This page has been archived and commenting is disabled.
A Professor Speaks Out: How Coddled, Hyper Sensitive Undergrads Are Ruining College Learning
Submitted by Michael Krieger of Liberty Blitzkrieg
A Professor Speaks Out: How Coddled, Hyper Sensitive Undergrads Are Ruining College Learning
Things have changed since I started teaching. The vibe is different. I wish there were a less blunt way to put this, but my students sometimes scare me — particularly the liberal ones.
I once saw an adjunct not get his contract renewed after students complained that he exposed them to “offensive” texts written by Edward Said and Mark Twain. His response, that the texts were meant to be a little upsetting, only fueled the students’ ire and sealed his fate. That was enough to get me to comb through my syllabi and cut out anything I could see upsetting a coddled undergrad, texts ranging from Upton Sinclair to Maureen Tkacik — and I wasn’t the only one who made adjustments, either.
The current student-teacher dynamic has been shaped by a large confluence of factors, and perhaps the most important of these is the manner in which cultural studies and social justice writers have comported themselves in popular media. I have a great deal of respect for both of these fields, but their manifestations online, their desire to democratize complex fields of study by making them as digestible as a TGIF sitcom, has led to adoption of a totalizing, simplistic, unworkable, and ultimately stifling conception of social justice. The simplicity and absolutism of this conception has combined with the precarity of academic jobs to create higher ed’s current climate of fear, a heavily policed discourse of semantic sensitivity in which safety and comfort have become the ends and the means of the college experience.
– From the Vox article: I’m a Liberal Professor, and My Liberal Students Terrify Me
The article at the center of today’s piece is truly excellent and demands much thought and introspection. One of the main themes here at Liberty Blitzkrieg since inception, has been the contention that the American population has turned into a nation of coddled, fearful serfs.
It’s not quite clear to me when this transformation actually happened, but the first undeniable evidence within my lifetime was the public’s reaction to the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. I’ve written about this before, most specifically in the post, How I Remember September 11, 2001. Here’s an excerpt:
In the days following the collapse, all I wanted was for the towers to be rebuilt just like before. I wanted the skyline back to what I had know since the day I came into this earth at a New York City hospital to be restored exactly as I had always known it. Career-wise, I felt I should leave Wall Street. I thought about going back to graduate school for political science, or maybe even join the newly created Department of Homeland Security (yes, the irony is not lost on me). I read a lengthy tome on Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaeda. I was an emotional and psychological mess, and it was when I was in this state of heightened distress that my own government and the military-industrial complex took advantage of me.
It wasn’t just me of course. It was an entire nation that was callously manipulated in the aftermath of that tragedy. The courage and generosity exhibited by so many New Yorkers and others throughout the country and indeed the world was rapidly transformed into terrifying fear. Fear that was intentionally injected repeatedly into our daily lives. Fear that translated into pointless wars and countless deaths. Fear that was used to justify the destruction of our precious civil rights. Fear that was used to initiate a gigantic power grab and the source of tremendous profits for the corporate-statists and crony-capitalsits. Unfortunately, that is the greatest legacy of 9/11.
It was the American public’s fearful and panicked emotional response to the attacks that allowed authoritarians and corrupt politicians to seamlessly and expeditiously steamroll over the civil rights of the citizenry. Unsurprisingly, this act of cowed submissiveness sent a signal to the less ethically inclined amongst us, and in the decade and a half since the attacks, the U.S. has rapidly deteriorated into something barely distinct from a Banana Republic.
This infestation of cowardice, anti-intellectualism and fear has permeated almost every nook and crany of American life, including academics. So much so, that a college professor has just penned an article titled: I’m a Liberal Professor, and My Liberal Students Terrify Me. Even more worrisome, he felt the need to write it under a pseudonym due to the fear of backlash.
This is not what makes a great nation. Here are some excerpts from Vox:
I’m a professor at a midsize state school. I have been teaching college classes for nine years now. I have won (minor) teaching awards, studied pedagogy extensively, and almost always score highly on my student evaluations. I am not a world-class teacher by any means, but I am conscientious; I attempt to put teaching ahead of research, and I take a healthy emotional stake in the well-being and growth of my students.
Things have changed since I started teaching. The vibe is different. I wish there were a less blunt way to put this, but my students sometimes scare me — particularly the liberal ones.
Not, like, in a person-by-person sense, but students in general. The student-teacher dynamic has been reenvisioned along a line that’s simultaneously consumerist and hyper-protective, giving each and every student the ability to claim Grievous Harm in nearly any circumstance, after any affront, and a teacher’s formal ability to respond to these claims is limited at best.
