Don’t Tell Your Parents
Dennis Prager on attempts to hide classroom indoctrination:
The vast majority of our colleges have become left-wing seminaries. Just as Christian seminaries exist to produce committed Christians, Western universities exist to produce committed leftists… Universities differ in only one respect: Christian seminaries admit their goal, whereas the universities deceive the public about theirs. Thus, in the “social sciences” — disciplines outside the natural sciences and math — a large number of college teachers inject their politics into their classrooms. And if they are recorded, the general public will become aware of just how politicised their classroom lectures are.
But there is another reason. Most professors objecting to being recorded know on some level that they are persuasive only when their audience is composed largely of very young people just out of high school. They know that if their ideas are exposed to adults, they may be revealed as intellectual lightweights. Students therefore need to understand that when professors object to being recorded, it is a statement of contempt for them. The professors are, in effect, saying to their students: “Listen. I can get away with this intellectually shallow, emotion-based propaganda when you are the only people who actually hear it. You aren’t wise enough to perceive it as such. But if people over 21 years of age hear it, I’m toast.”
See, for instance, this first day of a creative writing class, and the examples that follow it, in which attempts to circumvent normal proprieties are passionately endorsed by leftist educators. The subject of some educators’ disdain for students – say, by conspiring to rob them of a chance to hear an alternative view – was touched on here. And for an illustration of just how vigorous and successful those efforts to indoctrinate can be, see also this.
Update:
And here’s a footnote to the Caleb O’Neil case mentioned in Prager’s article.
The hard thing is that you have no idea from most courses as to the value of the content before you get there. I had a great course on colonial history 14-1850 or so. Lots learnt and full of facts and thinking about the history and mindsets of those involved without labelling one side evil.
I’ve also had what seemed to be straight forward courses about post war Europe and Australian history turn into political recruitment or propaganda courses.
How on earth would you know until a couple of weeks into a course when it’s too late to back out? Let alone mandatory? And how to ensure political balance or depoliticisation of courses?
And for an illustration of just how vigorous and successful those efforts to indoctrinate can be, see also this.
Remind me again, which ones are the grown ups?
Remind me again, which ones are the grown ups?
Well, quite. Though I suppose when you’re a teenager and just out of school, you may not fully appreciate the significance of a sociology professor who spends his time tearing down flyers for events he doesn’t like, who denounces those who disagree with him as “fascists” and “white supremacists,” and who has paranoid screaming fits in front of students.
As a commenter, dw, said following an earlier, related post:
Indeed.
As I’m sure I’ve said before, there’s often an air of predation, of, as it were, grooming.
Even if we set aside questions of professionalism and propriety, and whether professors of, say, creative writing have any business inflicting their own politics on the young people supposedly in their care, there’s still the inherent inequality of the student-professor relationship to consider. Typically, the dynamic involves a teenager, who is by definition unworldly and inexperienced, and to some extent under pressure to please, or at least not aggravate, and on the other side, someone who has spent years rehearsing the same political sermons and the same attempts to browbeat. As with Professor Penn, linked above, there’s the question of what may happen, in terms of grading or whatever, to students who argue back or in some way demur.
It’s a situation that allows adult leftists who behave like arrested adolescents to feel righteous and powerful. And which may appeal in part because in the wider world, among equals, they wouldn’t fare so well.
Something seems to have changed over the last 30 or so years in education. At my School in the 1970’s we had a History teacher who was a card carrying member of the Communist Party but he never brought his politics into the classroom, he always taught to the curriculum. Nowadays, many educators seem to have no such inhibitions.
How and why have they become so confident that there will be no consequences for their naked indoctrination? Has there actually been what Gramsci called the ‘Long March Through the Institutions’? If so, we’re in trouble.
Has there actually been what Gramsci called the ‘Long March Through the Institutions’?
I think the answer to that question is a resounding ‘Yes!’, unfortunately. It’s also a matter of attrition\accumulation, as older, more middle of the road academics retired they were replaced by more strident, left-leaning types; and let’s face it, academia was never really a reactionary and conservative hotbed to begin with.
Has there actually been what Gramsci called the ‘Long March Through the Institutions’?
Somewhat related.
Speaking of the Long March, here’s a glimpse of it in action in the world of teacher-training, showing, among other things, how the left gains its choke-hold. Faced with such Kafkaesque behaviour, I’d imagine quite a few would-be educators despair and decide to do something else instead. And so the uniformity grows.
