Category: Seen On Campus

Observations from an elderly student

Incomprehensible Witch

Freaks & Loonies, Seen On Campus

Over at Taki’s place, Ted Dalrymple takes aim (metaphorically speaking;  he’s a Brit) at some total loony university professor:

Professor MacCormack’s book defeated me, not only sapping my will to read further but inducing a state almost of catatonia.  It certainly cured me, at least temporarily, of my obsessional desire to finish any book that I have started.  Her style made  The Critique of Pure Reason  seem as light and witty as  The Importance of Being Earnest.  She appears to think that the English plural of manifesto is manifesti rather than manifestos;  I admit that it conjured up in my mind a new Italian dish, gnocchi manifesti.
Open the book at any page and you will find passages that startle by their polysyllabic meaninglessness combined with the utmost crudity.  By chance, I opened the book to page 144 and my eye fell on the following:

The multiplicity of becoming-cunt as an assemblage reassembles the tensors upon which it expresses force and by which force is expressed upon its various planes and dimensions.

And Dalrymple notes:

I have known deteriorated schizophrenic patients to speak more sensibly and coherently than this.

No kidding.  Let’s take a look at this paragon of literacy, shall we?

…and not in drag:  

This Oz bint is, and I quote:  “a professor of continental philosophy at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, England” (whatever “continental philosophy” may be).  Also, Anglia Ruskin University is not part of Cambridge University, but a separate school with campuses scattered across several towns, Cambridge being but one of them.

One wonders what John Ruskin (after whom it’s named) would think of this example of its academic excellence.

 

Unhinged

Marxists, Seen On Campus

As Longtime (and, probably, Recent) Readers know full well, intemperate speech is not exactly an unknown event on this here back porch, and I often “permit” (okay, encourage) the same in Comments.  But I’m just a guy with a digital megaphone, little different from the loons one would find at Speakers Corner in Hyde Park, London or the average screamer on a city street.

I am not, however, a college “professor” who does the same in a classroom:

The investigation found that Castro would belittle students who disagreed with his religious beliefs or lack thereof. Students alleged that Castro made his political beliefs known in the classroom by saying things such as he “would cut off [former U.S. Attorney General] Jeff Sessions’ head and play soccer with it,” and that he would “hang [President Donald] Trump by [President-elect Joe] Biden’s entrails” for example.

Note that I’m not interested in his Twatter account where he said this:

Castro celebrated the news of Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) contracting COVID-19 and hoped that President Donald Trump and Vice President Pence would contract the virus too, in addition to calling Trump a “fat klansman.”

That’s his right to say that — Glenn Reynolds once suggested on his private Twatter account that we should run over violent protestors who attacked our cars, and there’s nothing wrong with that, either.  (Actually, there’s a great deal correct about it, but we can discuss that another time.)

The minute, however, you subject your students –essentially, a captive audience — to your unhinged ravings and penalize them for disagreement, you should be shown the door, the window, the wall and finally the street as you are tossed out on your tenured ass.  (Which, amazingly, Texas A&M are doing to him subject to his appeal, which is also his right.)

There is a clear distinction here between freedom of speech and professorial misconduct.  For far too long, students have had to toe the line and simply acquiesce with the antics of such professors even (or especially) when they disagreed with these Marxist loons.  My own kids used to tell me about this when they were still at college.  (I did no such thing, and for some reason none of my professors ever confronted me when I called attention to their silliness.)  So it’s long past time that this conduct was censured — and by the way, as a side issue, tenure should not be treated as a barrier to censure either.

Ditto this asshole (same link):

Alvard was reportedly notified of disciplinary sanctions following the results of the investigation into his classroom conduct and behavior. In the memo, Alvard was charged with “creat[ing] a negative learning environment for some students that materially affected their ability to participate and learn” and that Alvard “failed to deliver instruction and class materials in an unbiased and respectful manner.”

What the hell has happened to Texas A&M?

Then we have another academic fuckwit getting his two cents in:

“Republicans, you should not be allowed to speak about being shocked by President Donald Trump or the recent right-wing raid in Washington, D.C., for your words ring hollow,” wrote Jones, who is the chair of the Pan-African Studies department. “You all should be forced to shut the hell up unless whatever you have to say begins with, ‘I’m sorry.’ You should not be allowed to condemn Trump or attempt to distance yourselves from him unless you begin with, ‘I have helped him, and I’m sorry,’” he wrote.

Ummm who exactly is going to force us to shut up, asshole?  You?  The federal government?

Actually, I know who he wants to shut us up:  Big Tech — Google, Apple, Facebook, etc. — and they’re getting down to that with gusto, the Leftist cocksuckers.

Here’s one little statement for our worthy head of the “Pan-African [whatever that is] Studies” department:  We’re not going to distance ourselves from Donald Trump — and by “we”, I mean the 75 million people who voted for him over your senile, fraudulent candidate and his cocksucking accomplice — and we sure as hell aren’t going to apologize to you or anyone else for our support of him.

 

Hitting Back

Seen On Campus, Wokism

Here’s a little something to make your day:

A linguistics and education professor from Michigan State University claims that telling somebody that you can’t understand him is an example of “linguistic racism.”
More specifically, it’s “racist” to ask a person to repeat what he said because you “don’t understand [his] thick accent.”
Another example is someone “openly say[ing] only English is to be spoken in the workplace” despite the presence of multilingual employees.

