On grounds that acknowledging tardiness, misbehaviour and a lack of diligence results in “racial imbalance,” which, in the land of the bedlamites, simply won’t do.

And so, those sufficiently dense and inclined to antisocial behaviour will be given a license to disregard normal deadlines and to be selfishly disruptive, all with academic impunity. Why, it’s convenient and morally improving. Mr Patterson, an eleventh-grader who deploys the word inequities with dutiful enthusiasm, informs us, “Students all across the district are excited about this.”

You see, expecting students to meet basic standards of behaviour, punctuality, and, it seems, probity – say, resisting the urge to cheat – is “not fair,” according to San Diego Unified School District Vice President Richard Barrera, who adds that the new policy is – and I quote – “an honest reckoning.”

Indeed, we’re told that this self-satisfied obliteration of standards, all in the name of racial fairness, is “a change that’s been a long time in coming,” one that “reflects reality.”

Again, an intriguing choice of words.

“We are mindful that previous attempts at addressing such imbalances have not been successful,” says the professor. And so, rather than revisiting his own egalitarian assumptions regarding the distribution of interest, aptitude and talent, he and his team will be searching for witches and racial ectoplasm.

It’s not unreasonable to suppose that the role of “reverse mentor” will attract people already sympathetic to the hokum being peddled, and intrigued by the personal leverage it affords, and who may feel an ideological obligation to unearth some damning but invisible sin, fairly or otherwise, if only to validate their own conceits.

Which is to say, the so-called mentors – who’ve agreed to participate in a project that by definition assumes white guilt regardless of evidence or lack thereof – seem more likely to be racially bigoted than any random member of staff.

What’s objectionable, among so much else, is the conceit that these clowns, with their weird racial fixations, have any business at all probing the unconscious of staff based on their race and sex, their maleness and paleness, in order to find bigotry that they assume must exist solely because of their skin colour.

It seems to me that when you’re reduced to hunting for “unconscious bias,” as supposedly confirmed by a person’s preferred charity or the random positioning of a chair, then you’ve crossed a line into something approaching hysteria. And a license for malice.

Readers may also wonder how such exquisitely sensitive creatures will fare when faced with potential employers who may also be paler than themselves and, shockingly, not nineteen.

In short, the students are admitting, albeit unwittingly, that in fact they are the inflexible and bigoted ones, the ones preoccupied with racist and ageist stereotypes, and are incapable of feeling “comfortable” with people whose appearance differs from their own.

Because apparently that’s now the reason that museums exist.

Which seems to mean that we must all pretend that our islands’ population and cultural assumptions have always looked like those of, say, twenty-first century London, a city whose demographics bear little relationship to those of the country as a whole, even in the twenty-first century.

It occurs to me that notions of racial “representation” will likely be distorted by the embrace of rather parochial progressive conceits, and by proximity to the nation’s capital, which in my lifetime has gone from a native white-majority city, over 90%, to a native white-minority one, around 35%, and which is wildly out of step with the rest of the nation. Things that are denounced as “horribly white,” or whatever the current term of disapproval is, may not seem so to people who live in, say, Chesterfield or Plymouth…

But apparently, museum visitors must be warned that the sight of a Constable landscape may trigger TERRIFYING BLOOD AND SOIL TENDENCIES. Or at least inspire thoughts of historical attachment, continuity and belonging – thoughts that may be disconcerting or very much frowned upon, if only by the – wait for it – keepers of our heritage.

And so we have high-status cultural custodians whose traditional function is now merely an ostensible function, such that the kinds of appreciation and sense of historical connection that their predecessors sought to engender are now merely qualities to inhibit and subvert. The perversity of which is hard to overstate.

Says she, “My partner Brent and I had found out our child’s sex chromosomes in the early stages of my pregnancy, and we had seen their genitals during the anatomy scan. But we didn’t think that information told us anything about our kid’s gender.”

No, of course. No clues there. No information at all, in fact. Just random noise.

Needless to say, Ms Myers’ website and Twitter feed are an endless churn of unconvincing smiles and rather desperate progressive signalling. We learn, for instance, that “Knowing the sex of a baby… does not tell us anything about the child’s… attitudes toward climate change.”

