Splendid Isolation

Tag: Campus Follies

Adventures in academia

Legacy Issues

Seen On Campus

Reader Mike L. sends me this little snippet:

The U.S. Department of Education has launched a civil rights investigation into Harvard University’s policies on legacy admissions.

Top colleges’ preferential treatment of children of alumni, who are often white, has faced mounting scrutiny since the Supreme Court last month struck down the use of affirmative action as a tool to boost the presence of students of color.

The department notified Lawyers for Civil Rights, a nonprofit based in Boston, on Monday that it was investigating the group’s claim that the university “discriminates on the basis of race by using donor and legacy preferences in its undergraduate admissions process.”

An Education Department spokesperson confirmed its Office for Civil Rights opened an investigation at Harvard. The agency declined further comment. 

I’ve always thought that giving alumni preference for their kids’ admissions was a nice touch, in that it established some kind of continuum or legacy (hence the name) for families.  (My old school St. John’s College absolutely thrived on such a legacy — to see fathers and even grandfathers wearing the Old Boys’ tie was a sign of belonging like few others — and legacies always got automatic admission into what was an extremely limited enrollment.)

But nowadays, tradition and (especially, it seems) father-son or mother-daughter traditions are anathema to the Egalitarian Set, who equate what is essentially a courtesy into some kind of “inheritance” Bad Thing, akin to keeping title transference within the same family.

It’s a good thing we don’t have nobility titles Over Here, because otherwise some Human Rights pests in our Gummint would no doubt call for its abolition in the name of “equity”.

A pox on all of them.

By the way, I have no dog in this fight because I happen to think that any private institution should have the right to determine whom they prefer to see inside it as members — country clubs, universities, fraternities, companies, whatever.

The fact that Harvard, of all places, is getting bitten by this is satisfying, but only because Harvard is a stupefyingly-PC and much-overrated institution, and they deserve every bad thing that happens to them, the elitist bullshit artists.

Let Them Have It

Feminazis, Seen On Campus

Another scathing article from the redoubtable Heather Mac Donald hits the streets:

Seventy-five percent of Ivy League presidents are now female. Nearly half of the 20 universities ranked highest by Forbes will have a female president this fall, including MIT, Harvard, and Columbia. Of course, feminist bean-counters in the media and advocacy world are not impressed, noting that “only” 5 percent of the 130 top U.S. research universities are headed by a black female and “only” 22 percent of those federal grant-magnets have a non-intersectional (i.e., white) female head.

These female leaders emerge from an ever more female campus bureaucracy, whose size is reaching parity with the faculty. Females made up 66 percent of college administrators in 2021; those administrators constitute an essential force in campus diversity ideology, whether they have “diversity” in their job titles or not.

So basically, women have taken over tertiary education, just as they did the primary- and secondary sectors.

Whatever.

If there’s one thing I know, it’s that when men see that the odds are being stacked against them, when the dice are similarly loaded, and when the playing field is tilted towards the other side, they shrug… and quit.

In times to come, men with degrees in the Humanities (like myself) will be a vanishing breed, and “education” will increasingly become irrelevant except to a few stubborn men (again, like myself) who will still pursue their education, except that they’ll do it outside the lofty and feminized academic institutions.  Their education will still be relevant — perhaps even more so than the accreditation offered by the Academia Femina — and other men of similar persuasion will recognize their value even if the HR Department (another female-dominated institution) doesn’t.

Ask any software manager whether he’d prefer to hire a kid with a “Computer Sciences” degree over a kid who showed him in his job application letter a fix for a bug in his product, and he’ll just look at you strangely, or else laugh outright.  (That’s actually how #2 Son got his current job about seven years ago, and he’s not the only one.)

Ask anyone hiring people for a semi-skilled technical position whether they’d prefer a candidate with a degree, or someone who’s been through an apprenticeship and has worked in the related field (e.g construction) for five years, and you’ll get pretty much the same reaction.  I knew a man who was the general manager of a gold mine in South Africa who would absolutely refuse to hire anyone — even in finance or accounting — who had not actually worked for a few years at a mine (as a miner, electrician, machine operator, whatever).  His own son became an apprentice electrician, then worked as a “sparkie” (at another mine), and only then got his diploma in order to get a job at his father’s head office, at age 35.

