And In Machete-Wielding-Educator News

Readers may recall this item from four months ago:

Curious how when you hear of yet another educator being intolerant, childish, or wildly unhinged, you don’t need to ask what their politics might be.

I was of course referring to Ms Shellyne Rodriguez, an art teacher at Hunter College, New York, and whose activities include menacing students whose views diverge from her own, shouting profanities at said students, vandalising their property, and chasing people down the street armed with a machete.

A liveliness subsequently blamed on “racists, white nationalists, and misogynists.”

In a turn of events unlikely to surprise regulars of this parish, it seems that Ms Rodriguez, our self-styled black Marxist and “public intellectual,” has a new position, this time at the Cooper Union School of Art in Manhattan. Where students will apparently be treated to our gentle maiden’s insights on,

The depiction and archiving of spaces and subjects engaged in strategies of survival against erasure and subjugation. 

Oh, and,

the ways in which the diverse social fabric of a place is rewoven as people and cultures coexist.

A coexistence achieved, one assumes, via screamed profanities, fits of physical intimidation, and holding machetes to people’s necks.

Readers are invited to speculate as to what it might take for a progressive educator to become unemployable.

Update, via the comments:

Our art instructor’s list of professed woes – supposedly mitigating circumstances – is of course extensive, and the relevance of many items escapes me, even allowing for the usual contrivance. Apparently, if you think a professional educator should behave like an adult, and not, say, threaten to decapitate people who ask questions about her childish and aggressive behaviour, then this is part of an “attack” on “women, trans people, black people, Latinx people, migrants, and beyond.”

A boldness that suggests Ms Rodriguez is very much accustomed to indulgence and being exempt from normal academic proprieties, and indeed civilisational basics. Rather than, as she pretends, being downtrodden at every turn.

Rafi adds, drily,

It was the machete of coexistence.

Indeed. What catches the eye isn’t Ms Rodriguez’s meagre scholarship – in which “critical studies,” i.e., Marxoid question-begging, seems more prominent than any aesthetic discernment – or even her equally meagre artistic abilities, which call to mind the daubing of a B-minus student, aged maybe 15:

Given the progressive chokehold on academia, and the neurotic racial imperatives consequently in play, corruption and rotting standards are to be expected. It’s the standard trajectory of ideological capture. This is the utopian path chosen by our self-imagined betters.

But it is, I think, interesting just how unhinged – and threatening – a progressive educator can be without having to consider an entirely different line of work.

Update 2:

Being a supposedly “marginalised” individual, maybe Ms Rodriguez was merely heeding the deep, deep wisdom of fellow “educator” Ms Shellene Drakes-Tull, mentioned here previously, and who informs us that expectations of workplace professionalism are scandalously racist, and that brown-skinned employees must be allowed to “bring their whole selves to work.” A wholeness of self that includes behaving in ways likely to be “interpreted as violent or aggressive.”

It turns out that a dislike of being bullied by the childish and emotionally incontinent is merely evidence of “deep, inherent bias and deeply inherent systemic racism.”

How terribly convenient.

Should further examples of suboptimal educators be required, see also this and this, and, well, any number of posts here tagged academia. The political leanings of the individuals in question will not be entirely surprising.

Also, open thread. Share ye links and bicker.

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