Instapundit quotes a Wall Street Journal editorial on Berkeley faculty’s fear of their own students: 

The University of California at Berkeley played down news last summer that it had installed an “escape hatch” from protesters in the chancellor’s office. The term was “the concoction of a 19-year-old headline writer,” a university spokesman said, referring to the student reporter who broke the story. “It’s a door,” the rep said, later adding that campus security thought it was “beneficial” to have more than one exit. But internal emails we’ve seen show that a staff “deeply disturbed by [recent] occupations” did build the exit to protect themselves from potentially dangerous students.

A $9,000 security door. Oh, and a $700,000 security fence to keep the agitated Mao-lings out of the home of former Berkeley chancellor Nicholas Dirks.

Enabling and excusing all that leftist psychodrama sure is expensive.

Princeton University is offering a course this fall that will “examine the changing history, aesthetics, politics, and meanings of fatness” through dance and performance art.

Yes, fat feminist dance therapy is a thing that exists. Needless to say, “intersectional dimensions of the fat body” will be thoroughly explored.

Ian Miles Cheong pokes through the literature of Antifa affiliate Redneck Revolt: 

Much of the group’s official website includes rhetoric pulled straight out of Marxist publications, echoing various talking points about the evils of capitalism, property ownership, “artificial borders,” and basic systems of social order, including police, prisons, and courts. Redneck Revolt refers to these public institutions as “systems of social control [that] only exist to serve the rich,” and calls for the end of the “nation-state project.” It lists the US Armed Forces alongside the Ku Klux Klan as having “undermined the struggle for freedom among all people.” The “Resources” page of the group’s website offers a number of publications that promote violence, including a 36-page manual called the “Mini-Manual of the Urban Guerrilla,” which advises readers on how to conduct urban warfare, with sections on “sabotage,” “kidnapping,” “executions,” and “terrorism.”

Related: “Violence can and should be… made commonplace.” And previously. 

Ed Driscoll on Lena Dunham’s latest gratuitous attempt to signal her piety: 

Dunham is now babbling “I live for my truth,” in response to being described, yet again, as a fabulist. In any case, as Ace of Spades writes of the above incident, the SJW crowd “are militant, they are dogmatic, they are intolerant, and they are vicious… They have convinced themselves that their Pleasurable Cruelty to people is justified because they act to vindicate the Righteousness of Strange Gods.” The incident may or may not have happened, but Dunham has chosen to position herself, as veteran journalist Kurt Loder tweeted, as “Lena Dunham, millionaire scourge of working-class women.”

Related, Iowahawk has an idea. 

Toni Airaksinen on complaints that women are being held back in class by “white” and “heteronormative” mathematics:

In a recent article titled Unpacking the Male Superiority Myth and Masculinization of Mathematics at the Intersection, Professor Luis A Leyva argues that factors such as teacher expectations and cultural norms “serve as gendering mechanisms that give rise to sex-based achievement differences.” Citing the “masculinization of mathematics,” Leyva then suggests that the apparent “gender gap” in mathematical ability is socially constructed (as opposed to arising from inherently different cognitive abilities) and therefore a “myth of male superiority.” 

Apparently, it’s “unfair” to hold all students to the same standards of proficiency, as this oppresses women. Or at least it oppresses feminists. And so mathematics must be corrected with “intersectionality theory” and lots of fretting about “whiteness” and “identity.” And very much related, this. Because the best way to teach engineering is to waste class time with lots of “social justice” hokum.

Feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.

Ben Sixsmith finds another Guardian writer with a spiteful confiscation fetish: 

What I found most unpleasant in [Abi] Wilkinson’s article [advocating a 100% inheritance tax] is her acceptance that there could be “a small allowance for objects of sentimental value.” It brought the reality of the idea home. Imagine relatives being forced to beg to keep their family heirlooms. Your granddad’s books? Well, okay. It’s not as if they’re first editions. Your mother’s piano? Sorry, pal. Too big for this allowance. Your grandmother’s house? Forget it. We’re selling it off.

Michael Aaron on the mental contortions of being “woke,” and why they spread: 

How could it be possible that so many people, large cohorts of students, and indeed entire academic disciplines, are so bamboozled into believing much of postmodernist rhetoric, including that science is a symbol of the patriarchy (you’ve got to click on the link, the title is “Science: A masculine disorder?”) and that the concept of health is merely another tool of Western colonial oppression?

Lee Jussim on the bias of assuming unfair “gender bias”: 

The societal push to equalise gender distributions may be deeply dysfunctional, because it can succeed only by having the perverse effect of pushing people into fields they do not prefer. Of course, on moral grounds, we want to ensure that all people have equal opportunities to enter any particular career. But if there are bona fide gender differences in preferences and interests, equal opportunities may never translate into equal outcomes.

And Shannon Spada on political asymmetries:

A recent poll conducted by Pew Research Centre produced results suggesting… that Democrats are significantly more likely than Republicans to say that it would “strain” their relationship to learn that a friend had voted for the other party’s candidate. Among all respondents (not just college students), 35 percent of Democrats said that a friend voting for Donald Trump would strain their friendship, while only 13 percent of Republicans said that a friend voting for Hillary Clinton would have the same effect.

Feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.

Janice Fiamengo on ‘poor me’ feminism: 

Yes, [the party invitation] is crude, in a Happy Days sort of way, but the fact that such a tame and entirely non-threatening bit of verse doggerel would inspire such Olympic-sized hyperventilating outrage shows us that American college campuses are the exact opposite of “rape cultures.” They are places where even the slightest hint of male sexual bravado is thunderously denounced by everybody breathing.

And wait for the tearful account of being oppressed and imperilled by toilet facilities in the Arctic. It’s what’s keeping women out of STEM, apparently.

Toni Airaksinen on the priorities of academic feminists:

In a recent academic journal article, two feminist professors claim that citing sources in scholarly articles contributes to “white heteromasculinity.” Rutgers University professor Carrie Mott and University of Waterloo professor Daniel Cockayne advance the claim in an article published last month in the Feminist Journal of Geography, but also suggest that citation can serve as “a feminist and anti-racist technology of resistance” if references are chosen with the explicit intent of promoting “those authors and voices we want to carry forward.” The authors say that “white men tend to be cited in much higher numbers than people from other backgrounds,” but dismiss the idea that this is due to the relative preponderance of white male geographers.

And Andrea Vacchiano on the cost of all that racial scolding and denunciation of privilege: 

A sheet compiling the salaries of the top diversity administrators at 43 of America’s top public universities finds that virtually all are paid at least $100,000, with some going well beyond $300,000. The average of $175,088 per year is more than three times the average American’s salary of $44,980. The lowest salary identified by Campus Reform is $83,237, still almost twice as much as the average American salary. A 2016 report by American Association of University Professors found that the average professor salary across ranks was $79,424. In one example, an administrator at Rutgers University named Jorge Schement, vice chancellor of the office of diversity and inclusion, made $253,262 in 2016, while most faculty at Rutgers in 2015 made less than $50,000 a year.

Feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.