Aims Community College Quotes

The loss of political diversity among professor, particularly in fields that deal with politicized content, can undermine the quality and rigor of scholarly research... when a field lacks political diversity, researchers tend to congregate around questions and research methods that generally confirm their shared narrative, while ignoring questions and methods that don't offer such support. The loss of political diversity among the faculty has negative consequences for students, too, in three ways. First, there's the problem that many college students have little or no exposure to professors from half of the political spectrum. Many students graduate with an inaccurate understanding of conservatives, politics, and much of the United States... Second, the loss of viewpoint diversity among the faculty means that what students learn about politically controversial topics will often be "left shifted" from the truth. [The third problem] is the risk that some academic communities- particularly those in the most progressive parts of the country- may attain such high levels of political homogeneity and solidarity that they undergo a phase change, taking on properties of a collective entity that are antithetical to the normal aims of a university... Politically homogenous communities are more susceptible to witch hunts

There is a way to transform punishment, to generate creative means of social control, which provides viable rehabilitation for delinquent youths and which does not spill over and affect young people who have yet to commit crime. It will take imagination and the courage to adopt successful models that attempt to transform the punitive way in which young people are treated in marginalized communities. There are a few individuals, such as my teacher, Ms. Russ, and Officer Wilson, who have broken away from punitive social control and aim to change the way young people are treated, and they can serve as examples. Maybe then a new generation of former gang members and delinquents will read names from an old refrigerator and celebrate multiple high school graduations and college

Disappointingly, at precisely the point where church-related colleges and universities ought to display a countercultural communitarian impulse, they generally mirror the radically individualistic tendencies of the rest of American culture. Thus, they do not realize in any exceptional way the kind of peaceable polity described by St. Augustine: “a perfectly ordered and perfectly harmonious fellowship in the enjoyment of God, and of one another in God.”5 Irrespective of their rhetoric, Christian colleges and universities in practice seldom if ever resemble anything like the commonwealth of which St. Augustine speaks, wherein all are “united in fellowship by common agreement as to what is right and by a community of interest.”6 To the contrary, on these matters church-related colleges and universities all too easily reflect the character of the wider culture and thus fail to embody imaginative, faithful alternatives in which community simpliciter, and Christian intellectual community in particular, are in evidence. The familiar results include hyperspecialization that is not only content with but also prides itself on interdisciplinary irrelevance and inaccessibility; fragmentation of the curriculum; faculty disinclined toward conversation about common educative aims and curricular priorities; and students confirmed in their untutored, careerist, and consumerist impulses. In short, Christian educational institutions exhibit a failure to acknowledge and cherish our mutual interdependence, an aversion toward the hard work of finding common ground and arguing contested points, and resignation to lives and ideas torn asunder from the joys of serving a shared, mutually enriching good.

While he was still in college, Litman was lucky enough to go work for NeXT, the computer company formed by Steve Jobs in 1985 after he was fired from Apple. “What I learned from him is that you can’t build a successful company if you are easily pleased: you have to aim at being the best,” he adds.