Academia Anthropology Politics Travel

Elsewhere (218)

October 31, 2016 by David 41 Comments

Janice Fiamengo on academia’s sanctimonious totalitarians:

[Feminist academic] Jo Livingstone laments that “the tenured, particularly men, are exempt from the kind of character scrutiny to which ordinary employees are subjected.” It’s remarkable to find self-described “progressive” people calling for “character scrutiny” for professors. It sounds like something out of Victorian times: “We hope Professor Sandwell is a respectable man, moderate in his habits, prudent, correct in his opinions, and regular in church attendance.” It’s clear that these individuals would love to able to sanction their colleagues for thinking incorrectly about feminism.

Somewhat related. 

Brian Min finds more feminists exhibiting their trademark stoicism and level-headedness: 

Student organisers of the upcoming talk [a critique of feminism and pretentious victimhood] by scholar Christina Hoff Sommers put up roughly 50 flyers promoting the event on four different campus buildings at Columbia University and Barnard College earlier this month. Nearly all were torn down within 24 hours. Since then, the organisers replaced the originals, posting roughly 75 flyers throughout the Columbia and Barnard campuses. That prompted another series of bizarre reactions. Flyers at Barnard College have had Sommers’ face torn or clawed off… In Lerner Hall on Columbia’s campus, two young women lurked and took pictures of student organisers as they posted the flyers… One of the students organising the event was putting up flyers… when a female student came up to her and threw a cup of cereal and pretzels at her feet.

And Thomas Sowell on immigration and discernment: 

Sweden was, for a long time, one of the most ethnically homogeneous countries in the world. As of 1940, only about one percent of the Swedish population were immigrants. Even as the proportion of immigrants increased over the years, as late as 1970 90 percent of foreign-born persons in Sweden had been born in other Scandinavian countries or in Western Europe. These immigrants were usually well-educated, and often had higher labour force participation rates and lower unemployment rates than the native Swedes. That all began to change as the growing number of immigrants came increasingly from the Middle East, with Iraqis becoming the largest immigrant group in Sweden.

This changing trend was accompanied by a sharply increased use of the government's “social assistance” programme, from 6 percent in the pre-1976 era to 41 percent in the 1996-1999 period. But, even in this later period, fewer than 7 percent of the immigrants from Scandinavia and Western Europe used “social assistance,” while 44 percent of the immigrants from the Middle East used that welfare state benefit. Immigrants, who were by this time 16 percent of Sweden’s population, had become 51 percent of the long-term unemployed and 57 percent of the people receiving welfare payments. The proportion of foreigners in prison was 5 times their proportion in the population of the country.

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