And I somehow doubt things have improved in the six or so years since.
It’s worth noting that many those who are indoctrinated in college go on to indoctrinate younger students in secondary and even elementary schools. The “don’t tell your parents” is more apt than you might think. Public school teachers are taught methods to keep sensitive topics out of the parents’ eye. As mentioned above, the “long march” has been going on for some time and has covered more ground than one might imagine.
“many those who are indoctrinated in college go on to indoctrinate younger students in secondary and even elementary schools.”
What other jobs would they possibly be qualified for aside from taxpayer-funded?
Somewhat related.
Re: readers’ comments at the link.
Oh dear. Denial is not just a river in Egypt. {o_O}
Three paragraphs from the wiki:
“Religion is a collection of belief systems, cultural systems, and worldviews that relate humanity to spirituality and, sometimes, to moral values. Many religions have narratives, symbols, traditions and sacred histories that are intended to give meaning to life or to explain the origin of life or the universe. They tend to derive morality, ethics, religious laws or a preferred lifestyle from their ideas about the cosmos and human nature. According to some estimates, there are roughly 4,200 religions in the world.
“Many religions may have organized behaviors, clergy, a definition of what constitutes adherence or membership, holy places, and scriptures. The practice of a religion may also include rituals, sermons, commemoration or veneration a god or gods, sacrifices, festivals, feasts, trance, initiations, funerary services, matrimonial services, meditation, prayer, music, art, dance, public service or other aspects of human culture. Religions may also contain mythology.
“The word religion is sometimes used interchangeably with faith or belief system; however, in the words of Émile Durkheim, religion differs from private belief in that it is ‘something eminently social’. A global 2012 poll reports that 59% of the world’s population is religious, 23% are not religious, and 13% are atheists.”
Nearly identical text substituting “progressivism” for each instance of religion and making suitable minor edits:
Progressivism is a collection of belief systems, cultural systems, and a worldview that relate humanity to an ersatz spirituality and, frequently, to approved, collective moral values. Progressivism has narratives, symbols, traditions and sacred revised histories that are intended to give meaning to life and to explain the origin of life or the universe. It tends to derive morality, ethics, political laws and a preferred lifestyle from its ideas about the cosmos and human nature. According to its own efforts and definitions, there is one predominant progressive school of Progressivism in the world. It has infiltrated both of the two major political classes in the United States.
Progressivism has organized behaviors, an academic ‘clergy’, a definition of what constitutes adherence or membership, sacred values, and political scriptures. The practice of Progressivism may also include social rituals, political sermons, commemoration or veneration of Jesus figures, social sacrifice, race or gender studies and accreditation, central education, retirement and medical programs, festivals, parades and demonstrations, initiations, matrimonial services, environmental meditation or prayer, music, art, dance, public service or other aspects of human culture. Progressivism may also contain mythology.
The word Progressivism is sometimes used interchangeably with faith or belief system; however, in the view of many, Progressivism differs from private belief in that it is eminently socialistic, which is to say collective and statist, intolerant and forceful, judgemental and hypocritical. Polls report that roughly a quarter of the nation’s population self-identifies as Progressive, with the majority roughly split between moderates and those who identify as conservative.
Uncanny, isn’t it? It appears that just as religion is collective, Progressivism is religious.
The right had a hundred years to address the religion of State but even as today, sits on its hands.
Public school teachers are taught methods to keep sensitive topics out of the parents’ eye.
The high school teachers caught on video here are quite revealing in that regard.
The first speaker, Sarah Knopp, a union leader and Occupier, tells us she wants to peddle the “enlightenment” of her Marxoid politics to the children in her care. Because only when they believe as she does will they be “critical thinkers” and, in her words, “emancipated.” The second speaker, Megan Behrent, a member of the International Socialist Organisation, merely intends to subvert the proprieties of the classroom in order to propagate her own communist politics at someone else’s expense. The preferences of parents, students and those who her pay her salary are to be circumvented in the name of “social justice.” Again, the students in her care will be “thinking for themselves” when they think and act “radically,” i.e., just like her.
The “don’t tell your parents” is more apt than you might think.
I briefly toyed with the title Don’t Tell Your Parents Where I Touched You, before deciding against it. I must be mellowing with age.
