Politics is important...

...Aristotle defined humans as essentially political because we live in groups and, in order to live in groups, we have to treat political issues as essential..

... but totalitarian politics - politics that pushes out everything not political - is dehumanizing.

//Like so many other areas of study, a consensus has been reached in English and Comparative Literature that the aims of one’s research should be about more than a body of knowledge or a disciplinary canon. Critique, as it is understood, is ultimately a criticism of the society (not the author) that produced a given text; all literary criticism reduces to social criticism. The contemporary literature professor need not even be an expert on any particular author or literary figure, but can be expected to be a master at applying a particular interpretive lens such as Queer Theory or Critical Race Theory.

The reality that the humanities and social sciences seem to be increasingly attracting one particular kind of person with one, very distinct, understanding of the world can be seen in other disciplines as well. Entire fields and subfields such as Diplomatic History and Military History are on the precipice of extinction, as more and more current and aspiring historians ignore or abandon these fields for the sexier (and more explicitly ideological) fields in Cultural and Social History.

What has happened in Literature and History departments as well as in other disciplines draws attention to something rarely considered in discussions concerning intellectual diversity in higher education. Conservatives will point to statistics such as the imbalance in the ratio between registered Democrats and Republicans as evidence of a political imbalance. Students it is argued are only getting one side of the story. While this sentiment is certainly understandable, it ignores an element of the current phenomena that might be even more deleterious to student learning and thus all the more intractable. The problem isn’t simply one of political imbalance, an absence of parity between Left and Right voices, but the extent to which humanities departments have become politicized.

The possibility that one might read a manuscript or approach a cultural or philosophical question from a perspective that isn’t explicitly political is now often dismissed as either naive or not worthwhile. In this way, the humanities have constructed a sort of ideological prison house for themselves. One of the most compelling features of humanistic study is the inexhaustibility of interpretations—the capacity to engage a text, a cultural practice, or an age-old philosophical question and derive new meanings and new possibilities from it. As the humanities have become subsumed into a larger political project, the possible interpretations that one may entertain have become narrowed to explicitly politicized readings.//

Academic Malpractice.

If colleges want to produce students with the virtues necessary to engage in the difficult practice of "public discourse" and even - perish the thought - share society with people they disagree with, then administrators and academics need to put away the virtue signaling and start modeling unemotional civil engagement, rather than demonstrating their real opinion that listening to the other side is a tasteless formality:

//The Speech President Patton Gave To Students

If there were any uncertainty about that, President Patton soon put it to rest. At seven minutes into the video, she took the stage and spoke for six and a half minutes. Let’s put this in present tense. Patton speaks in a somber tone, and is at pains to get across her own extreme reluctance to have Charles Murray on campus. Her points are:

Inclusiveness. “Thank you all—every single one of you—for being here.” Several times over the course of the next six minutes, Patton repeats a pledge of allegiance to diversity: “Middlebury is committed to unlocking the potential and brilliance of every student no matter their race, their class, their sexual orientation, their religious orientation, their disabled status, or any other demographic marker.”

Regret. “I’m here because if my schedule is free I always respond to the student requests.” Patton allows that college policy permits students and faculty freedom “to examine and discuss all questions of interest to them.” She sounds not one bit enthusiastic about this policy.

Repugnance. “I would regret it terribly if my presence here today, which is an expression of support I give to all students who are genuinely seeking to engage in a very tough public sphere, is read to be something which it is not: an endorsement of Mr. Murray’s research and writings. I will state here that I profoundly disagree with many of Mr. Murray’s views.”

Is every Middlebury student a repository of brilliance waiting to be unlocked? Presumably the Charles Murray of “The Bell Curve” would have doubts about that, as would anyone who takes the trouble to watch the 44-minute video, which serves as a pretty good illustration of what not-very-intelligent people look like when they succumb to a mob mentality. Patton’s list of the “demographic markers” she is eager to defend does not include political orientation. Indeed, she began her remarks by declaring, “Allow me to state the obvious. We are a left-leaning campus…”

Patton Didn’t Defend Free Expression—She Took Sides
Nowhere in her remarks was there any defense of the ideal of free expression on campus. She acknowledged that “college policy” left the door open to the American Enterprise Institute Club to invite Charles Murray, but Patton had nothing to say about why it was a good idea to let Murray or others not on the left speak.

