It turns out that the University of Nottingham and Nottingham Trent University have much to offer the pretentious and racially neurotic: 

As is the custom, an operatic tone is adopted and victimhood is feigned and deployed as a credential, a basis for deference. Though particulars of any credible harm, any actual modern-day “racism,” are thin on the ground. And the reasoning, such as can be discerned, is just a tad contrived. Quite how those “undertakings of white people” – in the arts and sciences – are crushing the hopes and dreams of students, robbing them of breath, remains somewhat unobvious. Likewise, the logical or moral basis for “reparatory measures.”

Yet those doing the demanding, a group of Nottingham academics, insist that these alleged woes, these “enduring detrimental legacies,” whatever they might be, “are issues that require urgent and sustained attention.”

I’m guessing this is where the applause is supposed to go.

Despite the theatre of “ongoing emotional pain,” the proponents of degree-course “decolonisation” seem quite enthused by their scolding and leverage. Their ability to wring pretentious atonement from fellow players of the game.

The central reasoning, such as it is, seems to be that some indirect historical beneficiaries of slavery, including those born after abolition, also gave money to universities, which, in ways somewhat mysterious, invalidates those universities’ modern-day course content and renders it harmful to People Of Pigmentation. “Reading classical European literature” and “travelling to historic landmarks” are among the activities deemed tainted and bruising.

In short, on a par with other recent efforts to “decolonise” degree courses, to purge them of the “inequities” of “white knowledge,” and thereby exterminate any trace of “white supremacy.” As when the Quality Assurance Agency, an organisation that boasts of being “trusted by higher education providers and regulatory bodies to maintain and enhance quality and standards,” demanded that computing courses address “how divisions and hierarchies of colonial value are replicated and reinforced” within the subject.

I’ll give you a moment to ponder that one.

If the particulars are, again, unclear and the reliance on verbiage unconvincing, and if readers are unsure of what “neoliberal systems of power” might be, and how they might bear upon musical notation or the Royal Veterinary College, at least the antipathy towards things deemed “white,” and thus offensive, is hard to miss and evidently relished.

Despite such causal convolution, the racial browbeating is having its intended effect:

And goodness, we can’t have that.

At Vanderbilt University, an honours programme intended to accommodate academic giftedness has been denounced as “inherently exclusionary.” Having now been identified as an affront to “equity,” an unforgivable wickedness, the programme is of course being shut down:

Or, His Unbeaten Ass. 

Yesterday, at UC Berkeley, that fiefdom of Our Betters, detransitioner and “former trans kid” Chloe Cole invited students to discuss the realities of sexual transition, a procedure she very much regrets.

However, expressing regret, or doubt of any kind, is apparently an outrage, a wickedness to be punished. And hence the grinning chap seen below, the one expressing himself via the medium of tomato juice:

Today at a @tpusastudents tabling event at UC Berkeley with Chloe Cole and Harrison Tinsley, this individual threw a full bottle of tomato juice all over the TPUSA chapter members, staff, and their table. @Harrisontinz @ChoooCole

VC: @uhneti pic.twitter.com/CTWd4rfpsm

— Turning Point USA (@TPUSA) October 23, 2024

“I’m not touching you,” says he. “I’m grabbing your phone.” 

Update, via the comments:

EmC asks, not unreasonably,

I would guess that if you attempt it, even politely – at least, at Berkeley, that great seat of reason – you risk being assaulted by a spiteful, emotionally incontinent misfit. One clearly accustomed to impunity.

And that’s rather the thing, isn’t it?

If, for instance, I were considering whether to amuse myself by flinging tomato juice over people and over their computers and whatever, while grinning with satisfaction, I’d expect a not insignificant likelihood of consequently being punched in the face. This expectation is important.

The risk of being punched, vigorously, is important. It inhibits quite a lot of recreational malice.

And the assumption of being able to behave badly, malevolently, with impunity, as seen above, and as seen repeatedly and quite vividly here, is not, to my eye, progress.

Readers will, I think, recall Mr Sasha Yates, the cross-dressing high-school sports coach with an interest in teenage girls’ panties.

The chap so loudly championed by ladies of a progressive bent, despite numerous complaints regarding Mr Yates’ inappropriate behaviour.

