They’re Perfecting Society, You Know
When they put up the posters [advertising the event]… the campus completely melted down. They had two campus-wide meetings attended, according to reports, by hundreds of students, faculty, and administrators about what to do with me coming to campus… The rumours were spread – not just rumours, emails, including from the student government – that I was a white supremacist coming to campus with my white nationalist followers to target minorities… They organised safe spaces for my visit. They organised safety teams to guide people to safe spaces with glow sticks if they couldn’t find the safe spaces. In the library, which was the main safe space, they had colouring books for students—college students. It was the craziest thing.
William Jacobson recounts a lively visit to Vassar College.
Other subjects touched on include blogging versus Twitter, and the Oberlin College / Gibson’s Bakery court case:
It’s just an example of a powerful left-wing entity, which essentially runs the town and is not used to people standing up to it, and which has reacted, in my view, completely irrationally… Oberlin moved to transfer the case out of… their home county, because they didn’t think they could get a fair trial… I think that should tell you something of the bubble that the college community is.
Professor Jacobson explains the Oberlin saga in more detail in this video.
Readers unfamiliar with the incident and its elaborate, rather farcical inversions of reality, can find a short but informative overview here. As I wrote at the time,
It’s worth noting that Oberlin College is the Clown Quarter writ large, a leftist fiefdom, where woke psychodramas are normative, encouraged and institutional. And hence the delinquency and moral inversion – the ripened fruit of all that leftist psychology. Such that students were encouraged by staff to side with a trio of physically aggressive shoplifters - people stealing for fun – and to actively destroy the livelihood of a baker who would rather not be preyed upon by thieves. The expectation of lawfulness, of common civility, being repaid with libel, harassment and ruin. Activities that Oberlin’s administrators were happy to enable, using college funds, and often with bizarrely adolescent behaviour of their own.
Our betters at large.
“A lot of those students took their culture, the culture of cancel culture, I think it’s called, and call-out culture, and the concept that hate speech should be illegal, and now they’re working at Twitter and they’re working at Google and they’re working at Facebook…”
That.
Activities that Oberlin’s administrators were happy to enable, using college funds, and often with bizarrely adolescent behaviour of their own.
Leftism is all about never growing up.
Leftism is all about never growing up.
Well, it’s interesting how, rather than the teenagers becoming more adult in their thinking, the adults employed to educate them often themselves remain in something close to a state of permanent adolescence. Such that, for example, the obvious grown-up thing to do when you’re the Associate Director of Oberlin’s Multi-Resource Centre is to start harassing a random stranger for no reason whatsoever and then threatening to vandalise his car.
“Leftism is all about never growing up.”
And pretending, don’t forget all the pretending.
I repeat my recommendation of a couple of weeks ago; that ALL Anglosphere “universities” and “colleges” must be immediately shut down for cleaning out, for the safety of the rest of the Human Race. There is less time left now than before I began stating this two years ago.
“That.”
Yup.
Leftism is all about never growing up.
Posted again because, as rjmadden said at the time, replace ‘capitalism’ with ‘adulthood’ and all becomes clear.
Yup.
So here’s a thing that I’m (not) seeing. I don’t doubt for a minute that a lot of this is going on, especially at Google. Google’s search results for certain subjects, even non-sensitive subjects that contain words that might be used in searching un-PC subjects, have taken a noticeable hit IMNSHO. But with Facebook, yes I have seen a few people get their fingers slapped but for the most part, I see a good bit of stuff that has supposedly been banned. I just re-checked a post from a friend (actually a re-post from a highly political friend of his) from two days ago that mentioned “the whistleblower”, and it’s still there. When Diamond & Silk were supposedly de-platformed, I was still getting stuff in my feeds (though probably not everything).
My point is, yes it’s bad and yes it’s a problem. But it’s not an all-defeating thing. Sometimes the degree of hysteria about it is out of proportion. I am far, far more concerned about what goes on at Google, and Wiki, and our colleges, universities, and even down to our elementary school systems than I am about what FB is up to. FB seems to suck at this stuff. So far.
Leftism is all about never growing up.