“…only when they believe as she does will they be
“critical thinkers”critical theorists.”Meh – what’s the difference, anyway?
A critical thinker can analyze an argument and pronounce it valid or specious.
A critical theorist converts every text into Marxist propaganda.
Now you know.
The right had a hundred years to address the religion of State but even as today, sits on its hands.
Because of the insidious, incremental long march.
The Progressives are actually quite canny, in that they have the patience to transform a society little by little instead of in one convulsion, as the revolutionaries wanted.
Every leftward nudge, every leftward push, has been small enough that it never constitutes a Hill To Die On for the conservatives. It’s easy to characterize your opponents as prissy hard-noses over a LITTLE change to this or that, in the name of easing the pain of someone who’s heretofore been put-upon.
You’re raising a big stink about THIS? What’s wrong with you? Lighten UP already! It’s no big deal!
Which, this is how the Grand Canyon got to be so big (well, ok, there were probably some convulsions here and there). Do note that after the river washes away the sand, you can’t restore it to a stony condition.
The 2nd law of thermodynamics works only one way.
@ Ten
On educators (particularly in American universities) as clerics — have you read Mencius Moldbug?
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.co.uk/2009/01/gentle-introduction-to-unqualified.html
His thesis is one explanation of what is going on. It posits that leftists are homologous to Puritans. There is no separation of Church and State: the ‘church’ (academia, the media) shapes public opinion and the public elects politicians who conform to those opinions. In many cases the electorate is short-circuited altogether, as when the government legislates on the basis of advice from academics (e.g. on energy policy). There is thus no effective democracy, because the electorate, even when it has any influence, has been brainwashed by people who like telling others what to do, exactly like clerics. In effect, we live in a theocracy.
This may well be why the great and good are so freaked out by Brexit and Trump. It seems that the brainwashing has not been as effective as they thought!
@dicentra
Moldbug identifies the left with chaos and the right with order, and even characterises the relentless leftward drift as an example of entropy.
If anyone has trouble with comments not appearing, email me and I’ll take a spanner to the spam filter.
“A professor at the University of Massachusetts, Boston used class time to offer students in his Moral and Social Problems flyers for an anti-Trump rally on President’s Day. According to video evidence provided anonymously to Campus Reform, Philosophy professor Andrew Leong pointed out a stack of flyers to his class, explaining that after students handed in a paper assignment, they could “scream [their] lungs out in front of the campus center” at an anti-Trump rally.”
http://www.campusreform.org/?ID=8830
I’m *sure* he did the same when Obama was in the White House.
…I’ll take a spanner to the spam filter…
Imperial, metric, or Whitworth ?
His thesis is one explanation of what is going on. It posits that leftists are homologous to Puritans.
Absolutely. Virtue signalling, for one example, is just the community’s external moral pressure and internal righteous isolation. And so on and so on and so on. You could write and book and I’m sure some have.
My issue now is with the all but wholly co-dependent and merely ostensible right, because not only did it squander any chance it had to nip this in the bud and keep govt completely socially detached, it spends its days taking up all the leftist movements and passively complaining about them, as if they deserve credence and discussion. Entertaining the left’s conversation, as it calls it, is the definition of decline losing.
This then paves the way for the rest of your comment, which is insightful and on the mark. By now rightists – this really needs to be a term – have ignorantly capitulated to resort to their habitual lifestyle-signalling and meek, blind tradition-signalling, as if complaining about a whole spectrum of presumed social leftists – vegans, eco-mentalists, even Libertarians and the alternative or classically-liberal right to a degree – are going to be brought to heel by this odd calcified unconservative rightism just on the basis of its noise, facile armchair protesting, and their momentum. Meanwhile what’s really going wrong is virtually never addressed. It’s remarkable.
And through this all is the enormous roster of nicely maintained rightist statism, the vast, ignorant structure that’s put the right on a similar track to the left’s of 20 or 30 years ago. Eventually they adopt it all and that may be the only real distinction between conservatism and progressivism: The length of time it takes to get to the same place.
It all started with just as you say: a nice popular brainwashing Orwell could be proud to have itemized in detail decades before. I’m not sure that was prescience or just predicting the very obvious.
I do quibble with any idea that the right’s order is proper and true, should that be the inference. The right’s order exists, but it is generally just sucking all the air out of the room and preventing reform. We have met the enemy and he is us.
^ Kindly pardon my grammaticals. You get the idea.
