Category: Seen On Campus

Observations from an elderly student

That “Human” Touch

Bad News, Seen On Campus

Apparently some colleges can’t even get it right when it comes to acceptance letters:

Applicants to Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health were the latest anxiety-ridden group of young people to fall victim to an admissions glitch, when, in February 2017, the school accidentally sent offers of admission to 277 students then said the notices were sent in error about an hour later. But those students are just the latest in a string of others who have suffered the same fate. Schools ranging from Carnegie Mellon to Tulane have sent admissions notices in error. In 2009, the University of California-San Diego accidentally told 28,000 students they were admitted to the school, when in fact they were rejected.

Of course, the response from these blundering fools is of the “My bad!” shrugs, along with the inexcusable excuses:

The errors are likely the result of the most mundane of office problems: IT challenges.
“For some places you’re taking relatively young professionals, you’re putting them in roles where they don’t have an enormous amount of experience with business process,” Farrell said. “The other piece is that sometimes the systems on campus, the enterprise management systems, can be very complex and not terribly user-friendly.”

I’m sorry, but we as a society are way past the “Oh, the computer got it wrong” bullshit. I’m not a litigious kind of person, but this looks like a classic case of a huge class-action “pain and suffering” payout. Without some kind of financial penalty, the universities (all of whom include courses on “Computer Science” in their curricula) have absolutely no incentive to fix this situation. So the “complex, unfriendly enterprise management systems” won’t get fixed, nor will the “inexperienced young professionals” get fired; and prospective (fee-paying) students will continue to get shafted. (My suggestion:  every time a person gets a false acceptance letter, that student should be entitled to a full-boat, all-expenses-paid four-year scholarship at the offending college. That, I think, would get someone’s attention.)

All in all, however, this sorry experience will also provide school-leavers with an excellent foretaste of corporate indifference and inefficiency, an experience that should stand them in good stead in their future careers. When their lives can be fucked up by a “mail-merge” mistake, young people will see at firsthand just how unimportant they are to Global MegaCorp Inc. If that doesn’t melt the “snowflake” mentality, nothing will.

OMG Rocks?

Bad News, Seen On Campus

Wait… so schools are now advocating bringing rocks to a gunfight?

A Pennsylvania school district is arming classrooms with buckets of rocks as a last-ditch defense against mass shooters.
David Helsel, superintendent of the Blue Mountain School District in Schuylkill County, told ABC News on Friday that every elementary, middle and high school classroom in the district is stocked with a 5-gallon bucket full of river stones for students and teachers to pelt an armed intruder.
“We’ve been trying to be proactive just in case,” Mr. Helsel said. “How can you aim a gun if you’re being pelted with rocks?”

I’m not even going to touch the obvious stupidity in this strategy.

However, when just a week ago the Army put out a statement that new recruits are unable to throw hand grenades further than a few yards because so few fathers can be bothered to play catch with their sons these days… good grief, what a bunch of pussies.

The College Conundrum

Seen On Campus

Via Instapundit comes this NY Post article, which opens thus:

When parents and teachers urge kids to go to college, they visualize the success stories: kids who graduate on time with marketable degrees. If every student fit this profile, college would be an outstanding personal investment. Unfortunately, most students don’t fit this profile, and their returns are mediocre or worse. Indeed, plenty would be better off skipping college in favor of full-time employment.

…and then goes on to list the five worst things about college in the U.S.

I will never forget my homeschooled kids’ first impression of their college classmates after the first week of classes.

Daughter:  “OMG! They are so stupid! They have no idea what they’re doing or why they’re there!” Pause. “Most of them are gonna fail, big time.”
Son&Heir:  “When you said that most people shouldn’t go to college at all but go out and get jobs straight out of high school, I thought you were just being an elitist. But you’re right. At best, most of them should be in trade schools or something.”

As for the five most horrible things about college (as enumerated in the article), I can’t argue with any of them — although I would add “spring break” to the list. The worst, in my opinion, is the degree of conformity — not just to the societal “everyone has to go to college” meme, but mostly to the conformity of thought being imposed on the hapless students by their professors and by their peers.

I have to confess that I was not exposed to this pressure when I was on campus just about a decade ago. With but a few exceptions, my professors were always receptive to my sometimes-contrary opinions when I expressed them in class (perhaps because I was, in many cases, older than they were). And I never associated with other students to any degree, so I can’t talk about peer pressure. (I did, however, manage to open a few eyes among the chilluns with my forthright opinions.)

And my original thesis has been, if anything, reinforced by events, as witnessed by the appalling unemployment rates among recent graduates. Most people shouldn’t go to college. Even with the dumbing-down of curricula, emphasis on “soft” Humanities courses and the loosening of academic standards overall, most kids are still failing whenever the courses are just slightly more difficult than high-school level, or require even a small combination of intellect and hard work. The plethora of “-Studies” courses, taught on marginal subject matter and delivered by tutors only marginally more intelligent / capable than their students, have simply amplified the degree to which colleges are failing in their mission.

And the kids, along with society, are paying the price. The Post article has it exactly right in its conclusion:

What’s the alternative [to the current situation]? Simple: Dry up the funding. Since we don’t get much per tax dollar, we should cut taxpayer support. This would have obvious drawbacks if college were a fine-tuned system for turning unskilled youths into skilled adults. In the real world, however, cutting spending doesn’t just save taxpayer money; it also puts a brake on credential inflation. Waiter, cashier and cook are already common jobs for college graduates. As long as we keep churning out more college graduates, this problem is only going to get worse. Instead, we need to admit that far too many kids go to college. Cutting government subsidies is the quickest way to make them reconsider.