I once saw an adjunct not get his contract renewed after students complained that he exposed them to “offensive” texts written by Edward Said and Mark Twain. His response, that the texts were meant to be a little upsetting, only fueled the students’ ire and sealed his fate. That was enough to get me to comb through my syllabi and cut out anything I could see upsetting a coddled undergrad, texts ranging from Upton Sinclair to Maureen Tkacik — and I wasn’t the only one who made adjustments, either.
A bizarre form of censorship and anti-intellectualism, but a very dangerous one nonetheless.
I am frightened sometimes by the thought that a student would complain again like he did in 2009. Only this time it would be a student accusing me not of saying something too ideologically extreme — be it communism or racism or whatever — but of not being sensitive enough toward his feelings, of some simple act of indelicacy that’s considered tantamount to physical assault. As Northwestern University professor Laura Kipnis writes, “Emotional discomfort is [now] regarded as equivalent to material injury, and all injuries have to be remediated.” Hurting a student’s feelings, even in the course of instruction that is absolutely appropriate and respectful, can now get a teacher into serious trouble.
The academic job market is brutal. Teachers who are not tenured or tenure-track faculty members have no right to due process before being dismissed, and there’s a mile-long line of applicants eager to take their place. And as writer and academic Freddie DeBoer writes, they don’t even have to be formally fired — they can just not get rehired. In this type of environment, boat-rocking isn’t just dangerous, it’s suicidal, and so teachers limit their lessons to things they know won’t upset anybody.
This shift in student-teacher dynamic placed many of the traditional goals of higher education — such as having students challenge their beliefs — off limits. While I used to pride myself on getting students to question themselves and engage with difficult concepts and texts, I now hesitate. What if this hurts my evaluations and I don’t get tenure? How many complaints will it take before chairs and administrators begin to worry that I’m not giving our customers — er, students, pardon me — the positive experience they’re paying for? Ten? Half a dozen? Two or three?
The current student-teacher dynamic has been shaped by a large confluence of factors, and perhaps the most important of these is the manner in which cultural studies and social justice writers have comported themselves in popular media. I have a great deal of respect for both of these fields, but their manifestations online, their desire to democratize complex fields of study by making them as digestible as a TGIF sitcom, has led to adoption of a totalizing, simplistic, unworkable, and ultimately stifling conception of social justice. The simplicity and absolutism of this conception has combined with the precarity of academic jobs to create higher ed’s current climate of fear, a heavily policed discourse of semantic sensitivity in which safety and comfort have become the ends and the means of the college experience.
This new understanding of social justice politics resembles what University of Pennsylvania political science professor Adolph Reed Jr. calls a politics of personal testimony, in which the feelings of individuals are the primary or even exclusive means through which social issues are understood and discussed. Reed derides this sort of political approach as essentially being a non-politics, a discourse that “is focused much more on taxonomy than politics [which] emphasizes the names by which we should call some strains of inequality [ … ] over specifying the mechanisms that produce them or even the steps that can be taken to combat them.” Under such a conception, people become more concerned with signaling goodness, usually through semantics and empty gestures, than with actually working to effect change.
This is more or less how politics functions in the U.S. today. Fake and superficial narratives take position at center stage, while the really big existential issues are never addressed, or merely brushed under the rug.
The press for actionability, or even for comprehensive analyses that go beyond personal testimony, is hereby considered redundant, since all we need to do to fix the world’s problems is adjust the feelings attached to them and open up the floor for various identity groups to have their say. All the old, enlightened means of discussion and analysis —from due process to scientific method — are dismissed as being blind to emotional concerns and therefore unfairly skewed toward the interest of straight white males. All that matters is that people are allowed to speak, that their narratives are accepted without question, and that the bad feelings go away.
In a New York Magazine piece, Jonathan Chait described the chilling effect this type of discourse has upon classrooms. Chait’s piece generated seismic backlash, and while I disagree with much of his diagnosis, I have to admit he does a decent job of describing the symptoms. He cites an anonymous professor who says that “she and her fellow faculty members are terrified of facing accusations of triggering trauma.” Internet liberals pooh-poohed this comment, likening the professor to one of Tom Friedman’s imaginary cab drivers. But I’ve seen what’s being described here. I’ve lived it. It’s real, and it affects liberal, socially conscious teachers much more than conservative ones.
This is how civilizations die. Slowly, and by a thousand small cuts.
»
- 70663 reads
- Printer-friendly version
- Send to friend
- advertisements -
Fuck College.
I freelance over th? internet and earn about 80-85$ an hour. I was without a job for 7 months but last month my paycheck with big fat bonus was $15000 just working on my computer from my home for 5-6 hours. Here's what i have been doing... www.extra-salary24.com
A nation of wimps.
"Ooh...you hurt my feelings. I'm telling..."
"Operation Castrate America, proceeding as planned, sir."
