Elsewhere (230)
Alex Southwell, a pseudonym, on “diversity” hires and the deskilling of academia:
I mentioned that I had received an email from one of the candidates and shared it with the committee members. After reading the email aloud, I argued that the missive effectively disqualified the candidate. The writing was riddled with awkward expression, malapropisms, misplaced punctuation, and other conceptual and formal problems… I asked my fellow committee members how we could possibly hire someone to teach writing who had written such an email. The candidate could not write. I also pointed to her application letter, which was similarly awkward and error-laden. My committee colleagues argued that “we do not teach grammar” in our writing classes.
Further to the above, Amy Alkon has identified the unnamed beneficiary of these piously lowered standards, and shares some student feedback. As even basic grammar and punctuation are apparently deemed superfluous, even among faculty, and even in official documents, I suspect the “Liberal Studies” department at NYU is probably best avoided.
For more on the Clown Quarter’s disdain for competence, see also this and this.
Noah Rothman on the delusional excuses of campus Mao-lings:
Georgetown’s student paper The Hoya endorsed Oberlin’s assessment of the threat posed by Christina Hoff Sommers – and thus, critical statistical analysis – by asserting that her invitation to speak at the university amounted to endorsing “a harmful conversation.” The notion that one is under physical assault eventually legitimises — even demands — a preventative response. The editors at Wellesley College’s student newspaper inadvertently endorsed this grim totalitarianism in an editorial advocating the use of “appropriate measures” against those who support those they deem to be irresponsible politicians or lecturers. “[I]f people are given the resources to learn and either continue to speak hate speech or refuse to adapt their beliefs, then hostility may be warranted,” the piece read. Amid laborious prose that read as though an algorithm translated it from the original Mandarin, these students articulated the logical foundations of fascism: We, the victimised, are owed reparative justice. And here it comes.
And Theodore Dalrymple on vanity as policy:
The Swedish government agreed to take 160,000 refugees or migrants from the Middle East in a single year (who did not want to claim asylum in Denmark, where the social security payments were lower). The government did this because it (and its supporters) wanted Sweden to be an ethical superpower, a country responsible to and for the whole world, rather than to and for itself… Even these ethical narcissists soon realised, however, that if they proceeded in this fashion for, say, ten years, Sweden would have become, with the aid of a little family reunification and a higher birthrate, a semi–Middle Eastern country stuck in the Baltic, and they promptly closed the borders… Since they were motivated not so much by the desire for change as the desire to preen themselves like ducks at the edge of a pond, they suddenly realised the danger they were in. Their desire to be good was much shallower than their desire to appear good.
As usual, feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.
Their desire to be good was much shallower than their desire to appear good.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions
As an aside Mr Thompson, read a lot of your work and first time commenting. Alerted to this site by our very own Tim Blair. A lot of coffee has been spat reading your work along with the commenters. Keep up the fine work!
A lot of coffee has been spat reading your work along with the commenters.
I’ll take that as a compliment. Welcome aboard.
The author of this essay is a Professor at a top-ranking, metropolitan U.S. university. Their name has been changed to protect them from retaliation.
Sign of the times.
The woman who had verbally assaulted me was a black female and the candidate whom she championed was also a black female. I was informed by the dean that pursuing a grievance, or even remaining on the committee, was now “complicated.”
There’s your problem.
There’s your problem.
Well, it’s hard to see how any institution, let alone an educational one, can remain functional if such anxieties determine who gets hired despite their shortcomings, who gets to be unprofessional with impunity, and who has to shut up about it. Lies tend to escalate and multiply.
Not entirely unrelated.
Regarding the NYU writing professor, the question becomes how the problem identified is corrected? Instead of standing one’s ground and contesting bogus accusations of racism, the pseudonymous Alex Southwell quietly leaves a hiring committee and publishes an essay after the fact. Unless those who are ostensibly concerned about quality and competence expose these travesties in time to prevent mistakes, the destruction of education will continue to the extent there’s anything left worth destroying.