We also learn that Ms Myers’ “environment” – by which I assume she means her home, social circle, academic workplace, and the leftist lifestyle-hustling circuit – is, “like yours, a patriarchy.” She just knows this, you see, by some paranormal means, and no evidence is forthcoming. Indeed, it seems there’s no expectation that evidence might be appropriate, for this and many other things.

Our author’s male partner, Brent, whose views aren’t deemed worthy of sharing, presumably agrees. If he knows what’s good for him.

Ruger’s improbable assertion echoed those of several students who would have us believe that Wax’s mere presence on campus is “physically and emotionally harming all of us.” And whose list of grievances included one student who resented the expectation that in order to win a debate, she “had to prove herself” – i.e., make a compelling argument – and another who was crushed by the suggestion that affirmative action policies can leave their supposed beneficiaries academically unprepared.

At which point, the word irony springs to mind.

So far as I can see, Professor Wax’s heretical comments – whether on the statistical benefits of bourgeois values, or on cultures of dysfunction, or on “equity” versus competence, or on her own students’ performance disparities and drop-out rates – have yet to be refuted by those trembling with indignation. They have, however, been denounced as “hate speech,” “racist,” “segregationist,” “white supremacy,” etc.

But if a person’s worldview and piety, and social standing, are based on a series of fairly obvious lies, they will tend to be touchy. This can, of course, be extrapolated to describe an institution, many institutions, an entire elite culture. Hence the bizarrely narrow range of permissible opinions, the unmentionable statistics, and the zeal with which transgressions are punished.

And when a teacher or grad student fails to convince a class and promptly blames that failure on some alleged-but-undemonstrated sexism or “weight stigma,” as if that were both obvious and the only conceivable explanation, this is not necessarily proof of injustice or unrecognised talent.

Likewise, when a grad student insists that the self-serving claims of self-defined victims, including her own, should not be questioned or verified, then this isn’t an obvious basis for respect or academic gravitas. Yet, says Ms Reidinger, “I tell students it isn’t the job of the marginalised to prove their marginalisation and that we must take the words of those who suffer discrimination as true and legitimate.”

In short, don’t question me.

This, we’re told, constitutes “critical thought.”

You see, being a grubby, antisocial prick and stealing from a library or grocery store is giving it to the man, man. An exercise in “radical ethics” and the “aesthetics of theft.”

At which point, readers are invited to imagine Dr Pugh being robbed in broad daylight – a bag-snatching or phone-snatching or possibly a mugging – and her subsequent search for some aesthetic in the experience.

“I’m a Starbucks barista at a drive-through,” says they. “I’ve de-escalated situations with people with guns… I’ve cooled shit down faster and better than a cop could.”

Readers are welcome to share clips of lively scenes to test this rather boastful hypothesis. It would, I think, have the makings of a compelling reality TV show. With preening, mouthy woke-lings encountering the realities they’ve so carefully ignored.

The subsequent tears and meltdowns could constitute a drinking game.

Even more frequent is use of the term “whiteness,” an alleged phenomenon on which the paper is premised. Though readers in search of some clear and convincing definition, or some compelling evidence of its existence, may find their hopes dashed. We are, however, assured that “whiteness” is something that gets in the way of black students “maintaining their Blackness.”

Readers will note how any feelings of incompetence and not being welcome are immediately blamed on external causes, on some ectoplasmic “whiteness,” that Befouler Of All Things. As if such feelings had nothing whatsoever to do with the choices and behaviour, and the personal shortcomings, of the students themselves.

Instead, Dr Jasien and her colleagues expect the teaching of mathematics to be driven by the goal of “healing… intellectual trauma,” by paying “attention to the minds and bodies of students.” The students being, it seems, much less obliged to pay attention to anything beyond themselves.

And so, we’re told that “exclamations” and “cacophony” are “to be both expected and valued.” Because when you picture a maths classroom and people getting to grips with differential equations or vector calculus, the first thing that springs to mind is the word cacophony.

So, to recap. Students must now be forewarned that Macbeth, a somewhat well-known tale of murder, includes scenes of blood and guilt – sorry, “psychological trauma.” And that Romeo and Juliet, one of the most famous tragedies in all of literature, contains, er, tragedy.

