#insitutions

Duke of Bookingham [x]

Along these lines, here’s a clip from a post I put up last year, about a Q talk given by political scientist Dale Kuehne. He studies the family and society, and he says we have reached “a gender tipping point.” Excerpt:

No wonder journalists are noticing that this is a significant time. But most are still missing what’s most important: while today’s conversations push the boundaries of how we understand gender, they don’t understand that this brave new world of identity is about more than gender.

The students with whom I associate—from middle school to college students—have understood for several years that we now reside in a world beyond gender. The youngest of them probably don’t realize that TIME’s article announced anything “new.”

For many of them, gender discussions, even of the transgender variation, are just so yesterday. When we talk about personal identity, we don’t include the mundane questions about being male and/or female. A person can certainly identify as male or female if they wish, but there is little expectation that one would do so.

After all, today Facebook gives us over 50 “gender” identities to choose from. (Conversations about this can involve questions about why there are so few options.) And rather than looking to gender or variations on a gender, more and more young people are seeking to discover their identity by widening the options to include “otherkins” (people who consider themselves to have a non-human identity, such as various animals, spirits, mediums, and so on).

Young people today are much less binary when it comes to understanding identity because “male” and “female” as categories don’t express a unique or comprehensive identity.

When I tell this to many adult audiences, they laugh, believing that young people will grow out of this “stage.” They’re surprised that I don’t share their sense of the immaturity of our youth.

That’s because the young people with whom I interact are extraordinarily perceptive, compared to adults. As one high school student recently asked me, “Why does our school demand that we figure out if we are male or female or some variation? How could we figure it out even if we cared about gender? Can you tell me what it feels like to be woman? Can you tell me what it feels like to be a man? Of course not. No one knows.”

Precisely.

If everything is reduced to gender—even liquid gender—then how can anyone know by a solely internal exploration if they feel male or female?

What does it feel like to be a man? It can’t just mean that I am attracted to women, because it is okay to be attracted to men. It can’t just mean I feel like a lumberjack—because what does it mean to feel like a lumberjack? It can’t simply mean to be drawn to women’s clothes because what makes some garments women’s clothes?

In short, if the ultimate source of reference is the self, and if no other self than the individual is a reference point, how can you know who or what you are?

Indeed. The kids are right.

We don’t live at a tipping point; we already live beyond the tipping point. Whether adults realize it or not, the most important conversation today is not about gender, but about identity, as released from the confines of gender.

Kuehne thinks this is a very bad thing, because it is part — indeed, perhaps the end point — of the total deconstruction of the relational bases of society and its refashioning to serve the needs of the sovereign Self. You see Paglia’s point. She said this in one of her 1990s essays; it’s still applicable:

FREE HIGHER EDUCATION HAS BEEN PASSED, HOWEVER, THE MINISTRY OF EDUCATION HAS REALIZED A SNAG IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE PLAN: A DEBT GAP THAT WOULD AFFECT ALL THE UNIVERSITIES INVOLVED.

SANTIAGO- Since President Michelle Bachelet’s re-election, she has promised to make higher education free. In May 2015, the policy was finally written into the law; however, now that the plan is in motion, there is a struggle to identify how universities will have enough money to run, when a current gap exists in many Chilean universities’ budgets.

  According to Emol, next year when free higher education is implemented in 18, out of 28, institutions of higher education, they will see a deficit gap between the original costs announced by the Ministry of Education and the actual costs.

Included in these 18 institutions are Universidad Catolica and Universidad de Chile, which are expected to have debts that reach CL$611,000 and CL$135,000, respectively, per student, once free education is officially implemented.

The institutions’ debt was calculated once the Ministry of Education released its plan to begin providing free education, with the allocation of gratuity to 50 percent of students in university education. The students’ financial needs will be evaluated, based on the university they are attending and their family income.

Last week, the Minister of Education, Adriana Delpiano announced that this will apply to at least 200,000 students. Delpiano explained that an investment of CL$536 billion was made to increase the higher education budget, of which only CL$177 billion were additional funds to support the existing resources, which are being redistributed to carry out this plan.

Although the Ministry has redistributed funds to create a budget for free university, the director of Acción Educar, Raul Figueroa, explains that the debt gap for institutions will still exist. He told Emol that the reason the gap occurs is because the Ministry of Education’s regulated tariffs are calculated from the current reference tariff that “bears no relation to the cost structure of the institutions.”

In regards to the gap, Universidad Catolica chancellor, Ignacio Sánchez, commented that if the current conditions are not adjusted, a gratuity benefit will not apply to these 18 higher institutions, leaving them with insufficient funds and a large debt gap. A collective debt, that according to a report released by El Mercurio, would be around US$30 million.