Our Universities Are Becoming Self-Licking Ice Cream Cones

What the Heck is a Self-Licking Ice-Cream Cone?

A self-licking ice cream cone is a term which describes a self-perpetuating system with no purpose outside of sustaining itself. In the case of colleges and universities, these institutions receive and spend a wide variety of monies from both our government and students — ostensibly to provide them a quality education. The thing is, by catering to “woke” student’s wants and demands rather than their needs (i.e., intellectual challenge and development), they are quickly becoming learning institutions in name only. They have stopped being places of enlightenment and growth, and now exist only to serve themselves as named organizations.

Here’s Proof…

Students go to university in large part to learn and develop new ideas aimed at improving their lives and the world around them. In a university classroom setting, this often involves using something called the Hegelian Dialect. This learning model is illustrated below.

Using this model, students learn to take their side of an argument or “Thesis”, compare it to their peers’ opposing argument or “Anti-thesis”. Together, the students examine, discuss, criticize and evaluate the merits of both of their positions and come up with a new one through a “Synthesis” of the two positions. In a successful use of the model the synthesizing of newly formed positions continues until the proposition or subject of discussion is agreed upon or proven.

In an environment where opposing viewpoints are not available, unwanted, or cancelled, the following model emerges.

Using this model, students learn to take their side of an argument or “Thesis”, compare it to their peers’ opposing argument or “Anti-thesis”. Together, the students examine, discuss, criticize and evaluate the merits of both of their positions and come up with a new one through a “Synthesis” of the two positions. In a successful use of the model the synthesizing of newly formed positions continues until the proposition or subject of discussion is agreed upon or proven.

In an environment where opposing viewpoints are not available, unwanted, or cancelled, the following model emerges.

In this model, now common on university campuses, the students reject opposing ideas (the Anti-thesis) they fear might “trigger” them, or which they claim are “racist”, “bigoted”, “hateful”, or coming from “privileged” sources. These most often unproven assertions are allowed to cancel opposing perspectives and stifle the process of Synthesis. When this occurs, an echo chamber emerges where students are open only to their initial unchallenged position (a “Sclero-thesis”), or those in agreement with it (a “Para-Thesis”). The end result is “Paralytic Synthesis”, a state in in which no newly formed position or belief is developed. Students remain unchallenged, unwelcomed synthesis is terminated, and intellectual paralysis is achieved. Sad really.

If young adults leave our colleges and universities unchallenged because fellow students, professors, faculty, and staff fear being targeted by agents of “wokeism”, they not are not only wasting their and taxpayers' monies, but they are also contributing to these institutions becoming self-licking ice cream cones.