Redskins and Paleface

sophists for socialism
I think my favourite example is still Dr Nina Power, a senior philosophy lecturer at Roehampton University, a Marxist, and naturally a Guardian contributor. Dr Power told readers of The Philosophers’ Magazine that “everyone has the potential to understand everything” and that equality of intelligence is “something to be presupposed” because – and here’s the clever bit, just because – “everyone is equally intelligent.” Despite, or possibly because of, her ability to ignore tens of millions of IQ tests to the contrary, Dr Power is very much the kind of philosopher currently in favour.
The mental prowess of our Philosopher Queen was particularly evident when she insisted that lecturers needn’t be competent in any conventional sense or be familiar with the subject they’re employed to teach, and instead should learn alongside pupils in “shared ignorance.” And she did all this while simultaneously denouncing cuts in public subsidy to arts and humanities departments and to so-called educators much like herself.

… she insisted that lecturers needn’t be competent in any conventional sense … and instead should learn alongside pupils in “shared ignorance”.
Well, it sounds like she has plenty to share

Well, it sounds like she has plenty to share
Dr Power is quite a character. Her blathering implies a great deal that she takes care not to state explicitly. She seems to imagine that precocity cannot be innate, that the unequal distribution of intelligence has nothing whatsoever to do with genetics and heredity, and that cleverness is therefore to be subject to social correction and redistribution by people like her. But then stating these things clearly might make her sound foolish and invite corrections from people who actually know something about the subjects on which she pontificates.

might make her sound foolish?!?!?!
Well, yes, quite. But stating her assumptions clearly would risk exposing the feebleness of her arguments to a larger, less politically uniform audience. An audience that might notice all those unearned conclusions because it doesn’t think those are the conclusions that one ought to arrive at regardless of the facts.