The modern sensibility, then, the approved outlook on things, is one in which we are to view cross-dressing perverts striding into schoolgirls’ changing rooms as in no way provocative or untoward, and regarding which one mustn’t bat an eye, while simultaneously trembling at the prospect of Shakespeare’s The Tempest containing dramatic approximations of bad weather.

A mindset in which almost any dramatic work that predates Instagram must now come with spoilers. Which does rather appear to defeat the object.

Says Ms Auken, “I don’t own anything. I don’t own a car. I don’t own a house. I don’t own any appliances or any clothes.” All these things, these beastly capitalist products, would be “free.”

And not yours.

Not to mention the endless manufactured congestion and astronomical parking fees, due to the council’s hostility to car ownership; the loss of tourism revenue as a direct result of these policies; countless failures to maintain simple infrastructure; and pavements overgrown with weeds to a degree that endangered the elderly and called to mind some dystopian science fiction.

And what every voter wants is a city councillor laughing at their frustration when trying to do formerly simple things. A frustration entirely the fault of said councillor’s own party and their bizarre policies. In this case, a policy based on a belief that when people go to the local dump – sorry, recycling centre – they do so by bicycle.

Readers are welcome to picture Brighton residents making three-mile journeys by pedal bike with old fridges and unwanted microwaves strapped to their backs.

But no, dear reader. How foolish you’ve been.

Apparently, these things constitute, not a basis for workplace success, but merely of “success in white male terms.” Which, we’re told, not only “limits white males’ ability to hear and understand others” and “dampens their curiosity,” but is also “devastating” to “people of colour, gays/lesbians, women, and non-Christians.”

You see, expectations of competence, “hard work” – and a concern for whether actions actually produce the desired result – these things are problematic and to be viewed with suspicion, and ultimately undermined. On grounds that they cause “people of colour” to “feel they are living out of context with who they really are.”

And we mustn’t forget the tale, via New York magazine, of the Brooklynite comedian and podcaster named Billy, his girlfriend Megan, and his girlfriend Megan’s other boyfriend Kyle. An exhaustingly self-consciousness three-way entanglement resulting in a series of grimly farcical situations that were framed, rather coyly, as “relationship difficulties.”

The above, I should add, was one of several attempts by New York magazine to portray unfaithfulness and cuckoldry, and the consequent anxieties, as the very zenith of a progressive lifestyle.

As when a betrayed husband, Michael Sonmore, boasted, unconvincingly, that he “finally became a feminist” thanks to his wife’s nocturnal sexual adventures with a chap named Paulo. A wife who was “embracing herself” and becoming empowered, we were told, while her children, aged six and three, wondered where their Mommy was.

Given the Guardian’s intense gravitational pull on certain kinds of stupid, it was perhaps inevitable that Dr Pitcher would find a welcome there. Now it turns out that squirrels are yet another proxy for “our” unspoken racial sentiment.

Our esteemed intellectual, who divines hidden racism by means of his third eye, is hurt by the avalanche of mockery aimed at his earlier pronouncements, claiming his words have been misconstrued, while also claiming that same derision proves him right, and while repeating the very claims that resulted in laughter.

He does, however, concede that “the uprooting of… Japanese knotweed is… not necessarily motivated by racist intent.”

Once some mental association has been discovered or contrived, everyone must act as if the innocuous object or action were in reality malicious and/or wounding, whatever the actual intention and regardless of how absurd and/or dishonest the claim of grievance is. Because whatever bizarre association of things is in the accuser’s head is assumed to be in everyone else’s head too.

Dr Golz and her peers are in effect saying to students, “You should want to be the guy who bitches about the rather unobvious racist subtext of party snacks. And if you do choose to behave that way, we’ll reward you and flatter you and make you feel important, while making other people jump through clown hoops to appease the feelings you pretend to have.”

And the more implausible and contrived the claim of victimhood is, the more status points accrue, on account of the complainant’s heightened sensitivity and supposed mental prowess. One has fathomed an injustice mere mortals cannot see. And bewildered onlookers are expected to pretend that this is a high and noble function of an academic institution.