The Progressives are actually quite canny, in that they have the patience to transform a society little by little instead of in one convulsion, as the revolutionaries wanted.
Every leftward nudge, every leftward push, has been small enough that it never constitutes a Hill To Die On for the conservatives.
Yes, but there’s much more. The phenomenon to identify today is the right’s running, century-long capitulation. I’m not referring to not holding hills; by itself that’s too conscious, too fragmented, and inherently unorganizable. I’m referring to these next principles.
Philosophy. Once the left broke federalism, once it broke the social barrier, and once it created funding and perpetuation with the beast, it had the game licked. The right capitulated on the notion of force and coercion against the individual, formerly unheard of. The floodgates were opened.
Policy. From there the right was powerless (assuming it even realizes what happened, which it does not). The preventative cure would have been the simple act of forever limiting govt from any place whatsoever in the affairs of the private citizen. Not one shall be passed. But having entered education, medicine, money, housing, retirement, business, the military, and even personal behavior as it’s presumed to be – the anti-discrimination mandate – the right had no will. It’s not even yet aware it has no moves left.
Institutions. The list of right-approved statist policies is literally too long and too varied to itemize. There are by now progressive acts that are entirely defended by rightists who have committed the left’s own sin in order to justify them: They just invert their meaning and convert them into “conservative” virtues shored up with relativistic excuses.
Funny, because we have everyone from the American founders to, on rare occasion, the Current Occupant to remind us, sometimes loudly, that this is nuts. I’d bet big money not one fundamental federal program will be abolished under this Administration. Do we really think that’s because we’re all deluging our representatives with demands to axe the thing?
Hardly. We’re tuned out. We’d rather carp and point than act.
“We’d rather carp and point than act.”
Great posts from Tim, but forcing the media to acknowledge what’s going on by constantly pointing it out is a key. Otherwise the left just dominates the narrative.
O/T but priceless, via Tim Worstall’s place: Rachel Dolezal, former NAACP leader who claimed to be black, is on food stamps.
http://www.timworstall.com/2017/02/27/theres-a-joke-here-2/#comments
Rachel Dolezal, former NAACP leader who claimed to be black, is on food stamps.
Or, “People not falling over themselves to hire notorious serial liar with serious and bewildering mental health issues.”
dicentra
“The 2nd law of thermodynamics works only one way.”
Certainly, it is easier to destroy social capital than to create it, and so much of ‘progressive’ change is intended to destroy institutions in the name of liberation. Yet conservatives must also be prepared to accept constructive change in order to maintain the health and continuity of the institutions they wish to preserve.
As the Prince says in The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa:
“If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”
Edmund Burke would probably agree.
Slightly off-topic: On another forum, somebody linked to the following “academic” paper:
Queering the Virgin: Evangelical World-Making and the Heterosexual Crisis
And of course the text is deliberately abstruse so that normal people won’t be able to understand it.
…forcing the media to acknowledge what’s going on by constantly pointing it out is a key. Otherwise the left just dominates the narrative.
The media will be forced to do nothing it doesn’t want to do. That’s not going to change.
The left dominates the narrative every time an individual rightist insists on lending it credence by arguing with it. Arguing with it is co-dependency. If it’s as lunatic as it is, how has it earned political equality?
If the right spent 10% of the time it does arguing (with lunatics) instead making consistent demands on its political representatives, things would not be as they are. But the right is neither consistent, focused, or aware.
Not only isn’t reform happening, the right has wholly itself accepted that centralization is an manageable influence on outcomes in each individual’s life to be bent to a majority’s will.
The right has abandoned the philosophy of liberty and it has stopped regarding force for what it is. The media, then, won’t listen and the left can’t but own the narrative, just as an abusive alcoholic spouse owns the narrative.
Ted S.,
And of course the text is deliberately abstruse so that normal people won’t be able to understand it.
I think this is an example of what Iowahawk called “Physics Envy”, where natural sciences, like Physics, are held in high esteem, but use words and symbols the layman finds incomprehensible. The social science theorists (aka “wankers”) see this and adopt incomprehensible words and symbols expecting esteem to follow.
Ten,
If the right spent 10% of the time it does arguing (with lunatics) instead making consistent demands on its political representatives, things would not be as they are. But the right is neither consistent, focused, or aware.
