Caesar Ekya

I have 8 years experience in the Canadian university system. Almost half of that was during the height of "Woke 1.0". I was also within the liberal arts (philosophy, Greek & Roman studies). University students are affected in their attitudes and ideology primary by peers, not professors. They go to parties, they join social clubs, and they are unleashed from their parents. For young adults who have never had any form of real independence before and have been extremely sheltered, this can have a dramatic affect. Secondarily they are exposed to ideas that can break apart their often patchwork and ill-conceived conception of the world that their parents never properly helped them develop, picked up purely through some comments around the house and Fox News playing somewhere in the background. Your children have agency, and so do you, if you choose to exercise it. Why didn't you "program" them? Why are you expecting an 18 year old to automatically have a fully worked and unshakable concept of the world if you didn't teach it to them? And if that worldview can be so easily destroyed by a couple university courses, then how powerful or truthful is it? I have never seen a university professor make someone mentally unwell, or even directly change their political views. Most interactions with professors are limited, especially in early years due to the large class sizes. Most professors I have had try to present themselves in a politically neutral way, with maybe the occasional joke or jab at a conservative political figure. Professors will expose young adults to information and ideas they may not have considered through their course material and assignments, but it is always the individual who makes the decision whether to agree or disagree with those ideas. The worst thing I experienced was a contract instructor (non tenured) going on a rant about how racist JRR Tolkien was, and fantasy in general. I argued the point with him before the class, then promptly dropped so I wouldn't have to put up with his stupidity. I submitted a complaint against him. On the other side I had a professor who was a right-wing anti-communist who used to go on rants against The Chinese Communist Party for absolutely no reason, and with no relevance to the course material. You should be building up your kids so that they are mentally prepared to interact with and counter wrong ideas. If your beliefs are not able to stand up to push-back in real life interactions and require your own children to be sheltered away from other ideas in order to be maintained, they are either not fully understood or they are not based on truth. Yet frankly the girl below seems perfectly fine and healthy in both images. Tattoos are not my thing, but young people do go through such periods where they want to form an image. Would someone make the same post about a young boy and then compare it t when he became a biker dude, or a skin-head with a swastika tat on his neck? Was his professor to blame?