There’s your problem.
Such policies also result, inevitably, in suspicion among colleagues, and among parents and students, as to whether a minority staff member was a beneficiary of such indulgence and may therefore be incompetent. Which seems unfair to any minority staff who were hired because of their abilities, rather than just their melanin levels. It encourages and legitimises the very phenomenon it’s ostensibly there to correct.
A lot of this was predicted by Bloom in “The Closing of The American Mind”. Bloom places a lot of the blame on cowardly university professors and administrators. These people have been in an environment of words, words, and words. They are like a cunning fox whose only tool is rhetoric and shuns and abhors hand-to-hand battle.The trouble is that when a fox is confronted by a roaring lion, who is a warrior, not prone to reason or words, the fox has no defense and whimpers away. This does not bode well.
It encourages and legitimises the very phenomenon it’s ostensibly there to correct.
It’s worth noting also, any attempt to provide remediation for academic deficiencies in order to raise the level of performance of underachieving groups is also met with protests and outrage because such efforts “unfairly stigmatize” those affected. Consequently, it becomes easier for feckless administrations to simply lower or eliminate performance standards than to bother with attempts raise achievement levels. It becomes the proverbial “hand-out” as opposed to a “hand-up.”
Amy Alkon has identified the unnamed beneficiary of these piously lowered standards
I don’t know Alkon and am a little uneasy about her identifying the “unnamed beneficiary” in question as this means that “Alex Southwell” must now also be identified against his/her wishes.
On the other hand, I was also slightly amused to spot this:
Teaching Statement: Taking from Paolo Freire, …
The “unnamed beneficiary” has spelt Freire’s name wrong – it’s Paulo Freire, not Paolo Freire
The “unnamed beneficiary” has spelt Freire’s name wrong
I denounce your obvious white supremacist tendencies.
I don’t know Alkon and am a little uneasy about her identifying the “unnamed beneficiary” in question as this means that “Alex Southwell” must now also be identified against his/her wishes.
I suppose it’s difficult to avoid if you quote one of the candidate’s rather symbolic blunders – just seven words – and it turns out to be the only Google search result.
Stupid is the new smart.
Stupid is the new smart.
I think it’s also an issue of basic diligence. Everyone makes blunders, your host included, but what’s eyebrow-raising is that these howlers were in job applications and official documents, including the educator’s own faculty profile. It suggests that the person concerned is not only ungifted but can’t be bothered to proofread her own work. Which doesn’t bode well, especially if you’re being employed to teach writing.
“Little children have imaginary friends. Modern liberalism has imaginary enemies.”
More good lines here (it’s mainly about the climate catastrofarian cult):
https://rclutz.wordpress.com/2017/04/16/nyt-readers-face-diversity/
I denounce your obvious white supremacist tendencies.
No, no! If the racism were obvious, we wouldn’t need experts to uncover it for us. I denounce your obvious populism!
“.. It suggests that the person concerned … can’t be bothered to proofread her own work. …”
I think she did proofread her own work. That’s how she wrote it, she wouldn’t see the errors when proofreading.
A lot of this was predicted by Bloom in “The Closing of The American Mind” (1987)
A lot of this was predicted by my mother (South Hills High School, 1940?) and father (Elizabeth High School 1941?, University of Pittsburgh, no degree, 1947?) long before 1987. Both of those luminaries were dismissed as too Edith & Archie to be taken seriously by proper educators at the time.
“In 2015, The Oberlin Review protested Christina Hoff Sommers for questioning the statistical basis for a variety of feminist myths by penning ‘a love letter to ourselves.’”
I’d call that literary onanism. Or, if you prefer, a load of old wank.
https://kakistocracyblog.wordpress.com/2014/05/07/what-weve-got-here-is-failure-to-imaginate/
“Penning ourselves a love letter”, if you know what I mean. *suggestive eyebrows*
she wouldn’t see the errors when proofreading.
The first rule of Dunning-Kruger Club is you don’t know you’re in Dunning-Kruger Club.