Arguing with lunatics is like playing chess with a pigeon. The pigeon will just knock over the pieces and shit on the board, thinking it has won.
The Right is clearly unaware, because they keep doing it.
How Marxists Hijacked Our Culture
https://youtu.be/Wwi6lYSEgEs
Civilisation as Ghetto culture. Inclusive, like a jungle.
Everyone gets to bleed equally.
Best to stock up on rotten fruit, poison darts, and popcorn.
Of course, this theatre is gender neutral and tobacco free.
The pigeon will just knock over the pieces and shit on the board, thinking it has won.
That reminds me, when will the Turner Prize shortlist be announced this year?
@Ten
“My issue now is with the all but wholly co-dependent and merely ostensible right, because not only did it squander any chance it had to nip this in the bud and keep govt completely socially detached, it spends its days taking up all the leftist movements and passively complaining about them, as if they deserve credence and discussion.”
But you have to remember when the “long march through the institutions” began, back in the sixties.
The right was basking in the twin victories of having survived the Great Depression and having won WWII. In the US, the economy was booming in the fifties and the sixties after the victory in WWII. No one on the right even noticed how the left was slowly implementing the “long march.” The right wouldn’t become aware of it until later in the seventies and the eighties, or until the 21st century, when the left had taken complete control of academia and the main-stream-media. With all that going on, I don’t think the right ever had a chance to “nip this in the bud.”
ith all that going on, I don’t think the right ever had a chance to “nip this in the bud.”
Wishful thinking. The right, even today with brexit and Trump, is too embarrassed to be associated with those who questioned academia, who questioned the media, who questioned, dare I say, the crazies in psychology. It was too easy for them to take the easy road and be silent while those who spoke up were mocked. They refused to see the reality right before their eyes.
back in the sixties
Try 100 years ago, with Woodrow Wilson’s administrative state, followed hard by the New Deal.
You can even take it back to Theodore Roosevelt, who said something like “we don’t mind whether you make a lot of money just so’s you spend it responsibly,” meaning that the gubmint (as the embodiment of Teh People’s Will) has a say in how private citizens manage their resources, especially if they’ve got a lot of them.
Dicentra, you beat me to it.
Try 100 years ago, with Woodrow Wilson’s administrative state, followed hard by the New Deal.
Precisely. Speaking of capitulating, 1913 was the unopposed beginning of the end. No era dealt a more crushing defeat, until its time, than that one. Today not one rightist in ten can tell you how. More like one in a hundred.
You can even take it back to Theodore Roosevelt
Who started the Progressive Party. In 1912.
“Try 100 years ago, with Woodrow Wilson’s administrative state, followed hard by the New Deal.”
Your ex-post facto denunciation seems to me to be a bit too easily arrived at. I don’t believe that anyone at that time (the 1920’s) could have seen the consequences of things occuring in the 21th century at that time, although you in hindsight congratulate yourselves with your superior knowledge.
Here’s an update to the story of student Caleb O’Neil, who was suspended for a semester for recording his professor’s bizarre political tirade in a class supposedly about human sexuality:
That’s “liberal” meaning leftist. Note that it took national headlines, widespread public disapproval and threats of suing the school to chasten the administrators and make them change their minds. Note too that Mr O’Neil says he recorded the professor’s rant in the first place because, as a known Trump supporter, he was worried about politically biased grading.
It seems to me the moral of the story is, if in doubt, record it.
And then of course there’s the professor’s curious notion that the way to “comfort” minority students is to rant in class about how Trump’s election victory was “an act of terrorism,” that “civil war” is looming, and that the new President is actually a racist, a white supremacist, and intent on deporting or enslaving anyone remotely swarthy-looking.
@ Ten
1913 — Jekyll Island and the formation of the Federal Reserve? Not really. Try the establishment of the Bank of England in 1694. (From Wikipedia: December 28 [1694] – Queen Mary II of England dies of smallpox aged 32, leaving her husband King William III to rule alone but without an heir.)
Universal suffrage is a fine, equitable and noble concept, but most people (me included) have neither the time nor mental capacity to investigate the issues properly and vote accordingly. We therefore elect a local delegate whose views we believe most closely coincide with our own.
The problem with politics is that anyone who seeks office is unsuitable for same. You end up with a parliament (or congress, etc.) infested with delegates who are not just megalomaniacal but corruptible, and even, in some cases, so dodgy that they are open to blackmail. They are interested only in retaining office and hence access to public money and the levers of power.
