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Academia Politics Psychodrama

And Another Balanced Individual

March 28, 2023 59 Comments

An educator, obviously:

Wayne State University has suspended a professor who allegedly posted on social media that people would be justified in killing those with whom they have disagreements, according to a note to the university from President Roy Wilson.

The university became aware of the post Monday morning, Wilson said in his email. The professor, whose identity was not revealed, works in the university’s English department… “The post stated that rather than ‘shouting down’ those with whom we disagree, one would be justified to commit murder to silence them,” Wilson wrote.

According to the educator in question, Steven Shaviro, “It is far more admirable to kill a racist, homophobic or transphobic speaker than it is to shout them down.” What unfailing criteria might be used to determine such things, and how those gorged on indignation might avoid error, prior to any murder attempt, isn’t made clear.

The professor goes on to blame “right wing” student groups for inviting speakers who “provoke” leftist students – who mustn’t be expected to have any kind of self-possession – making them behave in ways that are threatening and delinquent, even sociopathic. Behaviour illustrated here many, many times – as, for instance, at Middlebury College, where the 74-year-old scholar Charles Murray, a contender for the title of World’s Most Polite Man, was physically chased off campus.

Says our educator,

The protesters get blamed instead of the bigoted speaker; the university administration finds a perfect excuse to side publicly with the racists or phobes; the national and international press has a field day saying that bigots are the ones being oppressed, rather than the people those bigots actually hate being the victims of oppression.

Or put another way, “How dare you try to discredit leftist Mao-lings by even briefly existing in their proximity and thus making them want to murder you.” I paraphrase, of course, but not enormously.

Update, via the comments:

Given sufficient squinting, readers may have noticed the professor’s tiny rhetorical fig leaf. We’re told that he doesn’t advocate breaking the law – by murdering someone for shits and giggles – he merely admires it, a lot. And so, if, for example, a woman says that she doesn’t think a mentally ill man should be using the women’s changing rooms and toilets – and is then murdered for her “transphobia” – this would be a good thing and “far more admirable” than merely ganging up on her and preventing her from speaking.

He’s an intellectual, you know. A terribly caring intellectual.

Update 2:

In the comments, Pete R adds,

Not much of a fig leaf.

No, not really. This, remember, is a man for whom demurral on a wide range of contentious topics is by definition “reprehensible” and, in his mind, could only exist in order to “provoke” the righteous and good-hearted, i.e., people much like himself, who fantasise about menacing and killing those who disagree with them. Note the implication at the end of his post – that after murdering someone – say, someone who doesn’t think that dysmorphic men and autogynephile perverts are actually women – one should be acquitted, as one’s actions would have been “justified.”

These sentiments don’t suggest a detached thought experiment or some devil’s advocacy. More a sociopathic urge. Maybe inside our professor’s head, there’s a loud, relentless buzzing noise.

This shaper of young minds, a self-styled “Kitsch Marxist,” has been suspended with pay.

Previously in the world of totally balanced educators.

Via Tom Joyce.

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Written by: David
Academia Politics Psychodrama

Elsewhere (317)

March 22, 2023 63 Comments

Heather Mac Donald on the feminised university and its pathologies:

Female students and administrators often exist in a co-dependent relationship, united by the concepts of victim identity and of trauma. For university females, there is not, apparently, strength in numbers. The more females’ ranks increase, the more we hear about a mass nervous breakdown on campus. Female students disproportionately patronise the burgeoning university wellness centres, massage therapies, relaxation oases, calming corners, and healing circles. Another newly installed female college president, Dartmouth’s Sian Leah Beilock, claims that the two “most pressing challenges of our time” are the “mental crisis among young people” and climate change.

Female dominance of the campus population is intimately tied to the rhetoric of unsafety and victimhood. Females on average score higher than males on the personality trait of neuroticism, defined as anxiety, emotional volatility, and susceptibility to depression. (Mentioning this long-accepted psychological fact got James Damore fired from Google.) Victorian neurasthenia has been reborn on campuses today as alleged trauma inflicted by such monuments of Western literature as Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Hearing an argument that chromosomes, not whim, make males male and females female is another source of alleged existential threat.

When students claim to be felled by ideas that they disagree with, the feminised bureaucracy does not tell them to grow up and get a grip. It validates their self-pity… The most far-reaching effects of the feminised university are the intolerance of dissent from political orthodoxy and the attempt to require conformity to that orthodoxy. This intolerance is justified in the name of safety and “inclusivity.” 

Christopher Rufo has some related thoughts:

Individual pathology is valorised as a form of marginalised identity. So when you have this victim narrative… all of a sudden individual psychopathologies, individual traumas, individual problems, individual personality disorders, something even like obesity, a kind of physical disorder or dysregulation, are elevated into marginalised identities that provide the moral centre of these new victim narratives… When you take the victim narrative… and you elevate individual pathology into a form of marginalised identity, you create a social system that incentivises certain kinds of behaviours.

