Higher Ed In America

OK, here is what has become a common story, so common that we fail to no longer see the idiotic cesspool that much of higher education has become.

A Florida Atlantic University student said he was punished after he refused a professor’s directive to stomp on a piece of paper with the word “Jesus” written on it. The university, meanwhile, is defending the assignment as a lesson in debate.

“I’m not going to be sitting in a class having my religious rights desecrated,” student Ryan Rotela told television station WPEC. “I truly see this as I’m being punished.”
Rotela, who is a devout Mormon, said the instructor in his Intercultural Communications class told the students to write the name “Jesus” on a sheet of paper. Then, they were told to put the paper on the floor.

“He had us all stand up and he said ‘Stomp on it,’” Rotela said. “I picked up the paper from the floor and put it right back on the table.

The young college student told the instructor, Deandre Poole, that the assignment was insulting and offensive

“I said to the professor, ‘With all due respect to your authority as a professor, I do not believe what you told us to do was appropriate,’” Rotela said. ‘I believe it was unprofessional and I was deeply offended by what you told me to do.’”

While I have no disagreement with this student's viewpoint and I have utter contempt for this inane professor, this kid made two mistakes:
1) First, he took a course called "Intercultural Communications".  Reading a this title alone in the course catalog should have set off alarm bells that this would be a descent into progressive, post-modern, relativistic, anti-intellectual hell.  What good purpose could taking such drivel possibly serve?

2) Second, the kid was too deferential.  Drop the 'all due respect' act.  Forget about the sacrilege, the very fact that the professor asked you engage in such an infantile, show-n-tell quality exercise in a college course should have tipped you off that this prof was a phony and a hack, not worthy of your respect.

The reason we have these stupid classes and idiotic professors is because students put up with it.  Don't enroll or drop the class the minute it becomes clear what a farce it is.  If enough do, ultimately, these courses these professors will go away.