AskSaidIt

AskSaidIt

log in
sign up
subreddits
search
sidebar

Is Harvard still worth it anymore?(self)

25 points24 points27 points submitted by ForbiddenKnowledge

Nonbinaryandroid 2 insightful - 2 fun2 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 2 fun 2 months ago

Education was never the value of a Harvard degree. It was networking.

You can give yourself a Harvard level education for free on YouTube if you want. You'll lack the connections with other students faculty and future opportunities that come from it.

Lots of college education is grade A bullshit you've just got to regurgitate to get a degree but that doesn't change for a high rank college or a low rank one. Go to a liberal university and you'll have to do bullshit land acknowledgements. Christian university and they'll replace it with psych 101 classes where you learn about demons.

What a college degree shows employers is "this person will bite their tongue to get shit done" because you don't want to hire someone who is going to flip their shit when they find out where phone batteries really comes from. Liberal colleges simply have plenty of causes to capture the, to borrow Marxist terminology, revolutionary aspirations of the youth, and shunt it in directions that are largely harmless to the establishment which you see as woke ideology. All the while these students whine and complain about how sexist racist and colonialist the college administration is because of old statues or some shit they get themselves in crippling debt to get their degree and practically ensure they are unable, financially, to raise any effective opposition against the status quo when they grow up and stop being stupid.

So is college worth it? If you don't go I to debt for it I say yes. If you can ignore the bullshit and focus on networking with useful people and maintaining a career focus it is very good. But if you have to go into crippling debt for it you're probably better off just finding some shit job and working your way up the ladder if you're directionless like many young people are.

ForbiddenKnowledge[S] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun 1 month ago

I'll have to look into the Catholic colleges then. At least every culture recognizes that demons exist and has recorded interactions with them, unlike land acknowledgements which are entirely fictional

Nonbinaryandroid 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun 1 month ago

You'll either be forced to give land acknowledgements or faith acknowledgements.

If you're creative about it you can get out of both. I've refused to give land acknowledgements because I believe they are highly offensive to natives and immoral. Basically imagine I punched and knocked out the disabled student took their waller and then later thanked them for paying for lunch. You going to give the land back? Nope. Then shut up. History happened and you don't need to keep rubbing it into the natives every time about how your race conquered them.

Same with public prayer. Some Christians tried to force me to do it once at some event and basically I just pulled out that verse where Jesus says "Don't pray in public like the pharisees, go pray in your closet."

They are forced to either accept that I have my own beliefs on the matter and tolerate it as I tolerate their nonsense or else they can attempt to punish me for my sincerely held beliefs and draw more attention to my position.

ForbiddenKnowledge[S] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun 1 month ago

What is involved in a land acknowledgement anyway? I haven't been to college... yet.

I watched youtube and it seems to be some pathetic essay written than somehow says "you were here first..."

Is there more involved than that?

Nonbinaryandroid 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun 1 month ago

Essentially it's just sticking a preface onto papers or speeches that says "We acknowledge we are on the stolen land of the xyz tribe". The original idea was to increase awareness of the historical plight of the natives (which is a good goal) but I think the way they go about it is entirely countereffective to that. Especially since the counter argument is the land was "conquered" not stolen. People don't like being told constantly they are terrible for stealing the Indians land because of their race, when nobody alive today was around then and many of them were born on the land that they supposedly "stole".

It's essentially generational guilt which is a concept i wholly reject as barbaric. I think it creates more white supremacists than it stops.

In practice though in universities it's little more than a "mandatory prayer" that you'll see religious institutions impose. You want to give a talk about the mating habits of seagulls or some other totally unrelated thing but you need to acknowledge that it wouldn't be possible for you to give your talk without the help of Jesus, or the stolen land of the natives, or else you risk attracting the ire of someone in the institution for subordination of their policy and jeopardizing your career. As a result , just like in most religious institutions, many people don't actually care about, agree with, or even believe the acknowledgements but do them anyway. And many ambitious and amoral types have no issue using these sorts of things as a way to either advance in the institution or to eliminate rivals so things can become quite ridiculous if there is a lack of competent leadership to quash such people. At the end of it all land acknowledgements are just a silly power game. Nothing more. They have already largely fallen out of favor and new power games rise to take their place. And as you'll see with the changing of the political tides just as how many companies and universities were quick to adopt DEI and other such policies as a way to gain funding they'll be just as quick to drop them to gain funding.

Land acknowledgements therefore have nothing to do with actually acknowledging the land you are on, they are about acknowledging the authority of the institution and how you, much like a dancing bear at the circus, need to perform in order to get fed.