The wokeness epidemic has infected none of our institutions harder than our nation’s college campuses. It’s a sad sight to see these once bastions of higher learning transformed into little more than leftist indoctrination factories. The issue gets worse and worse each year, but unlike those who cower to the liberal mob, I’m not afraid to call out the root cause of my concern: I graduated from college forty-one years ago and miss being young so, so bad.
Dear God, please make me young again.
Anyone who thinks our universities are still places of serious academia need only take a quick look at their farcical course offerings. “Queer Theory”? “Women’s Studies”? “Computer Science”? Let’s be frank: does anyone actually understand what these mean? I sure don’t, and feeling out of touch scares me so much that I lash out at waitresses.
University life has changed tremendously since I was a student. Back when I was in college, I was a cool, virile twenty-two-year-old with washboard abs and a large group of friends. Students today would struggle to say the same, since I’m sixty-two, my kids hate me, and my doctor says I’m prediabetic.
On a recent trip to my beloved alma mater, I couldn’t believe the Orwellian state the school has become. As soon as I stepped into a dorm, the woke student horde looked at me cockeyed, as if to tell me that I didn’t belong there for the sole reason that I am a straight, white man who happened to barely graduate in the year 1983 and am neither enrolled in nor recently affiliated with the school in any capacity.
Now, because of DEI-inclusivity-everyone’s-a-winner grade inflation, anyone can get an A. But abandoning the value of personal responsibility in favor of high GPAs is shortsighted. Back when I was in school, students I knew most often got Bs and Cs. It wasn’t because we were dumb; it was because we did not try. We had more important things to worry about than our future. That was all lined up for us already.
Take me back, take me back, please, somebody, take me back.
I now fear that college students have lost the ability to hear opposing opinions. When a controversial figure would come to speak on campus when I was a student, we didn’t protest or try to cancel them. Instead, we had the guts to listen, really listen, to the Steve Miller Band at a party on the other side of campus.
If a professor facilitated a discussion in a lecture that challenged our preconceived notions, we welcomed the opportunity to hear about it from some nerd who actually went to class while we’d drive to the lake to skinny dip with our friends, who, at our fortieth reunion, I’d find cornering me to voice their concern about my erratic behavior.
So to professors, students, and university administrators, I urge you to make your places of learning return to pre-woke sanity: when syllabi stressed civics, when students listened to one another, when the music was better, when colors were more vibrant, when urinating was simpler, and when our foreheads were unburdened by the wrinkles of a life spent in anger.