Amber Athey notes another data point in the decline of academia: 

A University of Arizona classroom dialogue guide encourages professors to use the “Oops/ouch method,” where students who are offended in class say “ouch” and the offender responds with “oops.”

Apparently, the way to “maximise free speech in the classroom” is to “create a safe space” in which pantomime ensues, and by advising faculty that “microaggressions,” even those on unrelated matters in personal conversations, should be “interrupted” – and interrupted “immediately” – as being “harmful to the classroom environment.” When not eavesdropping on private conversations and offering unsolicited correction, faculty are advised by the guide to be on the look-out for a range of classroom “challenges” and “cultural misunderstandings,” including:    

A heterosexual student claiming that LGBTQIA+ individuals do not have the right to exist.

Because, obviously, that must happen all but daily on a politically correct campus. And,

A white student threatening an African American student over views on affirmative action.

Other forbidden behaviours include acknowledging in class that illegal immigrants have in fact broken the law, or using gendered metaphors in descriptions of atoms, or “questioning the credibility and validity” of (certain) students’ accounts of an event, even if one has contradictory information. “Feelings,” at least those of some students, must not be “nullified.”

Curiously, all of the examples given, and they are numerous, assume that only members of Designated Victim Groups will ever be on the receiving end of “problematic behaviour.” There is no guideline for how to deal with, say, opportunist and vindictive accusations of racism or “privilege,” or attempts to denigrate straight, white male students as inherently ignorant and oppressive, which are hardly inconceivable in an environment where “microaggressions” are regarded as a pressing issue, and where students with brown skin are deemed, automatically and by default, victims of “institutional discrimination” and therefore in need of collective “validation.”

The College Fix reports on a daring breakthrough in educational standards: 

The New York State Board of Regents will consider tomorrow whether to go with a task force’s recommendation to scrap a teacher literacy exam known as the Academic Literacy Skills Test. “Part of the reason,” NBC New York reports, is because “an outsized percentage of black and Hispanic candidates were failing it.” It is expected the Board will abandon the assessment.

Because expecting educators to be even nominally competent is so Twentieth Century.

Victor Davis Hanson on politics and incompetence: 

Former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg used to offer all sorts of cosmic advice on the evils of smoking and the dangers of fatty foods and sugary soft drinks. Bloomberg also frequently pontificated on abortion and global warming, earning him a progressive audience that transcended the boroughs of New York. But in the near-record December 2010 blizzard, Bloomberg proved utterly incompetent in the elemental tasks for which he was elected: ensuring that New Yorkers were not trapped in their homes by snowdrifts in their streets that went unploughed for days. The Bloomberg syndrome is a characteristic of contemporary government officials. When they are unwilling or unable to address pre-modern problems in their jurisdictions — crime, crumbling infrastructure, inadequate transportation — they compensate by posing as philosopher kings who cheaply lecture on existential challenges over which they have no control.

John Ellis on why the National Endowment for the Arts is a bad thing: 

From the organisation’s website, “The NEA is an independent federal agency that funds, promotes, and strengthens the creative capacity of our communities by providing all Americans with diverse opportunities for arts participation.” That mission statement prompts a few questions… How does creating a false market for art promote and strengthen creative capacity? The NEA model artificially props up mostly unwanted markets by using tax dollars that get funnelled through inefficient and wasteful bureaucracies… Artificially propping up an unwanted market does not benefit the arts. It does benefit the people who work in the NEA office and the many local organisations that help funnel taxpayers’ money to arts organisations, though. What it does to the arts is create a marketplace that supports bad art.

See also this. 

And Anthony Gockowski spies a terribly radical approach to being terribly radical: 

Let’s say I assess your ‘unconscious bias’ and give you a diagnosis. Well, there’s no evidence that it predicts your behaviour. So what good is it? Well, it’s good if you want people to send you to ‘retraining’ exercises so that you can have your perceptions adjusted in the direction that your organisation thinks is proper. And that’s happening. It’s becoming mandatory… But there’s no evidence whatsoever that ‘unconscious bias’ retraining programmes have the effect they’re supposed to have, and there’s some evidence that they actually have the reverse effect. And maybe that’s because people don’t really like being marched off to re-education by their employers after they’ve been ‘diagnosed’ as racist, even if there’s no evidence that they in fact are. It’s an absolute misuse of psychology. It’s an assault on freedom.

Dr Jordan Peterson, filmed at Ryerson University, chats about the ideological corruption of social psychology. 

Note that Dr Peterson’s talks are being denounced in advance - as “dangerous,” “hateful” and “white male arrogance” – by left-leaning umbrage-takers, most of whom claim, piously and repeatedly, to value “diversity” and “alternative views,” while trying to get Peterson’s talks cancelled or forcibly disrupted.