Amen to that.

Just A Minute, Sparky

Men & Women, Seen On Campus

From our mole in Scandinavia comes this little gem:

Seriously? You mean just laughing at this bullshit would send me to jail?

…and:

And who is this priceless little feministical?

So all that study in the hard sciences, and young Ashleigh is analyzing the  implications of gender differential in flatulence?

Send me to jail now, Judge Sotomayor. Because I’m never going to quit making fun of these spoiled First-World fuckups and their loony little “philosophy”, ever.

Turning Men Into Women

Seen On Campus, Two-Minute Hate

…and I don’t mean by surgery, either. Following on the heels of the aforementioned Girlyman TV Show comes this pile of bullshit, appearing no doubt on a campus near you:

The program bills itself as a class where men “learn how social constructs of masculinity harm them and the people around them, and work to construct healthier masculinities.” Or, as Hicks puts it, “It was eight weeks of guys discussing how they can address their actions with better self-awareness and less toxicity.
“We spoke of emotional labor, consent, violence, communication, empathy, and vulnerability,” he adds, noting that the last subject, in particular, was a struggle for him: “[I was] trained and conditioned to be tough growing up.”

Listen, Sunshine: you know why men are conditioned to be tough growing up? Because someone has to be. Otherwise, we might as well all be women — which is no doubt your whole purpose.

And by the way: masculinity is as much as “social construct” as is motherhood, you fucking charlatan.

Read the whole disgusting piece to experience the full horror, but if projectile vomiting occurs, followed by an uncontrollable urge to do something really stupid (like driving off into the distance at 120mph on a Kawasaki), don’t blame me.

FFS, what a revolting concept. Some more (oh, why not? I shouldn’t be the only one to suffer):

For the past 25 years, Mankowski has taught a course titled Psychology of Men and Masculinities, which, he says, “deconstruct[s] how masculinity is socialized as a performative mask rather than a biological imperative.” He argues that the concept of “toxic masculinity” has four main components: suppression of anything stereotypically feminine; suppression of emotions related to vulnerability, like fear, sadness, or helplessness; male domination over women and other men; and aggression.

Pro tip: anytime some tool uses the word “deconstruct” or “deconstruction” he’s a fucking Marxist. Because that’s what Commies do: it’s the desired result of “critical theory”, which doesn’t criticize, it destroys. Don’t even get me started on the term “performative mask”, as though masculinity can just be taken off at the end of a performance.

It’s not a mask, asshole; it’s the core of our being.

I need to get to Scotland, and soon, so I can engage in some Critical Killing Therapy, whereby I deconstruct a fucking female* deer’s heart into shreds with a 6.5x55mm hollowpoint bullet. Yeah, that’s doubtless a manifestation of “toxic masculinity” for pricks like Mankowski; the problem is that it’s normally dormant, but can easily be awakened by psychobabble like this bullshit.

*That’s not overt hostility towards the fairer sex, by the way: the cull is for does (i.e. Bambi’s mom), because that’s how you control the deer overpopulation problem (yes, it is a problem) in Scotland. Fucking things breed like inner-city welfare mothers. Here’s Mr. Free Market displaying some toxic masculinity after one successful day’s culling, a few years back:

I know what y’all are thinking, and it had better be “Mmmmm… venison burgers!”

1+1 = 0

Seen On Campus, Two-Minute Hate

The latest exercise in “critical thinking” comes courtesy of “Professor” Rochelle Gutierrez at University of Illinois:

“On many levels, mathematics itself operates as Whiteness. Who gets credit for doing and developing mathematics, who is capable in mathematics, and who is seen as part of the mathematical community is generally viewed as White,” Gutierrez argued.
Gutierrez also worries that algebra and geometry perpetuate privilege, fretting that “curricula emphasizing terms like Pythagorean theorem and pi perpetuate a perception that mathematics was largely developed by Greeks and other Europeans.”
Math also helps actively perpetuate white privilege too, since the way our economy places a premium on math skills gives math a form of “unearned privilege” for math professors, who are disproportionately white.
“Are we really that smart just because we do mathematics?” she asks, further wondering why math professors get more research grants than “social studies or English” professors.

Okay, you can all stop laughing now.

Did I slip through some wormhole in the time/space continuum to end up somewhere around April 1, 2018?

You know, I recall how people reacted with stunned incredulity when Hitler’s Nazis referred to “Jewish” mathematics, “Jewish” physics or “Jewish” chemistry, because the terms are not only not apposite, they’re also fallacious. The Jewish Einstein coming up with the Theory of Relativity does not make that “Jewish” mathematics — a point with which I’m sure the worthy (ahem) Professor Gutierrez would agree, she being “woke” and, no doubt, sympathetic to the anti-fascist cult.

So why then, applying the same “White patriarchal” [sic] theory of logic to the argument, would the same not be true of her fallacious (and idiotic) position on the topic?

Warning note to all undergrads at U of I: if you’re scheduled to have this cretin Gutierrez teach one of your Math classes, you may want to change to another one. She’s nothing but a pseudo-intellectual poser masquerading as an academic.

Unless you too subscribe to her “woke” argument, in which case you deserve everything that happens to you in later life.

Is it too early for Scotch?