Apparently, the way to entrance others and to suddenly become fascinating is to make yourself your own go-to subject.

And Anna Slatz on “inclusivity” and questionable role models:

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Academia Politics Science

Statusful Worries

March 15, 2023 47 Comments

From the University of Oxford’s Department of Biology, a new opportunity for ostentatious fretting:

The reality is that the use of eponyms in the naming of species poses a wider, more problematic nature. Traditionally, eponyms typically reflect benefactors, academics and officials affiliated with the individual who discovered a species – which is a practice that continues today. With science of the 19th and 20th century largely dominated by white men from colonising European nations, this meant many of those honoured are strongly associated with the negative legacy of imperialism, racism, and slavery.

A suitably concerned survey of the scientific names of African vertebrates revealed – presumably, to gasps and much rending of garments – that,

1,565 species of bird, reptiles, amphibians and mammals – around 24% of their sample – were eponyms, notably of white, male Europeans from the 19th and 20th centuries.

The rewards, I would guess, of doing the actual leg work, and of funding said leg work, resulting in, well, knowledge.

However, all this whiteness and maleness is, for some, terribly troubling. Among them, Associate Professor of Conservation Science, Ricardo Rocha:

Arguments against reforming biological nomenclature do not stand up to scrutiny.

Actually, and while I can claim no expertise, I’d guess that rewriting the entire scientific literature, in any number of countries, to alter thousands of obscure Latin names, which very few people know or remotely care about, in order to accommodate modern political fashion – which is what this is – might be rather impractical, somewhat confusing, and perhaps not the best use of limited resources.

Undeterred, our associate professor continues his tearful trajectory:

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Academia Anthropology Free-For-All Politics Pronouns Or Else

When Intellectuals Gather

March 13, 2023 88 Comments

To ruminate deeply on the issues of the day:

A crowd of jeering Stanford Law School students shouted down, yelled profanities and sexual mockery (“you can’t find the clit”) at Fifth Circuit Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan.

Stanford Law School Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, And Inclusion Tirien Steinbach then intervened – not to admonish the students, but to spend several minutes berating the Judge for having the audacity to appear at Stanford Law School, which was traumatic to the students given his conservative judicial decisions.

Among the Judge’s supposedly harmful and traumatising views are his belief that dysmorphic men and autogynephile perverts should not venture into ladies’ toilets and changing rooms, and a refusal to use the preferred pronouns of a transgender sex offender, an enthusiast of pornography featuring children.

Other screamed objections to this “cis-het white man” included the outrage of his being brought “into the classroom building where our students have to go every day to be able to get this degree and participate in this community.” Apparently, mere proximity – even sought-out proximity – to a person with whom they disagree causes students of law, would-be intellectuals, to “feel unsafe.” Demurral, it seems, results in “tearing the fabric of this community.” This, from students and staff who accused the Judge of “wanting an echo chamber.”

This all was performative. None of those protesting students were forced to go into the classroom holding the lecture, and they engaged in a ritual walkout after they had prevented the Judge from giving his prepared remarks.

Video of this performative, self-applauding wankery – by students and Ms Steinbach, a supposedly grown woman – can be found at the link above, with a longer version here.  Of the four university administrators present at the event – acting dean of student affairs Jeanne Merino, associate director of student affairs Holly Parish, student affairs coordinator Megan Brown, and Ms Steinbach – none saw fit to ask that the invited guest be allowed to actually speak.

Stanford, since you ask, is ranked the second most prestigious law school in the United States, with annual tuition a mere $66,000.

Update, via the comments:

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Academia Politics Problematic Competence

Elsewhere (316)

February 21, 2023 68 Comments

Ashlynn Warta on “diversity” versus competence:

[The proposal, by North Carolina Association of Colleges for Teacher Education,] would remove the exam that is currently used to determine whether a teacher candidate is prepared for teacher training. It would also eliminate the exam that is currently used to determine whether a candidate is qualified to teach in a classroom post-graduation. Why are education “experts” so adamant about removing these exams? The answer is unsurprising…

NCACTE recently explained its concerns about standardised tests, stating, “Entry and licensure exams serve as barriers to placing more teachers, particularly more diverse teachers, in classrooms.” In other words, NCACTE doesn’t believe that its “diverse” teacher candidates can succeed when faced with objective measures of preparedness.

Somewhat related, the third item here:

It is now illegal to use a math test to make sure that math teachers know the material they would be teaching.

There is a category tag – Problematic Competence – via which you can find many similar items.

Also related, Heather Mac Donald on the stupefying effects of “disparate impact” ideology:

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In which we marvel at the mental contortions of our self-imagined betters.