John Rosenberg wonders whether female students really need “stereotype inoculation.”

New research summarised in the Chronicle of Higher Education, “Online, People Learn Best from Virtual ‘Helpers’ That Resemble Them,” argues that women and minorities prefer instructors of their own race and gender even if those instructors are not real people but artificial, computer-generated “‘helpers’ or virtual agents that pop up on a screen and guide people through a program.” Most people might think it odd that one of the clearest effects of our mania for “diversity” is that people are increasingly race- and gender-conscious and thus estranged from people who don’t look like themselves, but it’s not odd at all. It’s entirely predictable.

As I noted here, there are some who seem to believe that the way to get past small differences in physiology is to continually fixate on small differences in physiology.

Speaking of which, John Leo spies a willingness to cater to other, less highbrow educational needs.

A course on sex taught by psychology Professor John Michael Bailey recently featured a naked woman being worked on by a man wielding a sex toy… The 600-student course, which for some reason is one of the largest at Northwestern, features all kinds of sexual expression and guests that include swingers and convicted sex offenders. The optional, after-class sex-toy demonstration, Bailey said, “helps us understand sexual diversity” – possibly the first time a state-of-the-art vibrator demonstration was stuffed in under the campus diversity umbrella.

Tom Paine quotes Oscar Wilde on socialism and selfishness.

Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live; it is asking others to live as one wishes them to live. And unselfishness is letting other people’s lives alone, not interfering with them. Selfishness always aims at creating around it an absolute uniformity of type… It is grossly selfish to require of one’s neighbour that he should think in the same way, and hold the same opinions.

Which reminded me of this from the Devil’s Kitchen: 

A racist is a stupid, ignorant bigot but at least he cannot, and will not, try to force me to believe what he believes and force me to pay for the implementations of his beliefs. Socialists do. So, socialism is worse than racism.

Update:

James Panero on the wrong kind of transgressive art.

For the administrators and students at Pratt, the problem isn’t political art itself, says DeQuattro, but the nature of his politics, which are conservative.

Update 2:

Russell Nieli on Jonathan Haidt and academic fiefdom.

We are a tribal moral community… We have sacred values other than truth; we have taboos that constrain our thinking; we have almost no moral/political diversity; and we have created a hostile climate for graduate students who don’t share those sacred values. 

Feel free to add your own.

200,000 creatures caught on automated cameras. (h/t, MeFi) // Octopus and hatchlings. // PewPewPewPewPew! // Opera house of note. // How to make a laser from a gin and tonic. // At last, the Battleship drinking game. // Kinetic sculptures by Anne Lilly. // Monster prominence, February 24 2011. // Bus passes of Milwaukee, 1930-1979. (h/t, Coudal) // Shanghai. // “This is not Sweden… This is our area.” And some French multiculturalism. // On “outgroups” and “ingroups.” (h/t, Franklin) // In three dee. // Nyiragongo Crater. (h/t, prm) //  Farmyard indecency. (h/t, Julia) // Which came first? // Infuse whole fruit with delicious gas.

Behold the Urban Downhill Mountain Bike Race in Valparaiso, Chile. It gets a little hairy.

Portraits made of screws. 

For newcomers, three more items from the archives.

I’m Other, Subsidise Me.

Omar Kholeif is professionally ethnic and terribly oppressed. Though by what he doesn’t say.

Mr Kholeif doesn’t mention any first-hand experience of vocational or artistic exclusion based on ethnicity, or any similar experience had by anyone known to him, which seems an odd omission as it might have made his argument a little more convincing. In fact, the only discernible obstacles he mentions are the limited market value of his chosen skills and the preferences of his own parents.

It Pays To Be Unobvious.

When clarity is “conservative” and evidence is unhip.

Occasionally, Judith Butler’s politics are aired relatively free of question-begging jargon, thus revealing her radicalism to the lower, uninitiated castes. As, for instance, at a 2006 UC Berkeley “Teach-In Against America’s Wars,” during which the professor claimed that it’s “extremely important” to “understand” Hamas and Hizballah as “social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left” and so, by implication, deserving of support. Readers may find it odd that students are being encouraged to express solidarity with totalitarian terrorist movements that set booby traps in schools and boast of using children as human shields, and whose stated goals include the Islamic “conquest” of the free world, the “obliteration” of Israel and the annihilation of the Jewish people. However, such statements achieve a facsimile of sense if one understands that the object is to be both politically radical and morally unobvious.

At Last, Socialist Football.

Some kids play better than others. This simply will not do.

Note that “an opportunity to play” doesn’t seem to entail playing as well as you can. And I’m not quite clear how penalising competence squares with the professed ideals of sportsmanship. However, there is some encouraging news. The handbook helpfully urges talented teams to avoid the risk of forfeiture by “reducing the number of players on the field” and “kicking with the weaker foot.”

Take a big stick to the greatest hits.