Representative democracy with universal suffrage has an even worse basic flaw: in any society there are more have-nots than haves. Delegates who understand this and pander to it will rise to the top. They are usually restrained to some extent by the knowledge that outright communism is a disaster that will lead to their personal downfall, but not always (see Venezuela). That is as far as their concern for the future goes.
The alternative to such a system is monarchy. A monarch has a biological imperative in making sure the system doesn’t collapse on his heirs. He may be barmy and believe in divine right; he may also be dominated by a Rasputin or in hock to moneylenders, but at least the populace can see what is going on.
I do not know what the answer is. All one can do as an individual is to get rid of the TV set (very important to shut down that particular outlet from the cloaca), stop taking any serious notice of the radio, and read newspapers, if at all, and any product of corporate publishers, as fiction. Demographic changes alone (the population of Africa is predicted to be 4 billion by 2100) mean that all bets for the future are off.
And at Cal State Fullerton, a course on “food justice” – taught by a supposed expert in gender studies, queer studies and post-colonial theory – will entail students browsing a far-left anti-Trump website replete with paranoid rumblings of “fascism,” “patriarchy” and “white supremacy,” and which urges readers to “create a resistance movement that makes Trump unable to govern.”
Personally I’m surprised that most students don’t record all their lectures, for use as a revision aid or to help complete notes after the event or to pass on to classmates who didn’t make it to the lecture…
But it was the college that rethought its actions
Or they just got caught *this time*.
1913 — Jekyll Island and the formation of the Federal Reserve? Not really. Try the establishment of the Bank of England in 1694.
I do not know what the answer is.
Yes, really. Absolutely and obviously yes really. And that’s for starters.
The seventeenth century and the general nature of the human animal either is or is not pertinent, at least in the colonies, when the subject is the original Resistance’s fecklessness and loud impotency. If this blog is pertinent, than any reasonable analysis of a like failure of reason is too.
The right was slothful and today, the right is misdirected and proportions terribly. It is itself the problem it barks about. It redefines elements of progressivism and adopts them.
It does not know what the answer is either, because it does not know what the problem is, even when it stumbles upon it.
The left is not the only faction guilty of denial.
Or they just got caught *this time*.
To date, the student has received no public apology, which you’d think would be in order, and the professor will apparently face no reprimand or disciplinary action. Which, as you say, may be an indication of the college’s general leaning.
Case in point. Note truth:
Try 100 years ago, with Woodrow Wilson’s administrative state, followed hard by the New Deal.
Deny truth:
Your ex-post facto denunciation seems to me to be a bit too easily arrived at. I don’t believe that anyone at that time (the 1920’s) could have seen the consequences of things occuring in the 21th century at that time, although you in hindsight congratulate yourselves with your superior knowledge.
The right offends so easily. But it offends more importantly than it acts and when it acts, it acts even more importantly than it knows.
I don’t believe that anyone at that time (the 1920’s) could have seen the consequences of things occurring in the 21th century at that time…
Isn’t that the point of the Long March?
@ Ten
The Fed was inspired by the BoE, a stroke of genius which enabled the creation of government debt. That is, bankers were permitted to finance the state and charge interest on the loans; loans being the means whereby fiat money is created in the first place. A neat trick. There is no reason why bankers should be allowed to pull it off, except for the fact that the political class is on the payroll.
The end-point of our leftward drift is presumably global communism, controlled by the usual suspects. Already most of us are enslaved by the tax system and bled by the corporations, which are of course the executive arm of the banks. Total enslavement and drastic depopulation seem to be the plan. Viewed in that light, the mad posturings of the left are even more hilarious.
And at Cal State Fullerton, a course on “food justice”…
I don’t get it, how can a recipe be decolonized ? Unless one has had it removed, all recipes eventually go through the colon.
Ba-dum tisshhh.
If the BoE link was behind your allusion to 1694 I’ll retract the part of my following remark addressing it, Tom.
1913 alone is notable for its progressivism, my point being that the political right, such as it is, first fails and then denies its part in eventually preserving it. As dicentra rightly points out to criticism, at best Wilson was the progressive who got the ball really rolling. For my part, I didn’t raise the Fed but it certainly is another central element from that era. These and more are the cornerstones progressivism laid, then and since, that were eventually defended by the right.
