A Columbia Student Who Fled North Korea Says the Ivy League is Crazier Than the Country She Escaped From
Source - A woman who fled North Korea when she was a teenager and is now attending Columbia University said she is seeing a lot of similarities between the totalitarian regime she grew up in and the education she is now receiving in the United States.
Yeonmi Park and her mother fled North Korea to China over the frozen Yalu River in 2007, when she was just 13, and the two were sold into slavery by human traffickers.
They were ultimately able to flee to Mongolia with the help of Christian missionaries and trekked across the Gobi Desert to eventually find refuge in South Korea, where Park, now 27, attended college before transferring to Columbia in 2016. ...
'I expected that I was paying this fortune, all this time and energy to learn how to think,' she told FOX News. 'But they are forcing you to think the way they want you to think.' ...
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Park said that her professors would give them 'trigger warnings' and allow them to opt out of readings and discussions.
'Going to Columbia, the first thing I learned was 'safe space,'' she told the New York Post. ...
During her orientation, a professor asked who the class who liked classical books, like Jane Austen.
'I said, 'I love those books,' Park said in an interview with FOX News. 'I thought it was a good thing.'
'Then she said, 'Did you know those writers had a colonial mindset? They were racists and bigots and are subconsciously brainwashing you.' ...
From there, she said, her classes were filled with 'anti-American sentiment, reminding her of her childhood in North Korea, where students were constantly taught about the 'American bastard,' which was the only way they were allowed to refer to Americans.
'The math problems would say: 'There are four American bastards, you kill two of them, how many American bastards are left to kill?,'' Park recounted, saying 7-year-olds in North Korea would have to respond with 'two American bastards' to that question.
'I thought North Koreans were the only people who hated Americans, but turns out there are a lot of people hating this country in this country,' she said. ...
Eventually, she said she 'learned how to just shut up' so she could get good grades and graduate, but, she said, 'Even North Korea is not this nuts.'
'North Korea was pretty crazy,' she said, 'but not this crazy.'
Forgive me the long excerpt, but click the link and you'll see for yourself just how much of Yeonmi Park's story I left out. This is basically just one slide of the "Academic Institutions are Irredeemably Unhinged" PowerPoint I could've presented.
And there are so many ways to go with this, where does one even begin? I suppose we can start with students at Columbia in particular, the Ivy League more broadly and our institutions of what were once called "higher learning" in general. How the hell do you react to Park's reaction to the absolute useless, nonsensical drivel you're being spoon fed every day? How she escaped the world's most brutal oppression, faced imminent death on a daily basis, trekked across frozen rivers and blistering hot, barren deserts, survived literal slavery, crossed an ocean and a content to live her dream of studying in one of the most respected universities in the western world, only to be told how much we all suck. All day. Every day. By tenured professors making six figure salaries whose greatest hardship is when the A/C breaks and whose only experience with suffering is burning their tongue on a Green Tea Crème Frappuccino.
Seriously, what do you say when the whole, isolated, insolated, utterly disconnected from reality little bubble you're spending four of your most formative years in gets knocked down like a Jenga tower by this woman who's already lived 10 lifetimes of real world experience? That she's wrong? That she doesn't know what she's talking about? That she's got an agenda? She's flat out full of shit? That in reality, the real ordeal in this world is surviving a life of wealth and privilege? Enough to go to an Ivy League school that millions like Park, yearning to breathe free can only dream of? And that the real evil in this world isn't so much lack of freedom, brutality and oppression, it's Jane Austen and her insidious, colonial brainwashing? I mean, how can you be in the presence of someone like Yeonmi Park:
... for 10 seconds and not feel completely, monumentally ashamed of yourself for needing safe spaces just in order survive the grueling ordeal that is four years at a cushy, elite university?
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And what about the parents who are footing the bill for this clown show? This is from Yeonmi Park's Instagram page, where Jordan Peterson talks about a conversation with her where she described her four years as "a waste of time and money" and how she felt just as "stymied" in her freedom of speech at Columbia as she did in North Korea:
According to one source, the annual tuition, room, board and assorted fees at Columbia total $79,752. Times four years, that's $319.008. So the child you brought into this world can be raised like a hot house orchid, incapable of surviving outside the campus environment and with absolutely no applicable life skills that make them useful in the marketplace. Molded into adult children by angry, wealthy fringe weirdos to be frightened by language and terrified by the harmful effects of Mr. Darcy and the Bennet sisters romantic entanglements.
Good luck with that. Just know that the one sane student in those classrooms was laughing her ass off at your kid the whole time.
At the risk of offending those Ivy professors by citing another European writer, Voltaire summed up the dynamic between people of privilege and people who have had to work and struggle to make better lives for themselves brilliantly. He said, “History is filled with the sound of silken slippers going downstairs and wooden shoes coming up.” Yeonmi Park is an example of wooden shoes rising to the top. The people whose parents are shelling out $319K for their useless silken slippers will never be heard from again once they graduate. My money is on her.