Jillian Kay Melchior shares an eye-widening guide to the Clown Quarter’s academic standards, and the unhappy personalities it attracts: 

The three academics call themselves “left-leaning liberals.” Yet they’re dismayed by what they describe as a “grievance studies” takeover of academia, especially its encroachment into the sciences… Beginning in August 2017, the trio wrote 20 hoax papers, submitting them to peer-reviewed journals under a variety of pseudonyms… Journals accepted seven hoax papers. Four have been published…

One hoax paper, submitted to Hypatia [a journal of feminist philosophy], proposed a teaching method centred on “experiential reparations.” It suggested that professors rate students’ levels of oppression based on race, gender, class and other identity categories. Students deemed “privileged” would be kept from commenting in class, interrupted when they did speak, and “invited” to “sit on the floor” or “to wear (light) chains around their shoulders, wrists or ankles for the duration of the course.”

Students who complained would be told that this “educational tool” helps them confront “privileged fragility.” Hypatia’s two unnamed peer reviewers did not object that the proposed teaching method was abusive. “I like this project very much,” one commented. One wondered how to make privileged students “feel genuinely uncomfortable in ways that are humbling and productive,” but not “so uncomfortable (shame) that they resist with renewed vigour.” 

In the world of intersectional grievance hustling, citing dog-humping incidents as evidence of “rape culture” constitutes “very good work” and “excellent scholarship.” We also learn that an aversion to transsexuality can be “challenged” with “receptive penetrative sex toy use.” Oh, and it turns out that you can impress a peer-reviewed feminist social work journal with chapters of Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

And yes, there is a video by the hoaxers, explaining their motives and unexpected success, embedded below the fold. 

Bo and Ben Winegard ponder woke piety and its contradictions: 

Even Woke language for popular consumption is complicated by a quickly changing list of taboo epithets. Is it wrong to say homosexual relationship? Is it all right to say African-American? Will I be berated if I say Mexican-American? These changing prohibitions function well to distinguish elites from hoi polloi because they require devotion, erudition, and the right social acquaintances to understand.

Using arcane language and adhering to constantly changing norms about acceptable epithets are not particularly effective for attracting people from the broader population to one’s cause. In fact, they almost certainly alienate many average, and otherwise sympathetic, Americans, who understandably disdain indecipherable prose and elite superciliousness. Therefore, this signalling function of the Woke faith is actually antithetical to the stated goals of Wokeness (i.e., creating a more just social world—which requires a broad coalition of different classes of people).

Also antithetical to the stated goals of Wokeness is the tendency of its most popular preachers to castigate sinners instead of calmly attempting to persuade them of the justness of the Woke doctrine. Antithetical, but perfectly comprehensible from a signalling perspective. Those who are Woke don’t really want to inhabit an entirely Woke world without the bigoted masses; instead, they want to occupy a world of good and evil, of the just and the wicked, of the high status and the low status, of the elite and hoi polloi. 

As noted here previously, it helps if you think of woke piety as a kind of positional good, a marker of in-group status, jealously defended and forever in peril; and hence the unattractive desperation and crab-bucket dynamic that so often accompany such displays. For the woke, it’s always winter, but never Christmas. As Kristian Niemietz put it, 

Sounding dim and uneducated is now, it seems, something to aspire to and encourage, especially at universities:

A sociolinguist from Stanford University claims the way African-Americans speak leads to discrimination across the board — in the court system, interactions with police, education, and employment. Professor John Rickford says, “Black Vernacular English” is viewed as less “trustworthy, intelligent and well-educated” than so-called standard “white” English, and that “dismantling this construction is part of the fight for racial justice.” Rickford, who is the current president of the Linguistic Society of America, said the “modern-day racialisation of language” — which mandates that African-Americans conform to the white norm — has its roots in slavery.

In other words, bad whitey. Because judging people by what falls from their mouths – its comprehensibility, precision and so forth – is racist and oppressive. And if someone sounds barely literate, and uninterested in being understood by anyone outside of their immediate circle, then you should pretend that this is somehow your fault. It’s the way of the woke.

We’ve been here before, of course, when CUNY’s Dr A. W. Strouse – an enthusiast of “social justice” and whose dissertation is titled Literary Theories of the Foreskin – denounced “bourgeois white teachers” and insisted that correcting errors of spelling and basic grammar can “make students feel bewildered, hurt, or angry,” and should therefore be abandoned.

A conceit that prompted the following:

Lionel Shriver on recreational outrage and the corresponding theatre of atonement:

The defence of an infinitely multiplying list of ‘marginalised groups’ is a predatory movement… and its pleasures are those of hunting: spotting your prey, stalking, going in for the kill. Any source of umbrage thus presents an exulting opportunity to score a trophy, stuff it, and hang it on your (Facebook) wall. Mainstream institutions straining to be with-it give credence to this pretence of injury and vulnerability, when no one’s feelings actually have been hurt. So the victory is two-pronged. You take down the sinner, and you humiliate the editors of the Nation by forcing them to participate in an emotional theatre that every-one knows is fake…

When, during that Evergreen foofaraw, a rabid convocation of students cowed the college president into lowering his arms at the podium because they found his hand gestures ‘threatening’, those students didn’t feel jeopardised; they were dominating and emasculating a man supposedly in authority. The students cowering in ‘safe spaces’ don’t feel endangered; they’re claiming territory… Progressives seem especially prone to disguise one feeling as another. Reliably entwined with self-deceit, the problem isn’t solely among the young.

William Ray on the pernicious hokum of “white privilege” guru Peggy McIntosh:

Peggy McIntosh was born into the very cream of America’s aristocratic elite and has remained ensconced there ever since. Her ‘experiential’ list enumerating the ways in which she benefits from being born with white skin simply confuses racial privilege with the financial advantages she has always been fortunate enough to enjoy. Many of her points are demonstrably economic. One is left to wonder why, given her stated conviction that she has unfairly benefited from her skin colour, there seems to be no record of her involvement in any charity or civil rights work…

[McIntosh] simply reclassified her manifest economic advantage as racial privilege and then dumped this newly discovered original sin onto every person who happens to share her skin colour. Without, of course, actually redistributing any of the wealth that, by her own account, she had done nothing to deserve. All of which means that pretty much anything you read about ‘white privilege’ is traceable to an ‘experiential’ essay written by a woman who benefited from massive wealth, a panoply of aristocratic connections, and absolutely no self-awareness whatsoever.

And Heather Mac Donald on Clown Quarter credentials and keeping out the riff-raff:

In the video below, Janice Fiamengo reports on recent events at the University of Chicago, where Rachel Fulton Brown, a professor of Medieval history, dared to suggest, briefly, that, as a notional group, white men aren’t entirely awful, and that Western civilisation isn’t wholly without merit. The professor has consequently been denounced by her peers as a “fascist white supremacist” and a “violent” menace to the wellbeing of anyone whose skin is heroically brown. And do note the number – 1,300, cited towards the end of the video – the significance of which will, I think, become apparent.