Patton’s explicit and emphatic avowals of her disagreement with Murray were gratuitous. She cited none of his views and gave no reasons why she disagreed with those views. She merely took sides: siding with the protesters in their uninformed distaste for Murray, though not in their willingness to deny him a platform.

The underlying message to the students who showed up to protest was that President Patton felt the justice of their cause, but was determined to stick with college policy allowing controversial speakers to speak. Patton positioned herself almost identically to how Chancellor Nicholas Dirks at UC Berkeley had positioned himself prior to the Milo Yiannopoulos event. Dirks had likewise empathized his extreme dislike of the speaker’s views and his temperate allegiance to free speech.

If the left moves away from "identity liberalism", nothing but good will ensue.

Mostly, it will shred the curtain of self-constructed ignorance the educational system has substituted for actual knowledge.

//But the fixation on diversity in our schools and in the press has produced a generation of liberals and progressives narcissistically unaware of conditions outside their self-defined groups, and indifferent to the task of reaching out to Americans in every walk of life. At a very young age our children are being encouraged to talk about their individual identities, even before they have them. By the time they reach college many assume that diversity discourse exhausts political discourse, and have shockingly little to say about such perennial questions as class, war, the economy and the common good. In large part this is because of high school history curriculums, which anachronistically project the identity politics of today back onto the past, creating a distorted picture of the major forces and individuals that shaped our country. (The achievements of women’s rights movements, for instance, were real and important, but you cannot understand them if you do not first understand the founding fathers’ achievement in establishing a system of government based on the guarantee of rights.)//

Rust never sleeps; the Left never stops distorting. I cannot count the number of times that I've gone to the sources to find some truism of the Accepted Narrative is completely unhinged from What Actually Happened.

E.g., Hiss was guilty.

There were Communists and Communist spies in the American government and non-governmental organizations.

Communists killed millions.

We know this from Communist sources. This pithy quote sums up my conclusion:

"I guess I can start out by observing that progressive scholarship really isn't scholarship in the traditional sense of the word, by which I mean the production and subsequent increase of human knowledge and, indirectly, the distribution of its benefits. Instead, progressive scholarship is simply progressives fleshing out and expanding upon the various bullshit narratives they've invented."

Surviving your Obama-prepared grownchildren this Thanksgiving.

Some tips:

//Fake Statistics. It was my old friend Boston Irish who alerted me to this ticklish little trope, when he observed that no matter how absurd the statistic you proposed to a progressive, if that statistic seemed to call attention to whatever bugaboos xhe was excited about, xhe would respond with a gushing "I know, right?!"

He demonstrated this to me at a party by interrupting a couple of liberals talking, and announcing to them:

"You know, based on current statistics, in ten years, the entire state of California will be homeless."

"Right! I know!" came the response.

By the way, that is not schtick. That is not a joke written for this blogpost. I was really there, he really said that, that really happened.

After having secured the agreement to his obviously-crank "statistics," he turned to me with a slightly arched eyebrow and sipped his beer in quiet triumph.//

Reminds me of the time, Jim Druley​ and I were listening to a post-op transgender at a book  club explain that a woman's normal attraction to a man had "nothing' to do with gender.

Jim: "So you're saying that a woman's attraction to a man has nothing to do with her gender?"

P-O TG: "Yes, that's right."

Woman in book club audience: "Oh, that's so interesting!  I'm learning so much!"

Neither P-O TG or the woman in the audience picked up on Jim's philosophically-informed essentialist sarcasm.

Orwell goes to College.

University of Minnesota rejects 9/11 Remembrance because it might incite racism.

//Welcome to college in 2015, where it's somehow problematic to acknowledge and remember victims of a terrorist attack. (While many schools participate in some form of the Young America's Foundation's 9/11: Never Forget Project, there were no such memorials on the U's campus.)

To play devil's advocate, today's entering freshmen class was born in 1997 and likely doesn't remember the September 11 attacks. Still, this doesn't excuse the rejection of a resolution to remember the day that nearly 3,000 innocent people were murdered. It is not Islamophobic or racist to pause and reflect on a day that fundamentally changed the country. If 3,000 people were killed in attack committed by white militant Presbyterians (or some other denomination), there would still be nationwide shock, outrage, sadness, and remembrance on the anniversary of the date. The victims of 9/11 aren't remembered because they were killed by Muslims--they are remembered because they were killed by terrorists, who happened to be Muslim.//

Why are our college students a bunch of ignorant whiners?

