . we have to be able to change what we’re doing within our system.
There it is again: we have to change the world we are in. A just plain stupid idea. Utter darkness. Instead: Do your duty as God gives you light to see your duty.
No one can change the world they are in because they are in it. And no one can change what they are doing within their system without abolishing the system they are inside doing things. Then where would they be?
This is Pelagianism. Over the weekend just past, Josh Hawley, a US Senator (!), discoursed accurately (!) on Pelagianism as the root of modern Left/Socialism to graduating students of The King’s College, NYC.
Stupidity cannot be eliminated, but it can and should be identified and condemned from a bill of particulars.
Randy Bertrand to David R. Graham
I have a little different perspective. Pelagianism claims there’s no such thing as original sin but we do have free will. But Original sin does not preclude free will. The Left believes there’s no Original sin or free will.
They want to create a Orwellian government which forces everyone in to a regimented mold similar to the Norks.
David R. Graham to Randy Bertrand
I take your point and offer a slight adjustment: Leftists believe there is no Original Sin or free will . . . except for everyone else in the first matter and themselves in the second.
Leftists are conflicted as regards their view of others and their view of themselves. This is their weakness: inconsistency, a weakness indigenous to all dualisms.
Leftists really hate Jews because they recite The Shema, which declares the world united in God, and they really hate Christians because they recite The Nicene Creed, which declares God united in the world. Leftists abhor unity.
Update 4: Oberlin shuns learning the lesson.
“Gibson bakery’s archaic chase-and-detain policy regarding suspected shoplifters was the catalyst for the protests,” the college said. “The guilt or innocence of the students is irrelevant to both the root cause of the protests and this litigation.”
So students can declare tuition an archaic policy and college education a right requiring the college to pay full freight for the student. Marvelous. Reminds one of this:
Update 5: William A. Jacobson: Student journalist: Shoplifting at Gibson’s Bakery was part of Oberlin College’s “Culture of Theft”
And these students think they will get far in this world?
AUM NAMAH SHIVAYA
