Writing in the pages of Inside Higher Ed, sociology student and “self-identified fat woman” Bobbi Reidinger bemoans the hardships of the chunky would-be educator:

Fat academics need to be more vocal in calls for increased structural accessibility such as larger desks or substitutions for tables and chairs, greater ease in access to elevators, and more. Yet in addition to structural changes that campuses could make to help people of size be more comfortable — such as providing larger bathrooms, chairs without arms and larger auditorium seating — we need to discuss more techniques to combat stigma within classrooms.

You see, it’s not just a question of remodelling half the campus:

Weight-based stigma has an impact on the credibility of fat academics, in particular female academics who often must contend with both gender and fat stigmas… Weight stigma negatively impacts a professor’s credibility as a communicator within the classroom, with greater credibility being given to those who argue against their own self-interest.

Being sufficiently obese that it requires special furniture and enlarged bathrooms, and such that it becomes an obvious topic of classroom conversation, is in a person’s self-interest, apparently. As opposed to, say, a significant health concern – a cause of hypertension, diabetes, heart disease, gallbladder disease, stroke, osteoarthritis, joint failure, incontinence, sleep apnea, breathing problems, depression, anxiety, and cancer.

Therefore, when a fat professor makes their fatness salient inside the classroom, their fatness overrides their educational and occupational statuses, as students interpret this information as coming from an unreliable source.

It occurs to me that if an overweight educator, or would-be educator, presents her own fatness as a kind of moral elevation, a political piety arrived at via victimhood, and then demands oversized desks, plus-sized seats without arms, modified lifts, modified bathrooms, modified auditoria, “and more” – and does all this while sidestepping responsibility for her own rotundity – then students would do well to question the motives and credibility of such a person. And when a teacher or grad student fails to convince a class and promptly blames that failure on some alleged-but-undemonstrated sexism or “weight stigma,” as if that were both obvious and the only conceivable explanation, this is not necessarily proof of injustice or unrecognised talent.

Please update your files and lifestyles accordingly. || Gone fishing, with goat. || Bit gusty. || African film posters of note. || When parrots share. || Pizza beyond the pale. || Probably best to just buy a new one. || Paranormal activity. (h/t, Damian) || Children of the night. (h/t, Julia) || The secret lives of snails. || Good day at the office. || When the trashcan brings you coffee. || Small child containment system. || Coming through. || Three amigos. || The thrill of pufferfish neurotoxin. || “I thought there was something wrong with the movie.” || I did not know about these. || Close enough. || Unfriending of yore. || That’s my sister! || Road rage scenes. || And finally, I’m not entirely sure what’s happening here.

Meanwhile, over at Salon, where the delusional hyperventilate, Mr Chauncey DeVega once again rails against Donald Trump. Today we’re being warned of his “political thuggery and mobster-style behaviour.” The current President is, we’re told, a “dictator.”

The question is… whether anything or anyone is capable of stopping him.

To embellish this tale of impending doom, Mr DeVega turns to academia. Specifically,

I recently spoke with historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat in an effort to better understand where America is on its road to fascism and authoritarianism in this fourth year of Trump’s regime.

It’s a regime, you see. Mr DeVega likes this word and uses it no fewer than nine times, as when telling us, confidently, that,

The American people are in a manic state because of Trump’s regime.

Not just Salon columnists, then, but the entire population. Apparently, 300 million people are teetering on the verge of a psychotic episode.

Dr Ben-Ghiat, a lecturer in Italian Studies, is of course on-message:

I’m very upset that there are in fact Trump supporters and I have zero sympathy towards them.

This is followed by pointed references to Hitler and Mussolini – because hey, why not? – and whisperings of a cowed and fearful media:

Many people in the news media are afraid to really engage the fact that Trump is an authoritarian because if they do so then reality becomes too threatening, and therefore they would have to take a different stance publicly.

Readers are invited to take a moment to reflect on Mr Trump’s famously warm and not at all fractious relationship with the mainstream media, which never, ever calls him names. Like “proto-fascist,” for instance. Or when MSNBC’s Niccole Wallace breathlessly announced that the President was genocidal and, for reasons left to the imagination, clearly bent on “exterminating Latinos.” Or when the same broadcaster’s Frank Figliuzzi suggested that Trump’s lowering of flags following a shooting tragedy was actually a coded salute to Adolf Hitler.

Apparently, these things never happened, are not in fact bizarrely routine, and the pundits at CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, NBC, Salon, etc., are just too terrified and deferential to admit, as Dr Ben-Ghiat puts it, that “they are living in the middle of a fascist, authoritarian takeover.”

“I like how it looks aesthetically next to my hand tattoos.”

Also, open thread.

Remember, students. You are not an individual, but a mascot of a notional group. 

From Is Everyone Really Equal? An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education, By Özlem Sensoy and Robin DiAngelo.

It occurs to me that when these clowns bang on about analysing events through a racial or identitarian lens, as for instance here and here, what they mean is shoehorning people through an identitarian keyhole, then pretending that the subsequent cartoonery and narrow contrivance, with its phantom evils and funhouse-mirror bigotry, is some universal profundity and proof of the speaker’s personal sophistication. The possible results of such “social justice education,” in which group affiliations, however contrived or incidental, are foregrounded and categorised, and their acknowledgement made habitual and a matter of great importance, are not hard to fathom. 

Update, via the comments: