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.
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.