The First-Year Indoctrination
City Journal Audio
Manhattan Institute
4.7 • 656 Ratings
🗓️ 29 August 2018
⏱️ 12 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
John Tierney joins City Journal editor Brian Anderson to discuss the "First-Year Experience," a widely adopted program for college freshmen that indoctrinates students in radicalism, identity politics, and victimology.
The First-Year Experience (FYE) began as a response to the campus unrest of the 1960s and 1970s to teach students to "love their university" with a semester-long course for freshmen. However FYE programs at most schools today are largely designed by left-wing college administrators, not professors, to sermonize about subjects like social justice, environmental sustainability, gender pronouns, and microaggressions.
While freshmen could undoubtedly benefit from an introductory course to learn basic skills for college, why do they so often get a mix of trivia and social activism instead of something useful academically? Tierney traveled to the FYE annual conference in San Antonio earlier this year to find out.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast. This is your host, Brian Anderson, editor of City Journal. |
| 0:22.8 | Joining me on the show today is John Tierney. |
| 0:25.0 | John's a contributing editor at City Journal and a contributing science columnist at the New York Times, |
| 0:31.2 | where he was a reporter for many years. |
| 0:33.2 | You can also follow him on Twitter at John Tierney, NYC. |
| 0:38.0 | John's here to discuss his latest piece, which appears in the summer 2018 issue of |
| 0:42.5 | City Journal, Re-education Campus. |
| 0:45.3 | It's an alarming essay about the first-year experience, a widely adopted program for |
| 0:51.0 | college freshmen used by schools around the country. |
| 0:55.6 | John, welcome back to the podcast. |
| 0:57.4 | Thanks, Brian. |
| 0:58.9 | First, can you explain to our listeners what exactly the first year experience is? |
| 1:04.6 | What was the program created to do? |
| 1:06.3 | And how widespread is it? |
| 1:08.7 | The first year experience is a term that covers lots of programs that are |
| 1:13.0 | designed specifically at freshmen, as they used to be called, before that became politically |
| 1:17.5 | incorrect. And something like 90% of American colleges have some version of the first year experience, |
| 1:23.9 | and it's rapidly growing overseas, too. These programs, one of the main constituents is often a common read as it's called, in which |
| 1:32.3 | all the freshmen are given one book to read and then they're a program. |
| 1:36.3 | But it's come to be able. |
| 1:38.3 | Is this something that takes place during the summer before they come to school or does |
| 1:43.3 | it last from the summer through school? |
... |
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