The Judge in the Oberlin/Gibson’s case would seem to disagree with the desirability thereof, to the tune of a hefty payout to Gibson’s, many million$ in punitive damages and the ruling that Oberlin must post a bond for the whole amount before they may appeal. More on this story can be found on Michelle Malkin’s site: she’s an Oberlin alumnus, but doesn’t feel much sympathy for her alma mater.
http://michellemalkin.com/2016/12/14/a-new-victim-in-the-war-on-small-biz-bakeries/
Leftism is all about never growing up.
The actual trial reporting – extracts of which are linked here and also in the earlier post – makes for eye-widening reading. It also conveys a sense of the jurors being astonished by the routine pathologies of leftist academia. Where vindictive hysteria is rewarded and actively encouraged, and where supposedly grown adults, professional educators, behave like stroppy children on a sugar high.
They organised safety teams to guide people to safe spaces with glow sticks if they couldn’t find the safe spaces.
It’s hard to believe that any student outside of kindergarten could struggle with such infantile helplessness, but I guess “acting your age” no longer applies to the left.
How do we get academia — especially the humanities — back to empiricism, common sense, and enlightenment values? How do we prevent them from flying off into the stratosphere with bizarre, radical, and often violent political theories divorced from reality that impair society’s ability to function?
One way is the free market. Students (and their parents who often cut the cheques) have the choice of what schools they apply to, and those institutions that are drenched in progressive politics often find themselves with falling enrollment. This phenomenon will likely increase, as demographics suggest that the competition for students will become intense over the next decade or so.
Furthermore, students may begin to avoid those fields which have become highly politicized. This is occurring in a serious way, as humanities enrollment is in free fall.
But we can help this process along. A rating system that identifies the most radical and politicized schools and fields of study would be absolutely despised by far left academics, but might apply constant pressure on them to return to core principles of scholarship and education.
The Fire does this indirectly by identifying those schools that violate individual freedoms, often an indicator of radical politicization. It’s been wonderfully successful, and that success should be learned from.
Re: what Burnsie said above…that kind of struck me similarly. I mean, if the main safe space is the freaking main library, and students can’t find their ways there, I think we may have a possible root cause identified. Students plainly not only don’t know how to read books, they don’t even know that they can read them, or even should. Perhaps even that they exist at all.
Back in my uni days, ~30 years ago, we used to joke about one of my physics lab instructors “spoon-feeding” us the information for the lab, and he was much better at it than our other instructors, we thought (I think the others were less good at it, simply b/c they operated at such a high level mentally, they couldn’t rein it in for us lowly and stupid undergrads, but definitely not in a malicious way). In retrospect, he didn’t really give us that much extra info: he just laid it out much better and made our time in the lab more efficient, so we could get to the core of each lesson without getting bogged down in the administrivia. And if we missed the point of the lesson, we were duly punished in our grades.
Even back then, there were the starts of whispers (and the subsequent jokes) about people not grading our stuff in red pen any longer, b/c of it’s so-called negative connotations. I had one prof grading in purple ink, but most of the people that didn’t use red used regular pencil, which is usually hard to read on a typed paper. I’d say this has been coming for a long, long time.
How do we get academia — especially the humanities — back to empiricism…But we can help this process along. A rating system…
How about a rating system on the money loaned? How about we just stop funding these sorts of classes with our tax dollars. We don’t need no new steenking bureaucracy of official certifiers, we simply need people to be responsible for how they spend their own money and their own time. No more guarantees for student loans. No more “(insert stupid thing here) studies” classes at public universities.
Associate Director of Oberlin’s Multi-Resource Centre
A significant part of the problem right there is that this position exists.
especially the humanities — back to empiricism
The humanities have never been about empiricism.
We don’t need a rating system, we need to eliminate the root cause of the problem: the notion that Everyone Must Go To College, followed shortly by And The Government Should Pay For It. There’s simply way too much “free” money flooding into higher education and it’s distorting the market.
Eliminate all sources of government funding for post-secondary education and this stuff vanishes overnight.