Maybe it is their teachers' fault.

I guess “Let’s Hug It Out, Bitch” is one option if you can’t do calculus and aren’t interested in a serious subject like history. The astonishing thing is that Professor Click collects money from various sources to support her “research.” E.g.:

Women’s and Gender Studies Faculty Research and Creative Activities Grant, University of Missouri. Awarded to support research on readers’ reactions to the messages in the Fifty Shades of Grey book series. April 2013.

Richard Wallace Faculty Incentive Grant, University of Missouri. Awarded to support research on readers’ reactions to the messages in the Fifty Shades of Grey book series. April 2013.

From Fifty Shades of Grey to Thomas the Tank:

A&S Alumni Organization Faculty Incentive Grant, University of Missouri. Awarded to support initial research on the PBS children’s series Thomas the Tank Engine. February 2010.

If you put a gun to my head and made me read one or the other–Fifty Shades of Grey orThomas the Tank Engine–I would go with Thomas. I do wonder, however, what the feminist angle on Thomas the Tank could possibly be.

Ms. Click gets around. I have no idea what this conference presentation was about, but she delivered it in Minneapolis, my home town:

Click, M. A. (1999, October). Who dunnit?: The utility of theorizing (in)visible identities in feminist action. Paper presented at the Second Biennial Feminism(s) and Rhetoric(s) Conference, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.

There is much more, but you get the drift. This is a large part of what “higher” education is all about these days. No wonder students don’t seem to know anything. One possible benefit of the scandals that have emerged in recent days at Yale and the University of Missouri is that they might lift the lid on the real scandal: the stupidity of much of what passes for a college education.

Thoughtcrime must be punished.

Take this professor to Room 101 until he loves Big Brother!

High School student debunks history professor ...

...which is probably more likely all the time as ideology is more important than scholarship.

The issue was whether the canard about anti-Irish prejudice in America was true.  The professor claimed that the signs reading "No Irish Need Apply" never existed, and that the story was an urban legend arising from Irish-Americans with chips on their collective shoulders.

As with other confidently stated claims, I bought this one too.

It turns out that the high school student unearthed all kinds of evidence of "NINA" advertisements and signs.

Professional scholarship - it doesn't mean what you think it means.

We are far beyond the ability of mortals to parody leftist academia.

Naked final examination at UC San Diego sparks outrage.

Academic Malpractice - Celebrity Academics

This seems to explain Bart Ehrman, who is winsome and entertaining, but as intellectually dishonest as they come.

Academic malpractice

The Wall Street Journal reports on how a college president made the mistake of provoking a conservative philanthropist:

The Klingenstein report nicely captures the illiberal or fallacious aspects of this campus doctrine, but the paper's true contribution is in recording some of its absurd manifestations at Bowdoin. For example, the college has "no curricular requirements that center on the American founding or the history of the nation." Even history majors aren't required to take a single course in American history. In the History Department, no course is devoted to American political, military, diplomatic or intellectual history—the only ones available are organized around some aspect of race, class, gender or sexuality.

One of the few requirements is that Bowdoin students take a yearlong freshman seminar. Some of the 37 seminars offered this year: "Affirmative Action and U.S. Society," "Fictions of Freedom," "Racism," "Queer Gardens" (which "examines the work of gay and lesbian gardeners and traces how marginal identities find expression in specific garden spaces"), "Sexual Life of Colonialism" and "Modern Western Prostitutes."

Regarding Bowdoin professors, the report estimates that "four or five out of approximately 182 full-time faculty members might be described as politically conservative." In the 2012 election cycle, 100% of faculty donations went to President Obama. Not that any of this matters if you have ever asked around the faculty lounge.

"A political imbalance [among faculty] was no more significant than having an imbalance between Red Sox and Yankee fans," sniffed Henry C.W. Laurence, a Bowdoin professor of government, in 2004. He added that the suggestion that liberal professors cannot fairly reflect conservative views in classroom discussions is "intellectually bankrupt, professionally insulting and, fortunately, wildly inaccurate."

Perhaps so. But he'd have a stronger case if, for example, his colleague Marc Hetherington hadn't written the same year in Bowdoin's newspaper that liberal professors outnumber conservatives because conservatives don't "place the same emphasis on the accumulation of knowledge that liberals do."

How could this possibly be true?

