Traditional Colleges And Universities

Well yes, today most colleges are coed. And I know that relations with the young women was an issue for Elliot Rodgers. But I don't consider this to have been a negative thing. I don't think he was asking for a single sex school either.

I don't think his calling of the young women 'sluts' was in anyway warranted. He was just angry about the sorts of power they were holding, and that they seemed closed to him. And I do understand that he did a great deal to ensure this.

And yes, Rodger's had a very well off father, worth $250 Meg. Elliot could have gone to any school he wanted to, or anywhere else for that matter.

Nominally he was an English Major at the University of California. But in fact he was no longer taking classes. Listening to his video messages, he certainly seemed smart enough to have done very well.

His main interest seemed to be making his video messages, and his main audience seemed to have been his father.

Now we can condemn Rodgers for what he did, and we might say he was a 'looser', but I don't think that is constructive in any way whatsoever. The man is dead, and for everyone who does something like he does, there are 10,000 more suffering like him, and at similar colleges. So no, we don't gain anything by pointing a finger of blame at him.

He needed to be in a different environment, some place which is not a well-off mono culture, someplace not dominated by sororities and fraternities, or other restrictive social clubs.

Elliot was well-off, far more like the mono culture than different from it. But still, he was not really part of it.

In his video messages, he laments his low social status. People think he is a racist, an elitist, and a misogynist. And taking what he says at face value, yes, that is how he comes across. But I think he was just expressing his pain and lamenting his condition. Despite having the designer sun glasses and the fancy car, he was treated like a nobody. At least this is how he saw it. And as I know, this fixation on indicators of social status is pretty much standard in the LA metro.

Why was this so, Rodgers an outcast? Interesting, and a very open question. But I feel that he would have done better in a less mono culture environment, like one of the State Universities, or starting at one of the Community Colleges, where there are more part time students and more employed students. Or just letting his father send him on a long trip to somewhere, anywhere, and doing anything he wanted. In the more open environment, and losing some of his privilege, he would find his own way and his own place. Sometimes another country and another language does it for people. Someplace where he always going to be seen as an outsider anyway, and so people make allowances and accept him anyway,

Sounds like the birth mother did not stick around long. And Elliot disliked his step mother. He expressed different ideas in his videos, but mostly it seemed like he wanted to get a reaction out of his father. So we have to look at his final acts as a variety on suicide.

So when I talk about traditional colleges, I am not speaking of the single sex. I mean with face to face classes, schedules, assignment, and examinations. This made sense long ago. But today, with wide spread literacy and highly disseminated books and Internet communications, do these sorts of Universities really make sense?

The only people who really learn, are the ones who want to. And so supervised independent study starts to make sense.

And then this could be supplemented with some sorts of occasional face to face meetings.

For many people, hooking up with a counter culture of one sort or another makes all the difference for them. And then others have had to be in wars, or gotten into revolutions, or done really unusual things.

The father probably just wanted his son to 'normalize', and so he sent him to a well liked regional university, where most of the students are coming from out of the immediate area, and from well-off families. Rather like a child care center. And it is not the most extreme, it is moderate.

So we have had more of these kinds of spree shooters in high schools.

About high school:

www.amazon.com/Jocks-Burnouts-Social-Categories-Identity/dp/0807729639/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1499975460&sr=8-1&keywords=jocks+and+burnouts

www.amazon.com/Learning-Capitalist-Culture-Contemporary-Ethnography/dp/B01JXT1B10/ref=sr_1_sc_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1499975494&sr=8-2-spell&keywords=learning+capialist+culture

Both of these are most interesting.

According to Karen Neuman, though these high school shootings are rare, they happen more often, not in high crime rate areas, large number of guns in schools areas, or with students that have records. They happen the most in white exurban mono culture areas, and done by students that have clean records.

So are colleges now same sorts of things? I would say yes, at least the common type which Elliot Rodgers was attending.

And are such schools the best way to get an education? I would say that it would be indeed very rare situations where they would be that good at all. Education needs to be self directed and life long.

Those most common sorts of schools are just an extension of adolescence. But if you have not graduated from one, you are still likely to be looked down upon by those who control the corridors of power, because they have graduated from such.

SJG

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Whitman

So this Charles Whitman, 1966, U Texas Austin, killing his wife and mother, and then killing three people in taking over the tower, and then locking himself on the 28th floor observation deck, and killing 11 more people at long range. After 96 minutes, police shot and killed him.

Is this the first one of these school shootings? America's first lone nut? No, this was after Lee Harvey Oswald.

Did well in the Marine Corps, good conduct medal, also good marksmanship.

He was married, he was a Mechanical Engineering student at U Texas Austin, grades were just minimal, so Marine Corp terminated his scholarship, and so he had to go to North Carolina to finish up his 5 year enlistment.

In 1964 honorably discharged from Marines, went back to U Texas Austin, as Agriculture Engineering Major. Also worked as bill collector, bank teller, and with railroads.

Tall building is the tower he fired from.
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0c/The_Tower%2C_University_of_Texas_at_Austin_%28ca_1980%29.jpg

He had just bought some cans of Spam, probably for when he was to be holed up in the tower.

Deranged Killers: Charles Whitman (2009)
www.youtube.com/watch?v=fx6veJsxcNU

Wounded lots more than those he killed.

SJG