Progressive ladies who denounced the “hate” and “transphobia” of those expressing concerns, while ensuring that Mr Yates retained his position, and his access to the girls’ changing rooms, where he paraded around in his own bra and panties, much to the girls’ discomfort, and while asking those teenage girls about their underwear and menstrual cycles.

Progressive ladies who merrily elevated themselves with the airing of modish views, their ostentatious displays of compassion and inclusivity, while in effect screwing over the schoolgirls being harassed by a cross-dressing creep.

Girls whose discomfort and polite complaints – their failure to be progressive – rendered them low-status. Beings of no consequence.

In case you’re unsure, Mr Yates is the strapping madam in the denim.

Well, readers, I have news.

Following the renewal of his employment contract, reported previously, Mr Yates has since resigned, citing “ongoing health reasons.” Which, as the ladies at Reduxx reveal, is something of a euphemism, another coy dishonesty:

I’ll spare you the more graphic details, but in one of the feats of erotica seemingly shared with the world, Mr Yates asks the question every parent hopes to hear from someone educating their children:

At risk of sounding stuffy and uptight, it occurs to me that if you’re employed as a sports coach at a school, despite perving on adolescent girls, and your home-made porno videos, in which you smoke meth, can easily be found by parents, and presumably by students, this is not an ideal situation.

And because, clearly, we need more irony, there’s this detail regarding the school district’s original investigation:

Wait for it.

You may now resume your humdrum, non-cross-dressing lives.

Lifted from the comments, here’s an interview with Professor Amy Wax. Topics touched on include academia’s practised unrealism, declining competence, and the seeming irrelevance of whether a thing is true:

The discussion, at 24:45, of who gets to define extremism – and, very much related, The Party Of Shoplifting – is, I think, entertaining and rather on-the-money.

Update, via the comments:

The complaints against Professor Wax were compiled, with some enthusiasm, by the law school’s Dean, Theodore Ruger, who claims to have experienced “lasting trauma” after hearing Wax speak. This, remember, is a supposedly grown man. An intellectual.

Ruger’s improbable assertion echoed those of several students who would have us believe that Wax’s mere presence on campus is “physically and emotionally harming all of us.” And whose list of grievances included one student who resented the expectation that in order to win a debate, she “had to prove herself” – i.e., make a compelling argument – and another who was crushed by the suggestion that affirmative action policies can leave their supposed beneficiaries academically unprepared.

At which point, the word irony springs to mind.

This, then, is the standard at the University of Pennsylvania’s law school. Where tuition is a mere $76,000 a year.

So far as I can see, Professor Wax’s heretical comments – whether on the statistical benefits of bourgeois values, or on cultures of dysfunction, or on “equity” versus competence, or on her own students’ performance disparities and drop-out rates – have yet to be refuted by those trembling with indignation. They have, however, been denounced as “hate speech,” “racist,” “segregationist,” “white supremacy,” etc.

Apparently, among our betters, it is now scandalous to suggest that a way to minimise the risk of poverty and imprisonment is to be diligent and hardworking, charitable and civic minded, and to “eschew substance abuse and crime.”

Again, $76,000 a year.

At which point, it’s perhaps worth repeating this, from an earlier post on those supposedly traumatised by Professor Wax and the fact that she exists:

Hence the bizarrely narrow range of permissible opinions, the unmentionable statistics, and the zeal with which transgressions are punished.

Update 2:

In the comments, ccscientist adds,

And the result is very often disaffection and resentment, which is eagerly redirected, not least by many of Wax’s critics, towards “whiteness,” or “white supremacy,” or “structural racism,” or some other self-flattering conspiracy theory. The resentment may be misdirected, or entirely unearned, but it is exploitable.

It’s also worth remembering that Wax’s comments about performance disparities and drop-out rates among her own students were prompted by Glenn Loury, who had noted, correctly, that such disparities must necessarily result from racial favouritism and wildly varying standards in admissions. A point he explains more fully in the short, and very much recommended, video embedded here.

Wax was essentially confirming Loury’s own reasoning, and stating clearly what Loury had cautiously tip-toed towards. And yet she, unlike he, is demonised and punished for articulating a statistical necessity, an observable fact. As Wax puts it, common knowledge, albeit of a kind studiously ignored by those doing the punishing and puffing out their chests.

As Wax says in the video linked above,

And noticing the knot, the mental contortion, is very much forbidden.