Linked in the comments earlier but worth wider attention, here’s Heather Mac Donald’s latest essay on the academic cultivation of pretentious victimhood: 

The pattern would repeat itself twice more at the UCLA that fall: students would allege that they were victimised by racism, and the administration, rather than correcting the students’ misapprehension, penitently acceded to it. Colleges across the country behave no differently. As student claims of racial and gender mistreatment grow ever more unmoored from reality, campus grown-ups have abdicated their responsibility to cultivate an adult sense of perspective and common sense in their students. Instead, they are creating what tort law calls “eggshell plaintiffs” — preternaturally fragile individuals injured by the slightest collisions with life. The consequences will affect us for years to come.

One of the incidents mentioned, in which students claimed to be oppressed by corrected grammar and any public questioning of their far-left politics, will be familiar to regular readers.

Other debates centred on the political implications of punctuation. [Professor] Rust had changed a student’s capitalisation of the word “indigenous” in her dissertation proposal to the lowercase, thus allegedly showing disrespect for the student’s ideological point of view… During one of these heated discussions, Rust reached over and patted the arm of the class’s most vociferous critical race–theory advocate to try to calm him down — a gesture typical of the physically demonstrative Rust, who is prone to hugs. The student, Kenjus Watson, dramatically jerked his arm away, as a burst of nervous energy coursed through the room. […] The student, a large and robust young man… eventually filed a criminal charge of battery against the 79-year-old professor.

Mr Watson has subsequently been awarded academic credit for instructing other “Students of Colour” – a tribe that excludes students from East Asia – in the subtleties of “constructive intergroup relations” at Penn State, St. Louis University, and the University of Michigan. Mr Watson describes his fellow grievance-seekers – and of course himself – as “courageous.”

Ms Mac Donald discusses the vanities and dysfunction of modern academia in this 90-minute video. 

Fear the terrible power of Telekinesis Cat. // Trash owl sees all. // Think lettuce, think Toshiba. // Oh, no-one lives in London any more. // Quantum whirlpool created. // On sloshing, spilling, beer and coffee. // Red Kubrick. // Orchestra versus chili peppers. A test of musical discipline. // Pocket-size espresso maker keeps your hiking classy. // Pygmy seahorse camouflage. // Poultry lifter. Cook bird first. // A near miss. // The big wide world of Spam and Spam-like products. // Baseball players of yore. (h/t, Coudal) // Paying a fair share. // “Nearly half of the president’s 43 million Facebook followers appeared to be fake.” // Fire in the sky. // For that elegant dinner party you’ve been meaning to have. // And after dinner, obviously, grandma and her friends will want to smoke some weed.

At DePauw University, Indiana, someone may have said something unkind to a student with brownish skin. And so, inevitably, 

Professor of Sociology David Newman stated, “I’m a white man. I’m a white middle-class man. I’m a white middle-class heterosexual man… This is my fault. I didn’t do anything directly, but this is my fault. My silence makes this my fault.”

Because what’s education without a little Maoist pantomime? 

Yes, it’s time for more of that lovely performance art. Today we bathe in the radiance of Mr Joseph Ravens, a fearlessly non-conformist artist who uses the medium of “action and movement” to “project energy and images with abundant focus.” Not just that, of course. Mr Ravens also “devises highly stylised situations in which images and actions coalesce to produce decidedly poetic, often conceptual, narratives.” It’s decidedly poetic. He says so himself. 

Naturally, all this decidedly poetic energy projection is harnessed to “touch on subjects such as materialism, insatiability, conformity, and alienation,” with works presented in “hay fields, school buses, closets, and [on] rooftops.” “My images and ideas are designed to have impact,” says he, “while at the same time embracing depth, resonance, and artistic integrity.” Pondering his own efforts to awe and enlighten, Mr Raven adds, “Only a short time ago I realised that in much of my work I am expelling something from my body. I often produce objects from my mouth, my anus, or compartments within my sculptural costumes. For me, these objects represent creation and the creative impulse.” I’ll just leave that one there, I think.

In the following piece, titled Ravenous and performed in 2012 during the Venice International Performance Art Week, Mr Ravens projects his energies, poetically, with the aid of a marker pen, feathers and a small metallic groin cup. Go on, taste the art. 

Apparently, there’s now a fashion trend called “lumbersexual.” As the avid fashionistas I know you to be, I’m sure its details and subtleties are already familiar, if not passé. For those as yet unschooled in lumbersexual grooming, here’s a brief summary:

Lumbersexual men have a calculated look with the desire to be (and be seen) as rugged and the heteronormative version of “manly.”

If that isn’t sufficiently clear, here are some inspirational pictures. 

And here’s where you can buy a sling for your axe. 

However, not everyone is thrilled by this rugged, or rather pseudo-rugged, fashion development. Among the aggrieved is a student and blogger named Indi, who looks like this and describes himself, at length, as:

Cisgender maletype, he/him pronouns. Type-2 diabetes, clinical depression… Panromantic pansexual… A multicultural global nomad… Seen a lot of stuff, done a lot of things… Formerly at Monash University, formerly at Lasalle College of the Arts, currently at Deakin University. Former theatre kid wholly sick of the industry… I want to perform or write for the rest of my life, whether it’s music, theatre, comedy, films, TV, voice acting, whatever… I don’t like people that ignore intersectional issues.

Regarding the lumbersexuals’ ersatz burliness and ostentatious facial hair, he says, rather testily, 

Let’s promote traditional aspects of masculinity by pretending it’s harmless! Let’s glorify large beards, because only ‘real men’ have huge amounts of facial hair based on their level of testosterone! Let’s make something seem harmless to give credit to a bunch of cis white men for no reason other than to uphold [a] European beauty standard.

Fads, it turns out, are terribly important and something that people attuned to “intersectional issues” should spend their time seething about: 

This shit is as transparent as the people promoting it. It’s the same as normcore, glorifying behaviours typical of people in white hegemonies. Take this ‘real men’ shit and go elsewhere. Stop trying to make what white men like fashionable, thanks.

Beards, then, are harmful and oppressive. Especially when combined with plaid shirts and skinny jeans. Because they’re “glorifying behaviours typical of people in white hegemonies.” Like this. And no, I’m not entirely sure what normcore is. Though that does seem quite a lot of baggage for a chap of 22 who’s still at university.

Update: