Chris Bing on that elite education you could be paying for: 

Skidmore College, ranked as one of the nation’s most expensive private colleges in the country, is now officially offering a course on Miley Cyrus: “The Sociology of Miley Cyrus: Race, Class, Gender, and Media.” The 2014 summer course will be taught by assistant visiting professor of sociology Carolyn Chernoff. “I am interested in cities, arts, and social change, particularly on the level of social interaction and the production of ‘community,’” Chernoff’s professional bio reads on the school’s website. “I investigate the role of culture in reproducing and transforming social inequality, and research conflict around diversity and difference.”

No, don’t. You mustn’t laugh at a woman in hipster glasses.  

Tim Blair goes undercover, unsuccessfully, at a Green activist training day: 

Next we were called upon to mingle with each other. “Try to find the person in the room who looks as though they hold completely different views to yours,” [anti-capitalist activist Bruce] Knobloch urged, which was an optimistic call, given that everyone at the event was of like mind. A laughing Asian woman turned to me and said: “Everyone should just line up to meet you.”

Do read Tim’s adventure in full. You’ll learn about “non-linear change strategies” and the looming “fascism” of people who aren’t anti-capitalist activists.

Jim Goad checks his “white privilege”:

According to conference founder Eddie Moore, Jr., “White supremacy, white privilege, racism and other forms of oppression are designed for your destruction – designed to kill you.” If that’s the case, privileged whites are doing a piss-poor job, seeing as how the 400,000 or so Africans who were transported to the New World in slave ships have – through the noxious evils of white privilege, white technology, and living amid a predominantly white culture – blossomed into around 40 million modern black Americans. That’s an increase of 100-1 and truly the most inept genocide in world history.

And Tom Paine bids us goodbye and good luck: 

To me, [Britain] now seems a strange, immoral place. For example, I read articles in the Guardian and the Times this week about the abolition of inherited wealth. The Economist also recently wrote about it. It did not even occur to any of these columnists that they were talking about the property of others. They did not create it. They did not inherit it. They have no just claim to it. Yet they have no moral concerns about proposing its seizure.

As usual, feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments. 

Tim Blair quotes Mark Steyn: 

The gentleman had called the Female Genital Mutilation Helpline thinking it was a helpline set up by Her Majesty’s Government to help you find someone to genitally mutilate your daughters. 

And no, he’s not joking.

Good news, everyone: 

From Monday the Guardian is handing over control of its features content to 10 young trainee journalists… Here they describe the topics they want to explore and debate – the media, sex, food, employment, globalisation and more.  

Thrilling, isn’t it? All that exploring and debating by the titans of tomorrow as they probe “the issues that matter to us and why.” They have a mission statement and everything:

We are all members of Generation Y – those born between the early 80s and early 00s.

And this, in itself, is somehow fascinating and a basis for applause. 

Like every generation, we think we see things differently from the ones that came before us. Also like every generation, we face rapid change that we don’t fully understand – for instance, are we really digital natives, or just magpies collecting shiny things? Are we doomed? Is our future a dystopian IRL news feed of being screwed over by landlords/elected officials/ill-judged sexts?

With such pressing questions in mind,

For one week, we will share our perspectives on the media, globalisation, sex and pop culture,

Media, globalisation, sex and pop culture. Wooh, yeah. Can the system cope with this avalanche of intellectual boldness?

These are some of the pieces we will be bringing you:

Buzzfeed’s Beastmaster explains the cat thing.

Everything you wanted to know about trans sex lives and were rude enough to ask.

And obviously,

Why Clueless defines Gen Y better than any other single cultural artefact.

As you can see, it’s “a week for everyone,” brought to you by an “eclectic mix of voices that have yet to be heard.” And so let’s meet some of these eclectic debaters and explorers, this hot and sassy new Guardian team.

Cathy Young on the psychodramas of academic feminism: 

Twenty years ago, critics such as Christina Hoff Sommers, Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge, and Karen Lehrman described the bizarre “therapeutic pedagogy” in many women's studies classrooms, where female students were frequently encouraged to share traumatic or intimate experiences in supportive “safe spaces.” Today, at many colleges, academic therapism has spread to other fields. Welcome to the age of the trigger warning. […] Initially, the warnings were primarily for sexual assault and partner abuse. Eventually, they spread to just about everything that could be potentially upsetting to any person of politically correct sensitivities: sexism, racism, homophobia, “ableism,” “victim-blaming,” “slut-shaming,” “fat-shaming,” “body-shaming” and a host of other sins and oppressions. (My personal favourite is a warning for “discussion of gender policing” – that is, of norms dictating proper bounds of masculine and feminine behaviour. How startling to find such a discussion on a feminist blog.)

