Bring the Revolution Home, Bill Your Parents
I had an experience with a class that I registered for this semester. It was an intro to architecture course, which I decided might be fun to take because I have strong opinions about ugly buildings and love reading Christopher Alexander and essays about urban planning. I dropped the class the first day because as it turns out, it’s less of an introduction to architecture, and more of a course on Marxist architectural thought, with a lot of very troubling statements made by the professor.
In the Business building of the campus, the professor told all of us that she hoped we would do something meaningful with our lives, not get into business or law and “useless stuff like that”. She declared that women were the superior sex, being more conscientious, better students, more capable of multitasking, and the only gender capable of being a parent and working simultaneously. She told us that the course textbook was not something we should buy, because the man who wrote it was too focused on Western architecture. She called him a close minded, racist probable Trump supporter, and said that she didn’t want to “help pay for his kids college fund.” Naturally, she was illegally putting sections from his book up on her webpage for assigned reading. Smiling, she quipped that “books need to be global, everything else needs to be burned.”
Naturally the most important thing a person could do with their life was to be in the humanities. She very clearly said that to be in the humanities and arts was to participate in controlling how people construct meaning, and that the new generation of the intellectual elite coming out of colleges would be the filter that the world would see reality through. Architecture had nothing to do with aesthetics or comfort in her view, it was all about reaffirming or defying social constructions like the patriarchy, capitalism, and racism. She ended the class with an impassioned speech about how the world needed “democratic architecture,” built by common consent to be devoid of the implicit hierarchical messages that shape our every waking thought.
I realized that I have been blessed in the math department, where no one talks about politics. Families are paying to send their children into programs that will teach them to hate their parents, dehumanize ideological opponents, and worship empty psycho-babble
