Keili Bartlett reports from the cutting edge of Canadian academia

Women should be heard first in the classroom, a forum on misogyny at Dalhousie University heard on Thursday. “Men should not be allowed to monopolise these forums,” management professor Judy Haiven said.

Readers are invited to see if they can spot any male persons on the non-monopolistic panel in question.

Her idea that women should always speak first in classroom discussions and at public events was brought up several times during the forum. Haiven said she already tries to apply this idea in her own classroom… “In the management department, women get to speak first.”

How chivalrous. Though of course the professor means male students aren’t allowed to speak first. Because gender condescension is the path to utopia. 

Haiven’s idea was met by a round of applause,

Of course it was.

but not everyone agreed with her suggestion.

Oh, calamity. Do I hear a rumble of dissent?  

“I think that women of colour should speak first in class,” [gender and sexual resource centre outreach co-ordinator, Jude] Ashburn said.

Whew. That was close.

Sadly, however, Total Ideological Correction™ remains just out of reach. Perhaps more panel discussions are needed. Panels in which stern and pious ladies confuse gender with temperament and depict women as timid, delicate creatures who struggle to raise their hands and can’t quite master speech. In a cosseting environment where women are a majority

Update, via the comments: 

Dogmatic mediocrities are hardly uncommon in the field of Women’s Studies and the subject isn’t exactly known for its factual reliability or intellectual rigour. So it’s entirely possible the applause for Professor Haiven is sincere, albeit bewildering, and it’s possible some of the panellists believe the bollocks they mouth, even the supposed need for women to always speak before men. However, it may conceivably be the case that the panellists are desperate to find excuses for their own rather disreputable academic positions, their own status and salaries, and for being on a panel in front of credulous teenagers while pretending to be more clever and essential than they actually are.

Even with standards as low as those found in Women’s Studies programmes, you do have to wonder how a supposed intellectual – a professional thinker – can insist on the following, apparently in earnest: 

On television interviews, on platforms and political meetings, at any presentations — if there’s no woman speaker, then the event does not take place.

By which, again, the professor means such gatherings should not be permitted. She’s quite emphatic on this point.

Unsurprisingly, Professor Haiven is keen on banning things and on punishing people who say things of which she doesn’t approve, and which she casually conflates with acts of violence. And this professional thinker, this intellectual titan, can denounce the evils of an alleged male “monopoly” in an environment where women generally outnumber men by quite some margin, and while sitting on a panel with no male participants, and with no-one willing to argue a substantively different view. Apparently, if a panel of any size, on any subject, doesn’t include a female speaker then the outcome is “foregone” and therefore invalid. Yet strangely, this doesn’t apply when a panel is exclusively female and wildly question-begging. 

Such is the Clown Quarter of modern academia.

Those with an appetite for self-harm can watch the ladies’ entire three-and-a-half-hour discussion.

Via The College Fix

 

Goodness, a button. I wonder what it does. 

















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