According to this interesting article:

"Even more worrisome, the National Center for Education Statistics has found that nearly 70 percent of college graduates could not correctly perform basic tasks like comparing opposing editorials. And Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa's recent work, Academically Adrift, found startlingly low gains in students' critical thinking, complex reasoning, and communication skills. Given these findings, it seems clear that the function of grades in meaningfully differentiating student learning has eroded."

70%?!?!?

Is this true? 

I am a little skeptical since this may be something ginned up to start a panic to funnel more money into academia, but if it is true, it says that we've wasted a lot of money for a long time.

How much of science is a poker game where everyone is afraid to call?

Peer-reviewed mathematics journal accepts paper published by a computer-generated nonsense phrase generator.

When Alan Sokal tricked Social Text into publishing a nonsensical parody of postmodernist criticism, he thought the journal’s failure to spot that the article was a hoax revealed a shocking lack of intellectual rigour. John Sturrock, writing about it in the LRB, noted that Social Text exists in a different realm of discourse from Nature and that Sokal’s contribution, for all its faults, was a ‘jauntily expressed’ piece of ‘extreme provocation’, and as Sokal knew, the kind of thing that Social Text existed to promote. Well yes, but, as legions of letter writers responded, don’t things you publish sort of have to make sense?

Last month That’s Mathematics! reported another landmark event in the history of academic publishing. A paper by Marcie Rathke of the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople had been provisionally accepted for publication in Advances in Pure Mathematics. ‘Independent, Negative, Canonically Turing Arrows of Equations and Problems in Applied Formal PDE’ concludes...

...Baffled? You should be. Each of these sentences contains mathematical nouns linked by the verbs mathematicians use, but the sentences scarcely connect with each other. The paper was created using Mathgen, an online random maths paper generator. Mathgen has a set of rules that define how papers are arranged in sections and what kinds of sentence make up a section and how those sentences are made up from different categories of technical and non-technical words. It creates beautifully formatted papers with the conventional structure, complete with equations and citations but, alas, totally devoid of meaning. Nate Eldredge – the blogger behind That’s Mathematics! – wrote Mathgen by adapting SCIgen, which does something similar for computer science. Papers generated by SCIgen have been accepted for publication at academic conferences and journals that claim to carry out peer review.

There is this hopeful note of sanity:

Neither Marcie Rathke nor the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople is willing to pay the ‘processing charges’ levied by Advances in Pure Mathematics, so we will never know if the work would actually have made it to publication. Academic journals depend on peer review to ensure the rigour and value of submissions. The less prestigious the journal, the harder it is to find competent reviewers and the lower they will have to set the threshold, until at some point we arrive at, essentially, accept-all-comers vanity publishing. The murkier the business model and the lower the standards outside the mainstream, the harder it is for academics to challenge the status of the prestige journals, locking academics into the situation Glen Newey describes.

American Psychological Association captured by gay rights movement...

...during which the APA stopped standing for science rather than politics.

Well, duh.

Dr. Nicholas Cummings, who supports gay marriage, and is the former president of the APA, sounds like an old style liberal who thinks that people should be allowed to disagree, something he says is no longer permitted in the APA.

A former president of the American Psychological Association (APA), who also introduced the motion to declassify homosexuality as a mental illness in 1975, says that the APA has been taken over by “ultraliberals” beholden to the “gay rights movement,” who refuse to allow an open debate on reparative therapy for homosexuality.

Dr. Nicholas Cummings was President of the APA from 1979 to 1980, and also served as a member of the organization’s Council of Representatives. He served for years as Chief of Mental Health with the Kaiser-Permanente Health Maintenance Organization, and is the author of the book “Destructive Trends in Mental Health: The Well-Intentioned Path to Harm.”

In an interview with representatives of the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH) in late April, Cummings said that the organization’s problems began with the rejection of the Leona Tyler Principle, which required that all public positions of the APA be supported by scientific evidence.

The APA “started changing pretty drastically by the late 1980s,” said Cummings. “By the mid 1990s, the Leona Tyler principle was absolutely forgotten, that political stances seemed to override any scientific results. Cherry-picking results became the mode. The gay rights movement sort of captured the APA.”

Cummings says that the movement for “diversity” in the APA, which he endorsed, had resulted in a lack of diversity regarding heterosexuals.

“If I had to choose now, I would see a need to form an organization that would recruit straight white males, which are underrepresented today in the APA,” he said.

And, incidentally, he says that unbiased, open research on homosexuality was never done.

Check out the video of Dr. Cumming's interview:

A rare moment of sanity at UCLA.

UCLA profs refuse to implement a rule requiring students to take leftist course to prop up leftist academia:

Perhaps I’m reading too much into this, but I think something remarkable occurred at UCLA last week. By a vote of 56%-44%—almost double the margin of Scott Walker’s recent recall-election victory—the UCLA faculty rejected a proposed “Community and Conflict in the Modern World” general-education requirement.

The proposal would have required each UCLA student to take a class that examines “community and conflict.” Although the proposal did not precisely define “community and conflict,” it listed a set of sample courses that would satisfy the requirement. Approximately half of those courses were taught by one of the “studies” departments—e.g. African American Studies, Chicano Studies, Asian American Studies, Labor and Workplace Studies, American Indian Studies, etc. Almost all of the remaining half would naturally fit in one of the “studies” departments.

Burn the Heretic!

John M Ellis, Professor Emeritus of German Literature at UC Santa Cruz, and President of the California Association of Scholars, s saying something that could lead to his auto-de-fe:

When Naomi Schaefer Riley was fired by the Chronicle of Higher Education for her trenchant remarks on Black Studies programs, most of those who criticized the firing saw in it a display of the campus left's intolerance. Fair enough, but this episode also has a much broader meaning.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, large populations of poor immigrants arrived in the U.S.--Irish, Italians, and Jews from Russia and Poland. Their extreme poverty placed them at the bottom of the social ladder, and they were often treated with contempt. Yet just a few generations later they were assimilated, and their rapid upward social mobility had produced mayors, senators, judges, and even Presidents from among their ranks. None of this could have happened without first-rate public education.

To be sure, they worked hard to get ahead, but they were not obstructed by something that afflicts the have-nots of today: as they walked through the school gates they were not met by people intent on luring them into Irish or Italian Studies programs whose purpose was to keep them in a state of permanent resentment over past wrongs at the hands of either Europeans or establishment America. Instead, they could give their full attention to learning. They took courses that informed them about their new land's folkways and history, which gave them both the ability and the confidence needed to grasp the opportunities it offered them.

When we compare this story with what is happening to minority students today, we see a tragedy. Just as Pinocchio went off to school with high hopes, only to be waylaid by J. Worthington Foulfellow, minority students are met on the way to campus by hard-left radicals who claim to have the interests of the newcomers at heart but in reality prey on them to advance their own selfish interests. Of course, what black students need is the same solid traditional education that had raised Irish, Italians, and Jews to full equality. But that would not serve the campus radicals' purpose. Disaffected radicals wanted to swell the ranks of the disaffected, not the ranks of the cheerfully upward mobile. Genuine progress for minority students would mean their joining and thus strengthening the mainstream of American society--the mainstream that campus radicals loathe.

Faculty radicals worked hard to put the kind of coursework that had served others so well out of the reach of minority students. They stigmatized those courses as Eurocentric, oppressive, and dominant-class oriented, and they worked successfully to remove them from curricular requirements. The very idea of upward mobility was made to appear a capitulation to the corrupt value system of the dominant class.

As thinkers, campus radicals are poor role models for students. Their ideas are simple and rigid, and they rely heavily on conspiracy thinking that infers far too much from too little. They are powered by emotional commitments that are highly resistant to the lessons of experience. As a result, their cherished ideas are now virtually obsolete, and strike any reasonably well-informed observer as downright silly. The minority students that they attract into their orbit are dragged down to this low intellectual level.

This background is the key to the fury that Naomi Schaefer Riley¹s criticisms of Black Studies dissertations unleashed. Radical leftists have achieved considerable influence on campus in part because they were able to add substantial numbers of incoming minorities to their numbers. They need those students in self-destructive Black Studies courses that keep them resentful and under-educated. But that is only possible if they can maintain the illusion that they help and support black students, rather than exploiting them. Ms Schaefer Riley was a threat to that illusion, and that is why she was attacked so vehemently.

Black Studies does have one thing right: black students are indeed oppressed. What they have wrong is who is doing the oppressing. People of good-will on both sides of the political aisle should join together to insist that black students be given the same chance that other groups got to join the mainstream. This latest version of the plantation ought to be abolished.