Christopher Snowdon parses the assumptions of “medical socialism”: 

‘Neoliberalism’ means free markets and ‘transnational forces’ means globalisation, i.e., free trade between countries. These are the main factors that have led to the extraordinary reduction in poverty in developing countries since 1980. The world suffers less from an unequal distribution of wealth than it does from an unequal distribution of capitalism. Countries which have resisted free market reforms have suffered greatly as a result.

Thomas Sowell feels the benevolence of teachers’ unions:  

The teachers’ unions see charter schools as a threat to their members’ jobs, and politicians respond to the money and the votes that teachers’ unions can provide. The net result is that public schools are often run as if their main function is to provide jobs to teachers. Whether the children get a decent education is secondary, at best.

And Dr Ben Carson, a retired black neurosurgeon, recently spoke at a conservative conference and received thunderous applause. Much to the annoyance of quite a few people on the Totally Non-Racist Left™, who denounced him as an “uncle Tom,” a “token” and a “house negro.” “He can shine my shoes,” wrote ‘progressive’ comedian Laura Levites. 

As usual, feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments.

It all began for me more than a decade ago, with the “mangetout moment”; a passing conversation with my editor at the Guardian about those pangs of consumer guilt that wash over us, but upon which we rarely act. 

Ah, consumer guilt. I bet you’re feeling its sting right now. 

Those moments when, for example, you pick up a plastic-wrapped packet of mangetout in a supermarket, fleetingly dwell on their food miles or the likely exploitative wage of the Kenyan farmer who grew them, but still pop them into your shopping basket and shuffle towards the next aisle.

Such are the recollections of Mr Leo Hickman, whose ten years of struggling with ethical purity will be known to long-term readers. And who believes that the way to make poor people rich is to not buy their goods. 

Our experiment was never framed as anything other than a personal journey. It certainly was never meant to be a finger-wagging sermon – more a fumble and a feel through some of modern life’s most chewy dilemmas.

Yes, Mr Hickman and his equally fretful colleagues shied from any hint of such competitive piety, honest, and instead merely had debates on subjects ranging from ethical sandwich-wrapping and the immorality of fireworks to whether it’s acceptable to employ a cleaner and alternative uses for inherited fur coats – among them, dog bedding and indoors-only fashion. And debates on whether roadkill could be an alternative ethical food source for Guardianistas who “hate waste.” Those “chewy dilemmas” that bedevil us all. 

And Mr Hickman’s moral guidance was often reciprocated by his readers:

A woman from Derbyshire wrote to enthusiastically explain how she hung her “washable menstrual products” out to dry from the guy rope when camping.

It’s good to know these things. And such wisdom was not without influence:

A troubled student writes:

As a proud male feminist,

Oh, go on. Guess where. 

As a proud male feminist, I believe it’s important for men to rally around the feminist movement to provide support and to act as an example for other men to follow. So it confuses me that at university a shockingly large number of male students I speak to refuse to apply the term to themselves, instead being evasive and avoiding such an empowering title.

Yes, dear readers, it’s both shocking and confusing that in the twenty-first century, in one of the most cosseting and politically corrected environments in all of the developed world, some male students feel no need to describe themselves as feminists. And calling oneself a feminist, announcing it proudly to the world – or at least to other, likeminded, equally proud students – is apparently the duty of all righteous beings, especially those with testicles. It’s empowering, you see. And never a sign of narcissism, credulity and pretentious moral grandstanding. 

The scandalised and bewildered author of this piece is Mr Lewis Merryweather, a first year student of comparative literature at the University of Warwick. “He is a proud feminist,” reads his Guardian profile, “and writes poetry.” And the sorrows of his life are there for all to see:

I often encounter negative reactions when declaring myself a male feminist at university.

Missionary work is hard. Bring handkerchiefs, quickly, a dozen at least. And possibly towels and a mop.

I find this attitude among male students worrying… Perhaps it stems from male panic, that, foolishly, male students worry they may lose power and opportunity in a world of feminism. Perhaps guy students are embarrassed to align themselves with a word that lexically alludes to female-centrism.

Yes, that must be it. Those lexical allusions are a real bugger.

Maybe they’re worried about feeling emasculated.

Says our fretful poet. A man agonised by the existence of peers who don’t think exactly as he does and won’t wear his badge. And to make matters worse, there’s the ever-present shadow of hegemonic oppression:

In the words of Colm Dempsy, a male feminist who spoke at the forum I attended: “I am a proud male feminist. I am willing to fight with you. If you let me.” This is a statement every man, inside university and outside, should be able to shout without fear of being silenced by society.

Silenced by society. In a national newspaper. 

And I still wake up screaming.  