Chap rotates his own feet 157 degrees. // More tongue than is decent. // “Mr Estala appeared to be intoxicated.” // Libation station. // Oil-absorbent material of note. // Organ relocation during pregnancy. // Globe-making of yore. // Smart glasses with liquid lenses. // Starfleet spacecraft comparison. His looks bigger than yours. // At last, an assault trombone. // Robot pianist. I said pianist. // 3D-printed housing. (h/t, Dr W) // Corked honey. // Headline of note. // “Antarctica’s best cuisine, with fine wines and seven-course lunches on Sundays.” // Frankly, I’ve been to worse gigs. // Phones from antiquity. // If you get pulled over, this will be the new sobriety test. // Doctor Strange reversed. In which time takes one for the team. // And finally, reassuringly, a bedtime tale.

Attention, all you white women:

If you didn’t create the culture as a coping mechanism for marginalisation, take off those hoops[;] if your feminism isn’t intersectional, take off those hoops[;] if you try to wear mi cultura when the creators can no longer afford it, take off those hoops[;] if you are incapable of using a search engine and expect other people to educate you, take off those hoops[;] if you can’t pronounce my name or spell it, take off those hoops.

So rants Ms Alegria Martinez, a member of the Latinx Student Union at Pitzer College, Claremont, California, in a campus-wide email. When not struggling with oppressive punctuation, Ms Martinez spends her time fretting about the fact that she and her peers are “not taken seriously” as the radical titans they so obviously are. According to fellow umbrage-taker Jacquelyn Aguilera, who also emailed the entire campus, “winged eyeliner, lined lips, and big hoop earrings” are “an everyday act of resistance” by the brown and virtuous, “especially here at the Claremont Colleges.”

Where students are forking out $60,000 a year in the hope of being terribly downtrodden. Possibly by the pool:

Update, via the comments:

Alice adds,

Some people want childhood to last 70 years.

Well, if you want to see evidence of maturity and self-possession, the Pitzer College Media Studies department, where Ms Martinez spends her time and some poor sucker’s money, probably isn’t the first place to look. And I think that, for many, that’s the tacit appeal of identitarian wokeness – it’s a chance to defer adult norms and an excuse to act out pretentious, inchoate tantrums. But it is a strange thing, this combination of assumed superiority and infantile emoting. Remember, Ms Martinez and Ms Aguilera emailed the entire campus, repeatedly and quite vehemently, with their views on hooped earrings and who should be allowed to wear them.

As sane people do.

And for a little perspective, it’s just occurred to me that when one of my nieces was the same age as these ladies, she was raising money for charity by trekking across the Sahara Desert. I doubt that hooped earrings and lip-liner, and who may or may not wear them, were foremost in her mind.

Commenter [+] quips,

Ain’t no privilege like victim privilege.

It does, I think, take a particular chutzpah to publicly claim to be oppressed – by other people’s earrings – while spending more than the median household income at a glorified holiday resort.

Dave Huber reports from the other side of the looking glass, where wide-eyed students are told,

A degree in Women’s and Gender Studies prepares you for almost anything.

“I do have skills,” says one graduate, rather defensively, “I do have a college degree that is meaningful.” I do, I do, I do.

Readers are invited to listen attentively for the imminent economic boom triggered by the ongoing oversupply of gender studies graduates. 

Lifted from the comments, more progressive intellectualism at Middlebury College, where female staff get assaulted by students wearing masks, and elderly scholars get chased off campus: 

College public safety officers managed to get Professor Allison Stanger and Charles Murray into the administrator’s car. “The protestors then violently set upon the car, rocking it, pounding on it, jumping on and trying to prevent it from leaving campus,” said Bill Burger, the college’s vice president for communications and marketing. “At one point a large traffic sign was thrown in front of the car. Public Safety officers were able, finally, to clear the way to allow the vehicle to leave campus,” said Burger. “During this confrontation, one of the demonstrators pulled Professor Stanger’s hair and twisted her neck,” Burger continued. “She was attended to at Porter Hospital later and is wearing a neck brace.”

Note that the rather animated protestors don’t seem too familiar with Dr Murray’s research and commentary, and as one of Middlebury’s sociology professors noted, “few, if any” of the protestors had ever read Murray’s books. Evidently, he’s nonetheless someone to be ‘othered’ and to whom the students can attach the usual out-group labels – denouncing him as “sexist,” “racist,” “anti-gay” and a “white nationalist.” (As even the briefest use of Google would reveal, Murray married a Thai woman while in the Peace Corps, has mixed-race children, has tutored inner-city black children for free, and was an early advocate of gay marriage – hardly the most obvious markers of a supposedly anti-gay white nationalist.)

Regular readers will no doubt register the irony that, if you wanted to witness some overt racial zealotry, you’d be much more likely to find it among supposedly ‘progressive’ students – say, the ones assaulting their peers or obstructing their path and making them walk through mud for the sin of being white, or grabbing women’s hair and yanking really hard.

I see no reason to suppose that the mob delinquency illustrated above, examples of which seem to be escalating in frequency and vehemence, will spontaneously improve or cease to be fashionable without some quite significant external pressure. Those directly responsible, and their faculty cheerleaders, show no sign of becoming ashamed any time soon. If their behaviour and assumptions are to change, I suspect it will have to cost them, dearly. And whether there are arrests and/or expulsions following this latest thuggish farce will tell us quite a bit about academia’s ongoing decay.