As much as I despise tax dollars going to Marxists propagandists pretending to be educators, your solution requires that the government makes judgment calls as to the political suitability of professors and their departments, and that could backfire horribly.
“Eliminate all sources of government funding for
post-secondaryeducation and this stuff vanishes overnight.”FTFY. While we’re talking pipe dreams…
Eliminate all sources of government funding for post-secondary education and this stuff vanishes overnight.
Agreed.
You can either have government fund university & have strict academic standards for admission or no funds and let the universities set their own admission standards.
How do we get academia — especially the humanities — back to empiricism, common sense, and enlightenment values?
Easy, quick and cheap.
Students in the U.S. are forbidden to discharge student loans through bankruptcy. Instead they sponge the system until someone looks them sternly in the eye and says “No more money – not a cent more. Now, when do you plan to start paying us back, and by how much a month?” The answer, which both students and bankers know, is never – the students plan instead to backpack-off to Asia to “find themselves”, which involves making bare minimum wage teaching English and spending every cent partying their face and genitals off. They’ll come back in ten years once the loans are blown-out to a collection agency, because they borrowed nothing from the collection agency so they owe it nothing in return. And let’s be honest here, they haven’t a cent to their name – so what’s there to garnish?
Now, let’s make student debt dischargeable through bankruptcy and see what happens. There’s a line-up around the block of students who’ve just graduated and have nothing to seize or lose anyway, and nobody will lend them anything for ten years after declaring bankruptcy; but they’re heading-off to Asia for the whole partying-the-genitals-off thing for the next ten years anyways, so they don’t care. The bank takes a royal pasting and will likely close its doors, but what were they thinking lending-out $400,000 student loans for doctorates in holistic acupuncture anyway? – serves them right.
The banks that survive will be much, much more selective making student loans; they’ll want hard facts on the salaries for the degrees the applicants are studying toward, and if the transcript falls below a certain GPA, said students will be unceremoniously cut-off. Far, far less money will be flowing into the universities, so they’ll have to fire all their “diversity coordinators” (awww, so sad…), sell-off half their ornate buildings to keep the doors open on the other half, and reduce tuition to the point that, like in the olden days, a student who studies-by-day and works-by-night could possibly pay his own way without a student loan at all – learning a great deal about thrift, work ethic and time-planning in the process. And those who can’t hack it – won’t go.
Win-win-win-win-win-win or so…
your solution requires that the government makes judgment calls as to the political suitability of professors and their departments
No it doesn’t. Not any more than what exists today. You can’t get a degree in bubble gum chewing or wiping your butt today…yet. The government, or anybody for that matter, has to make judgement calls at some point. This is the problem. Oh, we can’t do x or it will backfire and the other side will do x back at us. No, there is no x on the other side here. What are they going to do? Say that math or medicine or such will be eliminated? Won’t happen. Attempts to do so will hurt everyone, including themselves. Also, what Y. Knott said.
The banks that survive will…want hard facts on the salaries for the degrees the applicants are studying toward, and if the transcript falls below a certain GPA, said students will be unceremoniously cut-off.
Until the trend shows that students from certain demographic subgroups are flaming out at a higher proportion than others, at which point these banks will have black-clad yoof tossing trash bins through their front windows and setting things on fire. After which the banks will roll out some program to support education for underprivileged yoof, financed by higher interest rates on everyone else, and before you know it we’re right back where we started, except the rules are driven by Antifa mobs rather than their patrons in Congress.
Fine citizens of Britain,
As our dear host says: no refunds.
– ‘Merka
– ‘Merka
HRC gave up being an American, except in name-only, a while ago.
Attention wypipo… did you do your act of anti-racism today?
HRC gave up being an American, except in name-only, a while ago.
TBF, so did about 90% of Democrats.
Of course this is the same nitwit who thinks that “flashing videos” on the dark web cost her the election, so her thinking a biracial actress who has been in several films and numerous TV shows and is as pale as I am got any “backlash”” over here because she married Harry is equally deluded.
Farnsworth
HRC and spawn are promoting their book “Gutsy Women” and when asked why they left out Maggie Thatcher they said “she wasn’t trying to make a positive difference.”
