Academia Anthropology Politics Psychodrama

Elsewhere (205)

July 3, 2016 by David 90 Comments

Kevin D Williamson on work and earnings: 

The median salary for a women’s-studies professor is more than a hundred grand a year. The average hourly earnings for a graduate with a women’s-studies degree? Eleven bucks an hour, well less than you’d make working the car wash at a Buc-ee’s convenience store.

Marlo Safi on unknown history: 

US history is not a staple course for history majors at most top universities, according to a new report from the American Council of Trustees and Alumni… Less than 20 percent of surveyed students could accurately identify in a multiple choice survey what the effect of the Emancipation Proclamation was, and one-third of college graduates were unaware that FDR introduced the New Deal.

Not entirely unrelated, Peter Wood on the fashionable conformity of student life:

Excluding people from a debate because you disagree with their views is an odd conceit, but odder still is that the practice has rapidly gained credibility on both sides of the Atlantic as morally valid.

Jonathan Haidt on the anti-rational rhetoric of “social justice” activism: 

There are many beliefs [on the “social justice” left] that are so central, so foundational, that when you try to argue against them, we see students saying that this would “invalidate” their “existence.” So if you were to try to argue that some cause of prejudice or racism was not real, or that disparities by race or gender had other causes, some would take this as an existential threat, an existential attack. You would be trying to “invalidate” their “existence,” which is “an act of violence.” So your very efforts to persuade with reason are, they say, “violence.”

And Paul Sperry spots an upscale, ‘progressive’ middle school that’s probably best avoided: 

The programme, these parents say, deliberately instils in white children a strong sense of guilt about their race. Some kids come home in tears, saying, “I’m a bad person.” Parents, moreover, say the classroom segregation only breeds resentment. Younger children, for instance, feel left out when the “kids of colour” come back to the main classroom munching on cupcakes they were given in their “affinity group.” The divisive programme is run by Anshu Wahi, a long-time “social justice” activist who’s held the title of “director of diversity” at Bank Street since 2013. She referred questions to the school’s communications office, which did not respond to requests for comment.

Not being overly fascinated by a person’s pigmentation is, says Ms Wahi, a “tool of Whiteness,” one that perpetuates “oppression.” Apparently, the way to get past small differences in physiology is to continually fixate on small differences in physiology – at least, according to our “social justice” educator, whose status and pay cheque – and whose opportunities to indulge in a little psychological sadism – very much depend on the children in her care being fixated by such things.

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