Increasingly, a college degree is being evaluated by employers not as a credential for a job, but as proof that the applicant has had the ability to put in the time and stick to it.  The Son&Heir, for example, got his job at Global Megabank Inc. not because of his degree in Philosophy, but because he had over a decade of managerial experience and dealing with customers.  This means that while companies may say “degree required”, what kind of degree is becoming increasingly irrelevant.

As universities and colleges are feminizing themselves, they will become increasingly irrelevant to society as a whole.  And the reaction to that, from men, will just be a shrug.

HOW Much?

Seen On Campus, Snowflakes

Just when I thought I’d seen it all, here comes this little piece of research:

“The vast majority of students (87%) say they have felt at least one of their college classes was too challenging and should have been made easier by the professor,” the survey found.

However, 71 percent of students spend fewer than 10 hours per week on studying, and a total of 87 percent of students spend fewer than 15 hours per week hitting the books.

The survey organization found that about one-third of students who think they work hard fail to put in more than five hours a week into schoolwork.

Back when I were a student, I would spend about six hours per day studying, excluding lecture time, and a lot more if there was a test, exam or paper coming up.

Granted, I was studying History and French — not hard courses, just ones requiring some extra-curricula study — so I found the work ridiculously easy.  (Had I been doing Organic Chem… oy.)

But the very thought of asking a professor to make the course easier?  The way I always looked at it was that if the course was hard, that just meant I had to work harder — it was like a competition between me, the professor and the subject matter — and there was no way I was ever going to let those two bastards beat me.

But nowadays, where there seems to be an “app” for everything (meaning that someone else has done the work for you), it’s small wonder that today’s snowflakes think that “hard” means actually having to think, and learn.

After all:  who needs a brain when you’ve got batteries?

Guidebook Entry

Seen On Campus

While this may be amusing, in fact it could have been taken from a university faculty’s handbook for linguistic standards.  (Which is all the funnier when they used “contemporary” when in fact they should have used “contemporaneous” for extra-special orotundity and opacity.)

Quote Of The Day

QOTD, Seen On Campus

Some asswipe college president said this, when his whales  wealthy alumni hit back at his university’s woke agenda:

“We’re living in an environment where people on both sides, right and left, are engaged in a culture war and they want to use universities,” he said. “I don’t find that beneficial to our mission and I’m not interested in being a participant in it.”

Whereupon Insty’s Bob Shipley responded to this bullshit with our quote of the day:

“Universities have been waging a one-way culture war on free speech, due process, and other fundamental rights (along with many other things) for decades. They don’t get to pretend they’re not part of it when the other side finally starts firing back.”

And there are a couple links at Insty’s for other alumni of similar mind to join in the fight.

“Losing”?

Gummint, Law and Order, Media Assholes, Military

I yield to no man in terms of my respect for Victor Davis Hanson, but I’m afraid the worthy professor is extremely late to this party.

Losing Confidence in the Pillars of Our Civilization
Millions of citizens long ago concluded that professional sports, academia, and entertainment were no longer disinterested institutions, but far Left and deliberately hostile to Middle America.
Yet American conservatives still adamantly supported the nation’s traditional investigatory, intelligence, and military agencies — especially when they came under budgetary or cultural attacks.
Not so much anymore.

He then enumerates said institutions:  the FBI, the military (senior officers), Big Tech / Woke journalism, federal health agencies, and the criminal justice system in general.

I will admit that the above are relative newcomers to the conservatives’ hall of shame, but as we all know, we’ve always loathed and distrusted the alphabet soups of the IRS, ATF and DHS, as well as Cabinet departments like the EPA, Energy, Interior and Education — to name but a few.

Wake up, VDH:  they’re all on the shit list.  They are very close to being — and in some cases very much already — not the “pillars of our civilization”, but active destroyers thereof.

And if you Readers want proof of this, ask yourself this question:  would you rather deal with your local law enforcement, or the FBI?  Your county tax office or the IRS?

Q.E.D.