Update:

And here’s an extract from Dr Murray’s own account of what happened at Middlebury: 

We walked out the door and into the middle of a mob. I have read that they numbered about twenty. It seemed like a lot more than that to me, maybe fifty or so, but I was not in a position to get a good count. I registered that several of them were wearing ski masks. That was disquieting.

Meanwhile, at Scripps College – a liberal arts college for young ladies, in Claremont, California, and where annual tuition is close to $50,000 – you must also pay to be scolded as racist and oppressive, by dint of having questions and simply being white:

Campus resident assistants at the school are hanging up two sets of posters titled “Emotional Labour 101”: one for whites, and another for minorities, whom the posters dub as “victims of emotional labour.” Both posters define “emotional labour” as having to exert energy “for the purpose of addressing people’s feelings, educating, making people comfortable, or living up to ‘social expectations.’”

You see, inculcating pretentious guilt, and then exploiting it, is terribly exhausting. And having to deal with “microaggressions,” like being disagreed with, or being asked questions you can’t answer in a sufficiently self-flattering manner, is way too much like hard work. And so, students with That Magic Brown Skin™ are encouraged to demand compensation from their paler peers for the “mental toll” of having to explain why everyone else is racist and should shut the hell up:

“Charge for your services,” the poster suggests. “If you’ve decided you’re going to do it, at least get paid.”

Those deemed sufficiently brown – and therefore by default morally superior and emotionally fragile – are cautioned to “avoid overexertion” when “educating” their paler, less enlightened classmates. “The burden does not rest on your shoulders,” declares the poster. “You don’t owe anyone anything at the expense of your mental health.” The instructional posters are, however, rather less indulgent of students of pallor, who are warned to consider how “people of colour” – who, despite such pampering are apparently “a marginalised group” – are being fatigued by any questioning of their claims. “Be mindful of your place and position,” reads the Guide For White Students, before suggesting that the melanin-deficient should offer financial compensation, “take ownership for the harm you caused” and “think about social justice issues.” 

Sadly, there’s no mention of any financial compensation for white students who are continually being told, by so-called educators, that they’re inherently oppressive and therefore bad people who should feel ashamed. It seems that this ‘microaggression’ business only works one way.  

Previously. Related. 

Bloody typical. // That’s a big one. // One sweaty fingertip. // That one-hour-ten-minute Phil Collins drum fill you’ve always wanted. // Ten hours of Arctic ambience. // This used to be a cement factory. // A Canadian imam shares his piety. // Causality is a game. // US presidents and their legacies of debt. // On the origins of cutlery. // Could a single marine unit destroy the Roman Empire? // Cars that never made it. // Multitasking. // So just how strong is Captain America? // Thomas Sowell on Marxism and its defects. // And on achievement and its particulars as mere “privilege.” // A pinhole camera made from drinking straws. // A mugshot of the inventor of the mugshot. // Thing is, Ridley, I think we’ve seen it all before. // All bark. // And finally, “Nobody was injured.”

I’ve been in and out of higher education for over seven years now.

Well, there’s your problem.

I feel more comfortable there than I do in the workforce,

And there it is again.

but there are still many issues with academia that make me uncomfortable.

But of course. The author of this piece, Everyday Feminism’s Celia Edell, a “feminist philosopher interested in social justice,” wants to reveal to us the pressures of unrelenting sexism in higher education: 

I know I’m making my way into a field that is, as a whole, less than welcoming to gender minorities like women.

Women are apparently a gender minority. I’ll give you a second to chew on that one. We’ll just skip over the preferential hiring of women across much of academia, including in departments of philosophy, and the fact that women earn a majority of both Bachelors and Masters degrees. 

My experience with sexism in academia has been that I am more often questioned about my knowledge and ability by male peers and, now that I am TAing [i.e., a teaching assistant], by my male students too.

If true, this may not be entirely unrelated to the fact that Ms Edell’s article contains so many statements of the bizarre – such as women constituting a “gender minority” in an environment where female students typically outnumber male students by quite some margin – along with numerous falsehoods, including the assertion that women “make 78 cents for every dollar a man makes.” A claim that has been debunked repeatedly and at length. 

I still feel silenced in a class of men. I feel like the boys I teach don’t take me as seriously as they would a male TA.

As ladies on the right report such difficulties much less often, perhaps the issue is not that Ms Edell is a woman being assailed by The Patriarchy and its all-pervasive sexism, even in one of the most scrupulously PC environments on Earth. Maybe it’s just the kind of woman she is. One who, in the very same article, tells us that she suffers from “imposter syndrome” and struggles to sound confident and knowledgeable when voicing her thoughts in public. And at risk of sounding shallow, I doubt that her retro-ironic Far Side glasses and randomly changing hair colour convey much in the way of gravitas. And referring to “white men” as inherently privileged or in some way problematic – no fewer than three times – probably isn’t helping on that front either.

Ms Edell’s ruminations have entertained us before.