No mention of Golda Meir in the book either.
IOW it’s about proper Leftist women. The other kind aren’t even *real* womyns worthy of note.
IOW it’s about proper Leftist women.
Yeah, I read that, the list could have included, Marie Curie, Boudica, Lyudmila Pavlichenko, but no, St. Greta The Scold. From an Amazon review…
Whoa. That is some galactic brain stuff right there, I tell you what.
That’s odd. You would think that if there is any place Oberlin could get a jury sympathetic to itself it would be its home county. If that isn’t so then Oberlin has generated a lot of bad will among the general population.
…Oberlin has generated a lot of bad will among the general population.
Not that unusual. Oberlin is a small town and the University administrators, professors and rich out-of-town students likely condescend to the townies. Given how horribly a local business and family rooted in the community for over 100 years was treated by the ivory tower types it’s unlikely there would be much sympathy in town.
Social Security payments. That’s actually hit some retiring boomers who never paid off their student loans. Oopsie.
Not that unusual. Oberlin is a small town and the University administrators, professors and rich out-of-town students likely condescend to the townies.
Sadly, you are correct: snobbery is commonplace, especially among students. I saw it when I was in college.
“A lot of those students took their culture, the culture of cancel culture, I think it’s called, and call-out culture, and the concept that hate speech should be illegal, and now they’re working at Twitter and they’re working at Google and they’re working at Facebook…”
RTWT
https://www.city-journal.org/journalists-against-free-speech
Oberlin is a small town and the University administrators, professors and rich out-of-town students likely condescend to the townies.
As noted in the earlier post, Oberlin’s students are overwhelmingly from wealthy families, the top 10% of earners, and are nonetheless shoplifting prodigiously – and recreationally, for kicks – from people who are generally much less well-off than they are. The gleefully spiteful treatment of the bakery’s staff and customers, including bullying and physical harassment, very much fits a pattern of casual contempt.
And yet they mouth pieties about “social justice.”
On a more optimistic note, here’s an example of Oxford students rebelling against woke academics and literally standing up for tradition.
[ Quietly fixes HTML shit-show. Resumes wiping bar. ]
Oh dear. Was that me? Apologies. Tip jar tipped in atonement.
Tip jar tipped in atonement.
[ Returns from hairdresser, looking glorious. ]
Bless you, sir. May your wooden chopping boards never bow.
[ Quietly fixes HTML shit-show. Resumes wiping bar. ]
We appreciate the classy service, David.
We appreciate the classy service, David.
In this instance, happily, the mangled tags were only mildly baffling. Nothing has yet rivalled Mr Sherman’s spectacular and truly bewildering HTML atrocity of August 2016. The words ‘don’t know where to start’ barely covered it.
I’m still traumatised.
“at which point these banks will have black-clad yoof tossing trash bins through their front windows”
Heh. Was it you mein host, who had the link to some AntiFA goon wailing in his cell about his unfair treatment? I think it was Trump’s inauguration fiasco, or some event in New York just after he won; I have it in my quotes page, too lazy to look it up but will if provoked. So ‘Anarchy AntiFA’ was bemoaning that they did no more than what they’d done in Europe for years; show-up, make noise, break stuff, mess-up some white faces and then exit stage right, chuckling; but instead of weak fascist vituperation, the riot squad showed-up, arrested over a hundred of them and many were facing ten-year jail terms. He ended with the observation that AntiFA recruitees were suddenly scarce on the ground because of this, and cried-out “Hey we’re the GOOD GUYS here!”
I believe I saw somewhere else that they have since gone to trial, and almost all of them didn’t show-up. “Laws are much harsher when enforced” – hey that’s a good one; you can use it if you want…
So ‘Anarchy AntiFA’ was bemoaning that they did no more than what they’d done in Europe for years…
I have long wondered why the European authorities cannot/will not suppress these gangs of thugs, whether they be Communists or soccer hooligans or whatever.
I have long wondered why the European authorities cannot/will not suppress these gangs of thugs…
Professional courtesy.