Is it a hint that you belong to Dunning-Kruger Fight Club if you suffer from mysterious, unexplained cuts and bruises?
And is there a Dunning-Kruger Leftist Cultural War Club that most people don’t realize they are part of?
“Recently, three criminals were shot and killed during a home invasion robbery and now the grandfather of one of the suspects is complaining that it wasn’t a ‘fair fight.'”
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/davidclarke/2017/04/grandfather-burglar-says-not-fair-defend-home-ar-15-heres-response/
complaining that it wasn’t a ‘fair fight.’”
Something tells me the moral rot extends through much of the family.
complaining that it wasn’t a ‘fair fight.’
As I recall, the other two (now dead) criminals were armed with knives. It is not much of a stretch to believe they intended to do harm to whomever was in the house. They were not looking for a “fair fight”.
Perhaps now, the next group of meth-heads looking to break into someone’s home in that area will now have to think twice about it.
the other two (now dead) criminals were armed with knives. It is not much of a stretch to believe they intended to do harm to whomever was in the house.
I, for one, tire of hearing people excusing the behaviour of their criminal offspring – in this case, a trio of armed thugs breaking into someone’s home, terrorising the occupants, and intent on robbery, possibly worse – as merely “stupid,” rather than, say, malevolent and verminous.
I remember back in 96-98 that the tenured faculty were big on reminding the freshman comp teachers that “we don’t teach grammar”, specifically there were some tenured faculty pressuring to allow ebonics and Spanglish (because “authenticity”) on comp papers.
I know this because I was one of the freshman comp instructors that complained about some of our freshmen not needing writing class (how can you teach somebody college level writing if they can’t read or produce grammar to even a fifth grade level?); they needed remedial grammar and reading skills. And I was told: “we don’t teach grammar and reading skills”.
The time table for something like this happening is reasonable then.
Urban Dictionary definition of ebonics
Ebonics is really the study of the rules applied to turn English into some uneducated sounding pseudo-language whose purpose is for the most part to insult and denigrate “Whitey.”
ebonics
Evergreen translation of proto-Ebonics into English.
Meanwhile, back at the Claremont Colleges, the Mao-lings are upset at Pomona College Pres. Davis Oxtoby because free speech, The Enlightenment and even truth are just tools of White Supremacy in order to oppress black bodies.
…unnuanced views
Well then. I bow to the Éminence grise of the undergraduates of Claremont College. Their absolute assertions concerning “nuanced views” regarding the absence of absolute truth have caused me to completely reevaluate my entire life.
I need to crack open another beer, I think.
Meanwhile, back at the Claremont Colleges
According to the Mao-lings, Heather Mac Donald is a “fascist” who “wants [black people] not to exist,” and her attempts to engage minority students with debates and Q&As, despite harassment and mob intimidation by the aforementioned Mao-lings, are actually, secretly, an “attempt to silence oppressed peoples.”
Interesting theory.
Back in the 1980s Chicago had a dismal high school graduation rate: about 50-something%. They decided that the trauma of being held back to repeat a grade causes kids to drop out. Their solution was called Social Promotion : no matter their grades or if they learned anything everyone graduates to the next grade with their peers. It was reconsidered when people were graduating high school while illiterate and significant percentage of high school graduates were reading at a 4th grade level or below. This (the reconsideration) was controversial and sparked loud accusations of racism.
You can’t blame the teacher as they can’t force knowledge into unmotivated students. You can’t blame the students because that would be victim blaming. You can’t blame the administrators or the school board because they aren’t teaching. You can’t blame the student’s parents because that would be racist. The only available politically correct object of blame is society and you in particular. Btw when social promotion was ended the graduation rate was still around 50-something percent.
Meanwhile, back at the Claremont Colleges
And I suppose we should ask the obvious. If evidence and statistics, even logic, are to be rejected out of hand and treated as an assault, and if “truth” is a mere phantom, conjured by “white supremacists,” how can the Mao-lings be so sure, so vehemently confident, in their own claims?