Via Herb Deutsch, Heather Mac Donald on the self-destruction of the humanities: 

Until 2011, students majoring in English at UCLA had to take one course in Chaucer, two in Shakespeare, and one in Milton — the cornerstones of English literature. Following a revolt of the junior faculty, however, during which it was announced that Shakespeare was part of the “Empire,” UCLA junked these individual author requirements. It replaced them with a mandate that all English majors take a total of three courses in the following four areas: Gender, Race, Ethnicity, Disability and Sexuality Studies; Imperial, Transnational, and Postcolonial Studies; genre studies, interdisciplinary studies, and critical theory; or creative writing. In other words, the UCLA faculty was now officially indifferent to whether an English major had ever read a word of Chaucer, Milton or Shakespeare, but the department was determined to expose students, according to the course catalogue, to “alternative rubrics of gender, sexuality, race, and class.”

The UCLA coup represents the characteristic academic traits of our time: narcissism, an obsession with victimhood, and a relentless determination to reduce the stunning complexity of the past to the shallow categories of identity and class politics. Sitting atop an entire civilisation of aesthetic wonders, the contemporary academic wants only to study oppression, preferably his or her own, defined reductively according to gonads and melanin.[…] [Consider] the resentment of a Columbia University undergraduate, who had been required by the school’s core curriculum to study Mozart. She happens to be black, but her views are widely shared, to borrow a phrase, “across gender, sexuality, race and class.” “Why did I have to listen in music humanities to this Mozart?” she groused… “My problem with the core is that it upholds the premises of white supremacy and racism. It’s a racist core. Who is this Mozart, this Haydn, these superior white men? There are no women, no people of colour.” These are not the idiosyncratic thoughts of one disgruntled student; they represent the dominant ideology in the humanities today.

Yes, what could the music of Mozart possibly have to offer a black woman, any black woman? After all, he was a composer of pallor, and male, and therefore, apparently, in the service of evil. Mozart ain’t for dark folk. Nothing to learn or enjoy there.*

A man who was caught masturbating in the meat aisle of a Sainsbury’s store has been banned from every supermarket in Britain – unless he is supervised by another adult. Eugenio Freitas, 49, was captured pleasuring himself through his trousers for 10 minutes on CCTV cameras. The married father of four went to the store in Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire “fully intending” to go shopping, but then became overwhelmed by his “excessive sexual drive,” a court heard.

Via Julia, who seems to have an eye for stories involving irregular arousal. 

Many moons ago, in a post on classroom radicalism and the grooming of students, I wrote, 

The problem is that adversarial role-play, like that of leftist academics Grover Furr and Rhonda Garelick, has little to do with reason, refutation or how the world actually is. It does, however, have a great deal to do with how those concerned wish to seem. In order to maintain a self-image of heroic radicalism – and in order to justify funding, influence and status – great leaps of imagination or paranoia may be required. Hence the goal posts of persecution tend to move and new and rarer forms of exploitation and injustice have to be discovered, many of which are curiously invisible to the untutored eye. Thus, the rebel academic tends towards extremism, intolerance and absurdity, not because the mainstream of society is becoming more racist, prejudiced, patriarchal or oppressive – but precisely because it isn’t. As mainstream society becomes less fixated by race, gender, sexuality, etc., so peddlers of grievance and victimhood must search out – or invent – something to oppose. Overstatement and escalation are all but inevitable.

This last point was illustrated with the ‘scholarship’ of Barbara Barnett, a graduate of Duke’s infamous humanities department, who claimed that college campuses have a rate of rape and violent sexual assault almost 1000 times higher than any credible calculation. Other, equally bizarre examples of activist ‘scholarship’ can be found in the archives, starting with this gem. You can imagine my dismay on discovering that my thoughts were not at all original, as Jeff Goldstein had demonstrated three years earlier: 

An obvious problem with the grievance aspect of identity politics is that the grievance needs to be perpetually maintained in order to justify the identity aspect of the politics. And in an era of academic specialisation wherein just about every individual identity group has its own set of researchers and theoretical champions – as well as a widely accepted generic narrative of grievance – the observation that continued relevance (which translates into political power) is contingent upon the nursing and care of the grievance is something that too often goes unexamined by a society that, at base, really does wish to understand and fix the problems and frustrations expressed by individual identity groups.

That nursing of grievance – from hoax hate crimes to hallucinated racism - is a subject that’s cropped up here many times since. It’s a trend that’s becoming increasingly surreal. As, for instance, when Kerri Dunn, a psychology professor at Claremont McKenna College, slashed her own tyres and defaced her own car with abusive and racist messages, before walking over to puzzled onlookers and asking if they’d seen who was responsible. Despite being witnessed vandalising her own vehicle, Dunn protested her victimhood to faculty and police, citing a “crisis of hate” on campus, while students held rallies for “tolerance and diversity.”

With an eye to the latest such fabrication, involving an imaginative lesbian waitress named Dayna Morales, Daniel Greenfield takes it from there: