As opposed to communist anarchism. I graduated from The Evergreen State College in Olympia Washington after being a student there for two and a half years. On consideration, there were quite a few problems that could have been easily corrected if the administrators and teachers hadn't been so fundamentalist in their beliefs about the educational philosophy of the place.
Evergreen prides itself on having a student driven contributions to learning loom large. These are manifested especially in seminars, meetings that make up half of the instruction. Seminars are discussions that are student lead, more or less, formally lead by one of the instructors. Evergreen runs on interdisciplinary programs instead of on individual classes, so you always have several teachers.
The problem, or at least one of the problems, with Evergreen comes from having so much student involvement, from having the absolute autonomy of individual student respected even when the greater group suffers. At Evergreen, I saw students who hadn't done their work dominate seminar discussions, talking about nothing, and when called on it they accused others of infringing on their rights, and the teachers supported them. The absolute respect Evergreen gives to individuals includes a consent to break the rules and get away with it. All an individual has to do is invoke their individual autonomy and make a half hearted excuse and suddenly their negative behavior, often interfering with the functioning of the class, is absolved.
This makes life for many other students suck, quite frankly. This tolerance for individuality includes tolerance for people who have come from non-academically rigorous backgrounds who complain about the tempo of the work. Often, in response, the work and difficulty level that the program does is reduced to fit that level, instead of the instructors telling the students to work harder and stop complaining. Requirements for work can also be mysteriously forgiven if students can think up a convincing excuse about why exactly they weren't able to do the work. The sound of a thousand tiny violins fills the air, and many instructors are taken in by these exaggerations and lies from their students.
Laziness and dishonesty amongst the students are widespread, and most of that behavior has the purpose of getting away with having to do as little work as possible. The instructors often play along, and the rules of grading sometimes have little value in practice, leading to a double standard between the students who actually do the work and the lazy students who lie to get out of it.
This is liberal, individualistic, anarchism taken to an extreme, to an extreme where the group suffers from the actions of a few. A more communist ideal of anarchism would include a responsibility to the group as part of its credo, a group that is in turn anchored first in the material structure of society and second in the community. The point here is that the rights of the sovereign individual alone are not the summum bonum, the be all and end all for society. Individualism is great if it can be demonstrated that the individual's actions do not hurt others. Society is a combination of the individual and the group, and both have to work well for everyone to prosper.
Evergreen prides itself on having a student driven contributions to learning loom large. These are manifested especially in seminars, meetings that make up half of the instruction. Seminars are discussions that are student lead, more or less, formally lead by one of the instructors. Evergreen runs on interdisciplinary programs instead of on individual classes, so you always have several teachers.
The problem, or at least one of the problems, with Evergreen comes from having so much student involvement, from having the absolute autonomy of individual student respected even when the greater group suffers. At Evergreen, I saw students who hadn't done their work dominate seminar discussions, talking about nothing, and when called on it they accused others of infringing on their rights, and the teachers supported them. The absolute respect Evergreen gives to individuals includes a consent to break the rules and get away with it. All an individual has to do is invoke their individual autonomy and make a half hearted excuse and suddenly their negative behavior, often interfering with the functioning of the class, is absolved.
This makes life for many other students suck, quite frankly. This tolerance for individuality includes tolerance for people who have come from non-academically rigorous backgrounds who complain about the tempo of the work. Often, in response, the work and difficulty level that the program does is reduced to fit that level, instead of the instructors telling the students to work harder and stop complaining. Requirements for work can also be mysteriously forgiven if students can think up a convincing excuse about why exactly they weren't able to do the work. The sound of a thousand tiny violins fills the air, and many instructors are taken in by these exaggerations and lies from their students.
Laziness and dishonesty amongst the students are widespread, and most of that behavior has the purpose of getting away with having to do as little work as possible. The instructors often play along, and the rules of grading sometimes have little value in practice, leading to a double standard between the students who actually do the work and the lazy students who lie to get out of it.
This is liberal, individualistic, anarchism taken to an extreme, to an extreme where the group suffers from the actions of a few. A more communist ideal of anarchism would include a responsibility to the group as part of its credo, a group that is in turn anchored first in the material structure of society and second in the community. The point here is that the rights of the sovereign individual alone are not the summum bonum, the be all and end all for society. Individualism is great if it can be demonstrated that the individual's actions do not hurt others. Society is a combination of the individual and the group, and both have to work well for everyone to prosper.
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I am not sure what professors or what disciplines you studied under, but mine would actively check in with students about if they had done the reading, if they hadn't they were asked to not come to seminar, thus not receiving credit for that portion. This is true especially for the sciences. I know a lot of people who didn't receive full credit based on their work as well.
I agree about with the statement regarding the administration but as far as students lying to get out of work and bitching about rights infringed, I think you shoot wide of the mark. First off students at every school across the country bitch and lie to get by; saying it happens more at Evergreen without providing any explicit evidence to back up that claim feels a little unsubstantiated. Furthermore, all schools of anarcho-political theory are utopian at best. The students at evergreen definitely suffer because of the administrations inability to hold people accountable, but they also suffer from a small group of fundamentalist anarcho-idiots. Anarchocommunist ideology is rooted in violence expounded by politicians elasticizing the works of others to fit your needed or desired meeting. All such anarchists should be treated as sociopolitical terrorists, including these Greeners who seek to "Smash the state...by any means necessary."
@Anonymous...well, first of all, it's not just unsubstantiated. I saw this stuff first hand and could give very detailed accounts of it...but doing so would put a lot of people's lives out there on the net, even if I didn't name names.
Second, I'm not sure where exactly you got your notion of anarcho-communism from. I don't consider anarcho-communists to be politicians, to be inherently violent, and I certainly don't view them as "sociopolitical terrorists".
When it comes to the cult of personality, I suppose that that can manifest in any political group, but I don't see anything in Anarcho-Communism that makes them more susceptible to this than others.
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