“I wish I, and more importantly you, had never been born!”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/14/anti-natalists-childfree-population-climate-change
Speaking of journalism.
What happens if nobody can find the light sticks?
Professional courtesy.
It’s sufficiently part of their culture that Playmobil has a play-set.
Hopefully not a duplicate comment: “It’s sufficiently part of their culture that Playmobil has a play-set.”
Yeah, I’ve seen that set. The policeman does not have a gun or truncheon, but he does have a very prominent wagging finger.
I’ve just listened to the latest Moral Maze. The topic under discussion was ‘The Morality of Voting’ and featured as a witness our old friend, the eminent academic ‘Dr’ Lisa ‘Murial’ McKenzie. She described herself as a ‘democratic anarchist’ who thinks that voting is amoral, although she does ‘study the ballot paper’. I found it difficult to follow her chain of thought (if that’s quite the correct term) but her aperçu that ‘keep voting, you just get a government’ did stick in my mind.
She’s now ‘teaching’ (What? To whom?) at Durham University, which I had hitherto understood to be a serious institution. In a saner world she’d be in a pot receiving an occasional watering.
our old friend, the eminent academic ‘Dr’ Lisa ‘Murial’ McKenzie.
Ah, yes. Our “rebel ethnographer” – the one “challenging” the “negative stereotypes” of rough council-house neighbourhoods by proudly showing us graffiti – sorry, “muriels” – that actually confirm every cliché – of litter, vandalism, gangs, car theft and, as she puts it, “young people who have died on the estate.” And all while a police helicopter rumbles overhead.
Lady Kitten,
As it happens, I always keep a goodly supply of light sticks in the garage fridge. So if the poor dears can find their way to my house, I’d be only too happy to tell them to sod off.
I wish I, and more importantly you, had never been born!
I can think of an immediate solution for at least part of their problem… I confess I am a bit surprised it hasn’t occurred to them already.
If Lisa McKenzie believes voting is immoral, I wonder why she bothered to stand as a Parliamentary candidate in the 2015 General Election – she stood for Class War in Chingford and received 53 votes. Do I detect a tang of sour grapes?
I always keep a goodly supply of light sticks in the garage fridge
Do the sticks have a longer shelf life if you store them at a low temperature?
‘Dr’ Lisa ‘Murial’ McKenzie. She described herself as a ‘democratic anarchist’
and
Lisa McKenzie…stood for Class War in Chingford
So she is a “democratic anarchist” who believes in waging war if she does not get what she wants because in a democratic election. Funny how self-described “anarchists” turn out to be Stalinists and other thuggish creatures.
pst314,
I have always believed so, but before my last dive trip I tested a couple and one of the batch had died, so…
But I’m one of THOSE GUYS who carries three lights and a strobe and a couple sticks and a recovery tube and a whistle and an air horn and a knife and a scissor and a beacon and probably some stuff I’m forgetting right now.
I compensate for not carrying lead by carrying too much other weight.
I compensate for not carrying lead by carrying too much other weight.
Fred, you should see all the stuff I have accumulated over the years “just in case”. 🙂
So she is a “democratic anarchist” who believes in waging war if she does not get what she wants because in a democratic election.
I’ve always believed that no one truly, in their heart of hearts, believes in democracy nor even representative government. Damn near everyone wants their friends and allies out and about and all their enemies locked up. Government in any representative sense, be it full democracy or tight republic, is a compromise between the competing groups. A willingness to tolerate the other just so long as we (whoever ‘we’ are) can be left alone. But I’m something of an idealist, so…
and if the transcript falls below a certain GPA, said students will be unceremoniously cut-off.
Late entry here from a former academic. Tying loans to GPA superficially sounds like a great idea. But after spending *cough* years in academia, I can confidently tell you exactly what would happen: massive grade inflation, or, in the alternative, strictly pass/fail grades. The upshot would be that a golden retriever could evince the required level of academic performance.
So it’s important in thinking about reforms – which God knows are desperately needed – to consider the intellectual corruption of university faculty and administrators (especially outside of STEM), and to consider how exactly they could scupper any such reforms. Because they will lie awake at night thinking up ways to do just that.