Dennis Prager on attempts to hide classroom indoctrination:

The vast majority of our colleges have become left-wing seminaries. Just as Christian seminaries exist to produce committed Christians, Western universities exist to produce committed leftists… Universities differ in only one respect: Christian seminaries admit their goal, whereas the universities deceive the public about theirs. Thus, in the “social sciences” — disciplines outside the natural sciences and math — a large number of college teachers inject their politics into their classrooms. And if they are recorded, the general public will become aware of just how politicised their classroom lectures are.

But there is another reason. Most professors objecting to being recorded know on some level that they are persuasive only when their audience is composed largely of very young people just out of high school. They know that if their ideas are exposed to adults, they may be revealed as intellectual lightweights. Students therefore need to understand that when professors object to being recorded, it is a statement of contempt for them. The professors are, in effect, saying to their students: “Listen. I can get away with this intellectually shallow, emotion-based propaganda when you are the only people who actually hear it. You aren’t wise enough to perceive it as such. But if people over 21 years of age hear it, I’m toast.”

See, for instance, this first day of a creative writing class, and the examples that follow it, in which attempts to circumvent normal proprieties are passionately endorsed by leftist educators. The subject of some educators’ disdain for students – say, by conspiring to rob them of a chance to hear an alternative view – was touched on here. And for an illustration of just how vigorous and successful those efforts to indoctrinate can be, see also this. 

Update: 

And here’s a footnote to the Caleb O’Neil case mentioned in Prager’s article.

Meanwhile, in the world of the well-adjusted Guardian columnist: 

It was July 2014, Nashville Tennessee. I was walking into a gas station for a bottle of water when the man behind me stepped up to open the door for me. With that act of kindness, something inside me snapped and I flew into a blind rage. I began screaming at him at the top of my lungs.

This latest admission of derangement is by Stacie Huckeba, a photographer and video-maker. She continues,

“No, you cannot open this door for me! You wouldn’t have opened it two years ago, so you damn sure can’t open it now!” I scowled and stormed away, completely enraged.

You see, he’s not allowed to do that – holding open the door for her – or for any woman, presumably. Because although Ms Huckeba didn’t know this polite gentleman and had never seen him before, she’s nevertheless sure of what his views on holding doors open for people must have been two years previously, back when she was fat. It’s intersectional science. And then, inadvertently, a punchline of sorts:

It was the third time that week that a man had done something polite for me.

Damn the patriarchy and all its works.

First a man had bought me a drink at a concert, and then there was the nice man who had helped me scoop up my groceries after I dropped my bag, and now this man with the door.

At this point, thankfully, Ms Huckeba offers an explanation, and justification, for her erratic, rather alarming mood swings:

Two years before this, in July 2012, I weighed 365lb, which roughly translates into 26 stone. I was enormous, and had been my entire life. I grew up an obese kid, was an obese teenager, an obese young adult, and by my mid-40s I had ballooned into a hugely obese adult. But that summer I started a massive journey to lose 220lb, or almost 16 stone, over the course of four and a half years. As I sit here today, I’m literally a third of the body mass I used to be. I am an average-sized woman who wears a size medium pretty much across the board. And, I am happy to report, I am also a fairly happy, confident person.

Yes, of course. That would explain all the random screaming.

I’ve previously mentioned the taxpayer-funded race hustler Dr Caprice Hollins, whose efforts to empower black Seattle school pupils included dismissing grammar and foresight as “white values” and expectations thereof as “cultural racism.” Rather than encouraging “students of colour” to articulate their thoughts, to be responsible and plan ahead, like everyone else, we must, said Dr Hollins, see people as “racial beings” and “teach [children] to view the world through a racial lens.” But we mustn’t correct their grammar and spelling, or expect them to turn up on time.

Similar sentiments were voiced, in a somewhat boggling way, by Dr Riyad A Shahjahan, a professional educator at Michigan State University and a “social justice theorist,” who wants us to believe that people with brown skin are mystical and exotic, akin to leprechauns, and, unlike white people, “inhabit [their] bodies fully.” Dr Shahjahan also denounces expectations of attentiveness and academic competence, and even punctuality, as racist and oppressive. We should, he says, embrace “embodied pedagogy” and “disrupt Eurocentric notions of time.”

With such deep and incontestable thinking in mind, it may not be surprising to learn that the Writing Centre at the University of Washington, Tacoma is exploring similar avenues. The Centre, the stated goal of which is to “help writers write and succeed in a racist society,” aims to improve the life chances of brown-skinned students by encouraging them to give employers the impression that they’re incapable of mastering even rudimentary grammar:  

An “antiracist” poster in a college writing centre insists American grammar is “racist” and an “unjust language structure,” promising to prioritise rhetoric over “grammatical ‘correctness.’” The poster, written by the director, staff, and tutors of the Writing Centre, states, “racism is the normal condition of things,” declaring that it permeates rules, systems, expectations, in courses, school and society… The Centre pledges to “listen and look carefully and compassionately for ways we may unintentionally perpetuate racism or social injustice, actively engaging in antiracist practices.” “We promise to emphasise the importance of rhetorical situations… in the production of texts,” announces the poster. “We promise to challenge conventional word choices and writing explanations.”

The Writing Centre press release - which, according to one of its authors, Dr Asao Inoue, took “over a year” to write, despite its brevity – tells us that language is “constantly changing” and it is therefore, allegedly, “difficult to justify placing people in hierarchies or restricting opportunities and privileges because of the way people communicate.” Instead of becoming proficient in the structure and expressive possibilities of the national tongue, students – brown ones – should “become more critical” of “unjust language structures.” Apparently, the way for minority students to flourish as writers is to dismiss any criticism of their prose, and any attempt to improve it, as a racially motivated “microaggression” and an “oppressive practice,” and thus proof of “an inherently racist society.”

In short, then, students with brown skin needn’t be articulate, verbally self-possessed, or precise in their thoughts. And that ungrammatical job application, the one enlivened with incomprehensible sentences and lots of inventive spelling, will do just fine. And by the time the real-world consequences of this “social justice” posturing become difficult to avoid, Dr Inoue will have been paid – and be merrily exploiting the next batch of suckers.

Thank goodness these enlightened people are here to help.

And speaking of notable trends: 

A leading girls’ school has drawn up a “gender identity protocol” that allows pupils to be called by boys’ names and to wear boys’ clothes if they request it… There are understood to be up to 10 girls in the sixth form who have gone through a formal process to be known within the school either as boys or as gender-neutral.

Ten, in just one sixth form of maybe 200 students, in a school of 770. 

“We are moving to the point where your gender is a choice,” said [headmistress, Clarissa] Farr. “I see this as a social phenomenon, especially in London, which is much talked about among school leaders.”

And presumably, among students too.

Farr said no one had yet come forward to be counselled on whether to embark on medical procedures to change sex. If a pupil had fully transitioned and become legally male they could no longer be a pupil, the protocol states, because St Paul’s is a girls’ school.

At risk of sounding heathen and indelicate, and while wishing no ill to people actually alienated from their own physiology, I do wonder to what extent this may be a fashion thing, a way to become interesting.

Ian Miles Cheong reports,

The latest sex trend: Spraying vaporised liquid nitrogen on your genitals.

So, um. Do let us know how it goes.