Ask a conservative if his involuntary weekly contribution is his constitutional birthright once he retires, by gawd. Or if his veteran’s patriotism should ever come to question what Eisenhower warned against a half-century ago, you commies. Or if you have anything to fear if you’ve done nothing wrong.
I appreciate your elaboration. It should be a reference work bolted to every self-identified conservative’s desk (forwarded by a Rockefeller in no uncertain terms. Maybe such an announcement will cut through the dense undergrowth of a hundred years of rightist revisionism and inverted principle.)
In the US the standard right tacitly intellectually adopts and pragmatically all but owns many such things. It converts them to rock-ribbed Republicanism.
Back somewhat on topic: the public institution hasn’t been a target for defunding by rightists since its inception. With majorities as far as the eye can see, that won’t change in 2017 because no sizeable list of representatives have been thusly informed by their constituents. You could make the case that given this blog’s catalog of dysfunction, its established institution has been given life by conservatives.
Given mankind’s expertise in madness, you’d think somebody could get a bill written, somebody could sponsor it, a rational constituency could responsibly see to its passing, and the thing would be signed.
After all, there’s a fairly hefty prohibition against religions of State.
Farnsworth: Isn’t ‘decolonization’ just ‘taking a dump’?
‘Ba-dum tisshhh’ could be the sound that it makes (if using modern plumbing).
(•_•)
( •_•)>⌐■-■
(⌐■_■)
A glimmer of hope from the world of American academia?
The former Provost of Stanford, John Etchemendy, gave a talk entitled: “The Threat from Within”.
The threat from outside is apparent. Potential cuts in federal funding would diminish our research enterprise and our ability to fund graduate education.
So far, so bland, but…
But I’m actually more worried about the threat from within. Over the years, I have watched a growing intolerance at universities in this country – not intolerance along racial or ethnic or gender lines – there, we have made laudable progress. Rather, a kind of intellectual intolerance, a political one-sidedness, that is the antithesis of what universities should stand for.
Read it all here.
Farnsworth M Muldoon: “Unless one has had it removed, all recipes eventually go through the colon”.
I denounce you for being offensive to people with colostomies.
Your use of “Unless” constitutes a rectumnormative hate crime.
rectumnormative
I’m writing that one down.
Or they just got caught *this time*.
Try being that student 30 years ago. Try being that student 30 years ago without the video evidence. Try, back then, objecting to having to sit through such indoctrination unrelated to the subject of the class. Try bringing that up, 30 years ago, to what conservatives who might be in positions of responsibility, for them to address it. Crickets is what you’d get. Even today, only with significant outside help, did this student not get thrown out of school. And the professor has yet to suffer any consequences. And then let’s put this same sort of conflict in the context of psychology/psychiatry. Why anyone today is surprised at where we are today surprises me….ok, not really…
I denounce you…
I shall report to Sector 9 for re-grooving. Being a callous churl I also committed a microaggression against the transcolonic.
Personally I’m surprised that most students don’t record all their lectures, for use as a revision aid or to help complete notes after the event or to pass on to classmates who didn’t make it to the lecture…
When a childhood friend of mine was a student at Stevens in Hoboken, it was apparently very common for a lot of his classmates to skip most days, just sending a tape recorder in their place.
But then, Stevens is a STEM school.
I don’t believe that anyone at that time (the 1920’s) could have seen the consequences of things occuring in the 21th century at that time
Nothing to do with unintended consequences and everything to do with the stated desires of Wilson and his successors — to replace “outdated”, “outmoded” institutions such as representative government and constitutions with “scientific” methods of governance, wherein a cadre of experts direct the affairs of the nation entire. Because evolutions.
Given that conservatives — or should I say “classical liberals” — want to conserve Enlightenment principles and the Constitution that embodies them, identifying the progressive’s explicit desire to do away with classical liberalism does NOT qualify as smug Monday-morning quarterbacking in the least.
The fact that high school history books omitted this significant sea change does not constitute self-congratulation on my part.
Speaking of recording lectures, I’m reminded of the iconic scene in _Real Genius_ (used here: http://www.screencast.com/t/eWQo2oQ3AXd by someone making some kind of point).
Foreshadows today’s distance education/MOOC revolution.
Rachel Dolezal, former NAACP leader who claimed to be black, is on food stamps.
Oh, right, and following that, Nkechi Amare Diallo . . .