This is one time where I wish I was still back in college, and specifically, at Michigan State in this little turd’s class.

Because from then on, I would only speak to him in Afrikaans, and submit all my papers in Afrikaans.  Then, if he attempted to change or penalize that, I would label him a linguistic racist and file disciplinary charges against him, using his own precept as the basis.

Slight Edit Required

Health, Seen On Campus

Seen at Glenn’s place:

With the greatest of respect, I feel that I must edit his comment just a bit:

 

Remember:  if some study or model from today’s academia actually disproves or casts doubt upon The Narrative, you’ll never see it, ever.  All others, therefore, should be ignored.

You’d think we would have learned our lesson with the infamous Mann “Hockey Stick” graph that proved we were all going to diiiieeeeee as early as 2010 from global warming…

Another Chink In Our Security

Marxists, Seen On Campus

Here we go again:

A University of California-Los Angeles researcher has been arrested for allegedly throwing away a damaged hard drive while the FBI was investigating him for transferring sensitive U.S. data to China’s National University of Defense Technology.

As I noted in my post on a previous such incident, it would be a terrible thing if the spying motherfucker’s name was something like Professor Laydback Surferdude — but no, he’s an omelet-complexioned virus-spreader:

The U.S. Department of Justice announced Friday that 29-year-old Guan Lei “falsely den[ied] his association with the Chinese military” during interviews with federal law enforcement officials. Lei has since admitted that he participated in Chinese military training.
According to authorities, one of Lei’s faculty advisors in China also served in the Chinese military.
The Justice Department further alleged that Lei hid digital files from federal law enforcement and lied about having contact with the Chinese consulate during his time in the U.S.

I’m generally not a huge fan of piling on offenses just to add to the sentence, but I’m going to make an exception in this case because the little prick is so young.  So:  destruction of evidence (20 years), lying to a federal agent (5 years) and espionage (25 years), all sentences to run consecutively.

Or we could just shoot him in the back of the head, and make his family pay for the bullet — it’s what the ChiComs do to spies, after all.

I’m getting heartily sick of both this spying nonsense, and the aiding and abetting being given by academia.

We need to clean house, thoroughly, by expelling all Chinese nationals from faculty positions in academia.  And before the profs start squealing about “loss of intellectual capital” or some such bullshit, I would suggest that the only loss of intellectual capital is being caused by having these spies sending our work back to their Commie bosses.  Should our academic wailers wish to continue to work with these assholes, they should be quite free to do so:  in China.

Shorter Degree

Education, Seen On Campus

Via Insty I saw the redoubtable Joanne Jacobs’s take on this topic.  Back when I decided to go back to college, I was astonished to learn that a simple B.A. degree would take me four years to attain.  Four years?  Everywhere else in the world only requires three.

Then I studied the curriculum, and started to understand why the late Joseph Sobran lamented that in a single generation, our society had “progressed” from teaching Latin and Greek in high school to teaching remedial English at university — a.k.a. the “core curriculum” which required a full year to be wasted on shit like “how to write a sentence” (English 101), “how the U.S. and state governments work” (Pol Sci 001/002), “Math For Dummies” (Math 001), and so on.  Even a “trimmed” course load for this mandatory study looks dubious, as Jacobs notes:

[Greg] Poliakoff would require all students to take “expository writing, literature, a college-level mathematics course, a natural science course, an economics course, a survey in U.S. history or government, and three semesters of a foreign language.”

What a total waste of time, in my case at any rate.  Fortunately, there are ways to “test out” of various courses — for some reason, the fact that I had published three novels somehow persuaded the English Department that I wouldn’t need English 101, for instance — so I was able to reduce some of the bullshit course load, but still not enough to shorten the four years into three that way.

Next, I ran into the stupid restriction that only allows students to take on four courses per semester which, when I studied the course content, made it plain that I would be prevented from tackling five and even six, even though it was easily doable.  My pleas to the Arts Faculty to do so were rejected Because Rules — clearly, the rules are there to protect the Grease Pit Set and Snowflakes from actual hard work, whereas I could see at a glance that the content for all but the 4-level History courses was not only light but superficial.  (Without exception, my requests for a supplemental reading list for a course were met with a “you’re not from this planet” look from the various professors — one admitted to me that she had never received such a request from a student before.  At Wits University in Johannesburg back in the 1970s, every liberal arts course had a supplemental reading list which, while not officially required, was necessary if you wanted to actually pass the course.)

So I attacked the degree with ferocity, taking all the summer / winter vacation classes I could.  (Strange, isn’t it, that professors can teach a course in three weeks that takes a full semester otherwise?)

Anyway, with all that my B.A. still took me three and a half years*, simply because the course schedules often didn’t jell with my degree plan — the one course I needed for a French sub-major (Business French) wasn’t taught in any “summer-mester”, and clashed with a History class during the regular semester, so I ended up taking instead a useless class of English short stories (during which the professor admitted to me privately that I could have taught, let alone studied) and passing up on a French sub-major.

The cynic in me thinks that the overly-long undergraduate degree is driven simply by financial greed — one less year equals a loss of $30,000 in revenue per student — but I will concede that without the bullshit core curriculum, the failure / dropout rate would probably be much higher than it already is.  (And that, of course, is the fault of the high school education kids get these days, but don’t get me started.)

It’s a racket, pure and simple.

*summa cum laude (for my non-U.S. Readers, that means a 90%+ final grade for every course)