For newcomers, three more items from the archives:

Spooky Action.

Jim Schnabel’s charmingly bizarre film about Cold War research into extrasensory perception as a tool of espionage. By turns intriguing and hilarious.

Rebellion, Revisited. 

Classroom impropriety and the grooming of young minds.

Even if we set aside the not insignificant issue of whether professors of, say, literary criticism have any business trying to “win over” their students and mould their political outlook, reasonably or otherwise, there is another problem. Is the student-professor relationship sufficiently equal and reciprocal to ensure evidence and reason prevail? Is there no pressure on students to defer, to please? Can we simply assume that improper leverage will never be brought to bear – for instance, in terms of grading or more subtle signs of displeasure? And isn’t there an unavoidable air of… predation?

Infestation.

A Guardian writer asks, Am I Fit to Breed? Other, less hesitant souls long for human extinction.

Explore the greatest hits.

This is one for the “funny-but-actually-quite-mad” pile: 

The outbreak of swine flu should be renamed “Mexican” influenza in deference to Muslim and Jewish sensitivities over pork, said an Israeli health official Monday. Deputy Health Minister Yakov Litzman said the reference to pigs is offensive to both religions and “we should call this Mexican flu and not swine flu,” he told a news conference at a hospital in central Israel. Both Judaism and Islam consider pigs unclean and forbid the eating of pork products.

Let’s set aside for a moment objections that the virus in question – a mongrel strain of H1N1 – has more to do with pigs than with Mexico as a whole, or indeed with Mexicans, as some might infer from the suggested renaming. Let’s also set aside the fact the virus has been found in the US, Canada, Spain, New Zealand and the UK, and has genetic elements of at least three other animal flu viruses found in North America, Asia and Europe. Let’s put that out of our minds and grapple with the much more pressing issue: When did the mere “reference to pigs” – i.e. the word “swine” – become such a trial for the devout? Will the indignity never end? And is the aforementioned “sensitivity” something to do with the fact that transmission from pigs to humans suggests a genetic commonality of some kind? I think we should be told.

KC Johnson visits three academic conferences in search of real debate. What he finds isn’t encouraging:  

The second recent groupthink conference occurred at Duke, where several leading members of the Group of 88 – the professors who early in the lacrosse case publicly thanked protesters who had, among other things, urged castration of the lacrosse captains – hosted an academic conference on race in contemporary America. The very same people who got things spectacularly wrong in a high-profile case in their own backyard dealing with issues of race and politics offered their insights on “how modern racial prejudice shapes policy.”

In our increasingly multicultural society, such a conference topic might have provided an opportunity to bring together people with both innovative and widely disparate insights. Instead, the conference’s seven sessions (all but one of which was chaired by a Group member) featured little more than a recitation of the race/class/gender worldview dominant in most humanities departments today. Each session, moreover, began with an admonition against taping the panellists’ remarks: Group members apparently feared the possibility that their extremist ideas would be available beyond the campus walls.

Naturally, one of the panels – ponderously titled Race, Gender and Sexuality: Intersections on Multiple Dimensions – was to be moderated by the ever-moderate Wahneema Lubiano. Readers may recall Lubiano, a tenured professor at Duke, for her underwhelming scholarship and her conviction that “knowledge factories” and “engines of dominance” [i.e. universities] should be “sabotaged” – by people much like herself. The professor’s courses in “critical studies” and “race and gender” are construed in such a way that students can be told, “once white working class people learn that corporate capitalism is using racism to manipulate them, they will want to join with racially oppressed people against capitalism.” Professor Lubiano also says things like this: “Western rationality’s hegemony marginalizes other ways of knowing about the world” – a claim that suggests the West is somehow devoid of literature, art, music and film, despite being the foremost producer and consumer of such things.

Some background on other panellists, and their “diversity,” can be found here, along with an audience member’s notes on the content of the “debates.” Readers will be thrilled by the presence of Lani Guinier, a tenured professor at Harvard Law School and advocate of “critical thinking,” who insists that standardised testing is “racist” because “talent is equally distributed among all people.”

Via Critical Mass, here’s a short follow-up film on the indoctrination efforts of Delaware University’s ResLife programme – described by its proponents as a “treatment” – in which students were told, “The term [racist] applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality.” The film, embedded here in two parts, is aimed primarily at trustees and alumni, but it deserves wider attention.

Part 1: Wait for the marshmallow “oppression” story around 2:05.

Heather MacDonald takes a look at Victimology 101:

In December 2008, Yale University president Richard Levin announced a series of budget cuts to compensate for a 25 percent drop in the value of Yale’s endowment. This February, the university launched the Office of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Resources to provide support for Yale’s homosexual community. According to its director, the new office is intended to make the “University feel like a friendly place as opposed to an alien, hostile place” to gays. The recession, it appears, is going to have little impact on the academic culture of victimology and the ever-growing bureaucracy that supports it. The idea that Yale is an “alien, hostile place” to gays is one of those absurd conceits that could only be maintained in the alternative universe of academia. Yale students and faculty are undoubtedly the most tolerant, least homophobic people on Earth; Yale helped launch the field of gay studies three decades ago and has only increased its involvement since.

Ah, but the drama must go on indefinitely. That’s the whole point. A while ago, in a post on the academic radical, I noted a tendency towards escalation: 

The problem is that adversarial role-play 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.

Unsurprisingly, this appetite for grievance and indulgence has been exploited and internalised by many students, especially those entranced by tribal identities and the leverage those identities make possible. (Not least among those who believe we live in the 1950s.) MacDonald goes on to list Yale’s pandering to this particular tribe, including lectures, conferences, professorships, elaborate nondiscrimination policies, the establishment of a Lesbian and Gay Studies Centre, the hiring of “special assistants for LGBTQ issues,” oral history projects, “critical analysis of queer and normative sexualities,” the provision and subsidy of “safe spaces” for LGBTQ students, and courses in “music and queer identities” and “gender transgression.” She continues,

In light of this history, one might think it impossible to maintain that Yale needs a new LGBTQ office in order to “feel like a friendly place as opposed to an alien, hostile place” to gays. Especially since the director of that new office, Maria Trumpler, has already been serving as “special assistant to the deans for LGBTQ issues.” But Trumpler herself charges that Yale has heretofore failed to confer on gays the power to form a community. If you’re tempted to ask why students require administration backing in order to form a “community,” you don’t understand the co-dependent relationship between self-engrossed students and the adults whose careers consist of catering to that self-involvement. Students in today’s university regularly act out little psychodramas of oppression before an appreciative audience of deans and provosts. The essence of those psychodramas is to force the university to recognize a student’s narrowly defined “identity” through ever more elaborate bureaucratic mechanisms. Rather than laugh the student players off the stage, the deans, provosts, and sundry other administrators willingly participate in their drama, intently negotiating with them and conferring additional benefits wherever possible.

In other words, enabling, in the pejorative sense. Obviously, as a gay man, I too feel aggrieved and entitled. Entitled, that is, to say, “Get the hell over yourselves, you whiny, parasitic little bitches.”

Ahem. Take a few minutes to read the whole thing.