Stephen Beard on women in STEM, absent males and the Great Diversity Hustle: 

Most large organisations — certainly universities — now have Diversity Officers, Diversity Consultants and Women’s Officers. Many of these Officers and Consultants and the like have academic backgrounds in gender or women’s studies… Perhaps this is why diversity bosses have chosen to focus on the four areas in STEM [out of eight] where men still make up the majority, rather than education, where men make up less than 25% of undergraduate and post-graduate students. This is a much more alarming statistic, given that only one-in-four British primary schools have a single male teacher, and there are over a million children in the UK growing up without a father. With the possible detrimental effects of not having positive male role-models, this is a much more pressing issue than the concerns of middle-class academic women seeking special privileges in their career.

The STEM fields in which women outnumber men are, oddly enough, not deemed biased or bothersome. 

Kyle Brooks on competitive outrage on campus: 

The University of Wisconsin-Whitewater has been enmeshed in controversy over the last few weeks in the wake of its chancellor mistaking a photo of two white students donning beauty facial masks as blackface and falsely accusing the students of being “racist.” […] Since the incident – which one student activist labelled “Bloody Sunday” – the campus has hosted diversity forums at which students have accused the campus of being steeped in racism and suggested administrators are not doing enough about it. One Black Student Union member even told peers she missed several days of school because she was too distraught by the blackface picture to attend class.

Related, their failure to know stuff is entirely due to your racism: 

Protesters interrupted the University of Wisconsin system’s Board of Regents meeting for a third time last week, demanding the end of “blatantly oppressive” standardised testing.

You see, the student protestors are ethereal beings of exquisite sensitivity, such that they are emotionally crushed by any hint of mockery – say, when laughed at for gathering in a “healing circle” – and are rendered tearful and distraught by any testing of their abilities. Such as they might be.* 

And Andrew Follett on the “feminist glaciology” hokum recently doing the rounds: 

The University of Oregon historian who wrote a study claiming glaciers are sexist said in an interview on Friday that the general public isn’t educated enough about feminism to understand his research. In the interview, Dr Mark Carey claims that when his studies are “described to non-specialists, the research can be misunderstood and potentially misrepresented.” […] The research was financially supported by taxpayer dollars. The National Science Foundation (NSF) gave Carey a five-year grant to write his “feminist glaciology” paper. He has received a total of $709,125 in grants from the NSF, according to his curriculum vitae. Carey did not address the huge sum of money he received in the interview.

Feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments. It’s what these posts are for. [*Added via the comments.] 

Janice Fiamengo on complaints of “microaggression” and other recreational outrage:

Previously. And before that. 

Ace ruminates on leftist piety as a kind of status signalling: 

I’ve heard it called “Luxurious Concerns.” That is, your concerns mark your social status. If your concerns are about keeping your job, paying your rent, or whether your kids’ school is any damn good, you’re worried about Big Things, and therefore you are marked as a Struggling Person. Only those who have really made it — who are at the top of the economic and social order — have the luxury of worrying about the Small Things. And if you worry about the Very Small Things, or indeed the Microscopic Things, then, well and truly, you have arrived… If you can’t afford a Luxury Car, or a Luxury Apartment, you can at least adorn yourself with Luxury Worries. It’s very cheap. Easy, too… Our modern class of intellectually-insecure social climbers are posing as connoisseurs of offensiveness. 

See also Kristian Niemietz and Daniel Hannan on the same. 

The attempt to cultivate pretentious guilt and pretentious indignation, and to balance grief and umbrage on a very tiny thing, the tinier the better, is of course a Guardian staple. It gives the left’s national organ its distinctive tone – that tinny, unconvincing high-pitched whine. Affecting woe, especially improbable woe, is how many leftwing columnists signal their position in their own moral hierarchy, relative to you, the heathen rabble. As I said some time ago, 

It’s important to understand these are not just lapses in logic or random fits of insincerity; these outpourings are displays – of class and moral elevation. Which is why they persist, despite getting knottier and ever more absurd. Crudely summarised, it goes something like this: “I am better than you because I pretend to feel worse.” 

And this is why, for instance, a tearful Theo Hobson tells us, “There is no excuse for failing to feel liberal guilt about race and class.” Because until “this problematic world” has been purged of all vice and inequity, however unrelated to your own behaviour, a heavy, heavy heart must be worn on the sleeve. How else will people know how superior you are? According to Mr Hobson, if you aren’t ostentatiously fretting about the eating of meat and “affluent lifestyles endangering the planet,” and if you aren’t “anxious about your status as a comfy bourgeoisie” and ashamed of earning more than some other random person, then there must be something wrong with you. And so you should feel guilty for not feeling guilty about things you shouldn’t feel guilty about. It’s the Guardian way.

Lifted from the comments following this and somewhat pertinent, from the pages of the student newspaper of Brown University: 

“There are people breaking down, dropping out of classes and failing classes because of the activism work they are taking on,” said David, an undergraduate whose name has been changed to preserve anonymity. Throughout the year, he has worked to confront issues of racism and diversity on campus. His role as a student activist has taken a toll on his mental, physical and emotional health… David spent numerous hours organising demonstrations with fellow activists. Meanwhile, he struggled to balance his classes and social life with the activism to which he feels so dedicated. Stressors and triggers flooded his life constantly, he said.

Poor lamb. All those triggers. Perhaps someone should take our stressed-out little warrior to one side and explain to him, quite firmly, that neither his parents nor the taxpayer are forking out $60,000 a year for a narcissistic clown to piss about playing activist by railing against phantom “oppression” and non-existent “violence” in one of the most cosseting environments in human history.

Update:

Speaking of students who’d rather be acting out fantasies of oppression than preparing for exams, let’s not forget the Oberlin student activist Della Kurzer-Zlotnick, who was emotionally devastated by a two-letter word that was apparently unknown to her, and which she later described as “violent and triggering language.”

The word, by the way, was no.

No doubt inspired by this defining moment in intellectual discourse, Milo Yiannopoulos is continuing his tour of US campuses. Last night the venue was the University of Minnesota, where Milo was joined by Christina Hoff Sommers, whose work has been mentioned here previously, to have a debate optimistically titled Calm Down: Restoring Common Sense to Feminism. Needless to say, the event was lively, with several short-lived attempts at disruption, including chants of “You’re an asshole,” raised middle fingers, and repeated brandishing of air horns, including one, clutched by a male feminist, that failed to launch and instead emitted a feeble whine, much to the amusement of both speakers and the audience. 

I’d imagine full video of the event will materialise later today. Meanwhile, it’s perhaps worth pointing out that while the “social justice” protestors favoured the standard ritual of drowning out dissent with klaxons and repetitive shouted slogans that bordered on incomprehensible, those being protested against articulated a case, invited questions and had a discussion. 

Photo of the three wise men by Leila Navidi.

Update: Full video of the event is available here. The Q&A starts around 45:35. 

Oh, and filmed outside afterwards, Air Horn Warrior #2 (pictured above) shares his feelings with passers-by.