The Pomona Student Petition looks to me like the sort of thing that should get every signer failed out of every course they’re in on the spot. It’s riddled with lies, red herrings, guilt by association, guilt by second-hand association, special pleading, double standards, and above all the rejection of the notion of truth as a myth. It is tripe utterly unworthy of an adult mind.
It is tripe utterly unworthy of an adult mind.
Aside from the absurd chest-puffing, it’s an attempt to deter any rational enquiry (say, as to their motives) and to frame such enquiries as offensive and illegitimate, leaving only their own bald assertion and a demand for deference. Being so superior, in their minds at least, they wish to be obeyed. The rest is window dressing.
Also, I like to imagine the failure notice throwing their own words back at them, although they’d probably miss the point.
Non-intellectual individuals do not have the right to prescribe how intellectual people respond to anti-intellectualism.
I’ve just read Mr. Southwell’s article, yowser.
While I agree with his assessment I certainly wouldn’t want to be him the next time he enters the faculty lounge.
Regarding campus dramas more generally, what comes to mind is a supermarket scene in which a screeching child is misbehaving, slamming trollies and tipping over displays, while the parent does nothing, or whispers only the faintest, most ineffective reprimand, and gets pissy if anyone dares to suggest that their offspring be made to behave.
As to who should be given the most vigorous sack beating, I’ll leave that to the reader.
It’s been more than 50 years since America’s Civil Rights Act (1964) was signed into law. Trillions of dollars have been poured into building the welfare state, and today people like these Mao-lings enjoy not just equal treatment but preferential treatment in school admissions, government jobs, academic jobs, and corporate jobs as well.
Will there ever come a point when, instead of blaming whitey for all their problems, they’ll look at other possible causes? Like, say, their rejection of that quaint notion of “marriage & jobs before babies?”
Nah. Keep whitey on the hook. That’s the ticket.
While I agree with his assessment I certainly wouldn’t want to be him the next time he enters the faculty lounge.
Yeah, he’s a marked man now. He actually seems like the NYU professors I had many decades ago, back when academic standards meant something. I wish him well.
Y’all are aware that arguing bullocks with reason has zero effect on bullocks, let alone Bullocks. Bullocks will always win such a fight. Win being the objective regardless of objectivity’s dubious genealogical descent from white patriarchal society.
Arguing is pointless. Stop giving them money.
Case in point:
It’s riddled with lies, red herrings, guilt by association, guilt by second-hand association, special pleading, double standards, and above all the rejection of the notion of truth as a myth.
What do you think they’re teaching in these schools? Given the inputs, what else would one possibly expect as an output?
I do hope Mr Oxtoby replies appropriately – and certainly by no later than 4.07 pm as instructed. To do otherwise would be an egregious mark of disrespect, not only to the scholars of colour of Claremont, but to melanated peoples everywhere, who are well known for their punctuality.
She’s appeared here before, but for the uninitiated, this is Yvette Falarca. She’s a leader of By Any Means Necessary (BAMN), an anti-white, anti-western group that uses violence against anyone it doesn’t like. She’s also a Middle School teacher in Berkeley, California.
Anyway, here’s an archive of stories about, and testimony from people who’ve escaped the clutches of BAMN. It makes for disturbing reading:
Why they still exist, I’m not sure but they do.
Here’s an archive of stories about, and testimony from, people who’ve escaped the clutches of BAMN.
So, essentially – dynamically, psychologically – a cult. Imagine my surprise.
Yes, the unlovely Ms Felarca has been mentioned here before. As I noted at the time, she strikes me as someone who just likes hurting people. It’s not so much politics as a personality disorder clutching an excuse.
“I, for one, tire of hearing people excusing the behaviour of their criminal offspring – in this case, a trio of armed thugs breaking into someone’s home, terrorising the occupants, and intent on robbery, possibly worse – as merely “stupid,” rather than, say, malevolent and verminous.”
Well said. I would use those words to describe the thugs’ apologists.