“College Will Make You Stupid”
Oh boy! I am giddy. A clip from the Fox News show Fox and Friends unveiled a new study claiming that college “turns you liberal.” Oh no! It’s the plague! While we don’t discuss sex, politics and religion too much on HackCollege, you can probably take a guess as to which way we lean. This video is insulting to the entire higher education system, no matter how flawed it may be.
What starts off as a seemingly alarming statistic (that one third of college students can’t name the three branches of the federal government), this clip quickly descends into bullshit. As my roommate Paul puts it, “Fox News proposes that we diversify universities’ ideas, while blatantly outlawing one method of thought.”
The video is punctuated by quotes such as “What is the answer? How do we fix this?”; “If degrees are more likely to make people support same sex marriage, how do you fix this?” and “Is it better to not go to college at all?” This video seems to be the result of a crunched deadline and a not-too-well-thought-out spin put on things. Usually, even Fox News has more tact than this.
I suppose the only answer now is to drop out to save our “values.”
What do you think?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kelly Sutton is a software engineer at blip.tv in New York City. During his days at Loyola Marymount University , he founded HackCollege. He earned degrees in film production and computer science (and took a fifth year). Kelly started HackCollege in August of 2006. While in school, Kelly was involved in Crimson Circle, a service organization at LMU; played on Laser Squad Bravo , the campus improv team; ran the underground media outlet, Fuck Yeah LMU ; and taught LMU's first Web video class and held odd jobs around campus throughout his tenure. Kelly started HackCollege in August of 2006. While in school, Kelly was involved in Crimson Circle, a service organization at LMU; played on Laser Squad Bravo , the campus improv team; ran the underground media outlet, Fuck Yeah LMU ; and taught LMU's first Web video class and held odd jobs around campus throughout his tenure. Kelly held some pretty awesome internships throughout college at Automatic Duck , Revision3 and blip.tv. He is quite the weird guy. He sold all of his possessions through his site, Cult of Less . The world apparently cared, along with the BBC, NBC Nightly News, CBC and Der Spiegel. Kelly is also a founder of LayerVault , a simple version control service for designers. Kelly has spoken at a few conferences including South by Southwest , 140conf and Trandmediale . Although he finds the word dirty, Kelly has consulted for many projects including TakePart , a subsidiary of Participant Media ( An Inconvenient Truth , The Cove , Syriana ) and Capture Your Flag . He has also published his very own guide to Berlin. Kelly is @ KellySutton on Twitter. Kelly can be reached at kelly@hackcollege.com