John Taylor Gatto: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pnzs-R7NHx8
A nation where courage is exemplified by a dude in a dress, who happens to be getting paid by a network $5 million a year to proclaim his/her uniqueness to any idiot willing to watch.
What about the woman or man who wakes up each day and goes to work to support a family, even though they know it is futile trying to get ahead. The adversity they deal with each day is enormous thanks to the misguided financial and political policies of our system of crony capitalism. The challenges are so daunting that it's a wonder they don't just give up. Yet they fight on, hoping that some day their kids will grow up to be critical thinking, well adjusted adults.
That, my friends is courage.
Exactly right, and quite deliberate distractions, should be noted.
"We are living in a world of so much degeneracy and dysfunction, that the noble are the ones who are hated. Their virtue is a threat to the weak."
Not my quote, can't remember who said it here 1st, but it about sums it up
This is what originally drew me to this site. It is one of the few places where people still argue, and worry far less about offending people. Unfortunately, even here the surrounding culture exerts an influence, and so we have our many banned friends. My guess is this is because the Tylers might face legal issues if they didn't act, but the fact that they face those legal issues is exactly the problem. This concept of "hate speech" is so stifling. Personally, I find hate speech to be moronic and pointless, but I support the right to it all the same. LET PEOPLE BE OFFENDED. That simple change in thought would clear up all sorts of problems. I've been offended on here. I've felt belittled, angry, disrespected. Such is life. I got over it. But no! We can't have that. Better to shove it underground, and pretend we are all one big happy family. That will work... until it doesn't. And then the explosion will be epic. Ferguson and Baltimore are warmups.
Global culture is working toward one hell of an explosion.
.
Pity they don't teach that in school anymore.
Cultural Marxism. Destroy the culture and its values, and soon the dregs will cry out for Communism. This is the work of the Frankfurt school.
This article is incredibly biased and in fact demonstrates what is really wrong. The culture war goes both ways. There are plenty of schools where parents complain about teachers teaching science instead of religion, bitch because teachers don't want to say the Pledge of Allegiance (a socialist pledge), and want to teach "intelligent design." The reaction to 9/11 involved lots of blind flag waving by plenty of so-called conservatives, and I'll bet any teacher who tried to tell his students that 9/11 was an inside job would be fired by said flag wavers, who tend not to be "liberal." Call a spade a spade. America is divided by competing ideologies of bullshit. And that is by intelligent design.
"And that is by intelligent design."
"Physical violence is for the amateur in dominance. Structural violence is the tool of the professional." -- Johan Galtung
Most of the blame for this situation needs to go to the uber-PC Lib MSM.
Without their support, and abundant coverage given on the nightly national TV news...
The little snot-nosed students & their encouraging professors, wouldn't have a platform for their stupid shit unworkable ideas.
I would agree, but there is nothing "liberal" about the MSM; that's a false construction.
What is called "pc lib MSM" is a linguistic trap which serves the corporate interests behind the facade.
College is a waste of time--unless you got the brains to be a doctor or an engineer. I'd give it a pass. Better off learning a trade.
Call it what it is, LIBERAL BIGOTRY, and intimidation.
No teacher ever gets in trouble for trashing white people, men, or free enterprise.
The smart professor who is now alarmed probably spent more than enough time trashing Western Civilization when it was in vogue. Who needs Homer when there's a demonstration to be organized. Smart professors abandoned Cicero in favor of tutoring their charges in the fine art of street theatre as a means of social justice. Instead of teaching the best Western and World literature, culture, art, etc., they fill the empty heads of stupid students with the superiority of Marxism. The smart professors never realized that Marx was a guttersnipe with a flair for scamming.
Now all of a sudden the smart professor realizes that he has been breeding spoiled monsters who have acquired a taste for politically errant professors. The condescending keepers of the Ivory Towers themselves are now being tutored in the fine art of dodging boomerangs. He and his smug colleages deserve every sting, bite, and clout they get. Be careful what you wish for.
Smart professor has had his "Robespierre" moment.
Aww da wittle baby offwendid?
Go put on you big-girl panties, you little shits. If only we still had Darwinism, you would have drowned in the bathtub long before college.
Doctors now graduate with so much debt they can't even make it with their high salaries. Engineers are still doing alright, though, ex petroleum.
Depends on the specialty. Cardiologists, dermatologists, radiologists, etc., can earn in the neigbhorhood of $500K annually. It's the primary care docs who are the ones on the hamster wheel rather than the gravy train.
Radiologists will be off that high-earning list pretty soon. Ever wonder how imaging reports are ready the first thing in the morning, even if the imaging was done less than 12 hours ago? Because they're being sent to radiologists in India...
Depends on the specialty. Cardiologists, dermatologists, radiologists, etc., can earn in the neigbhorhood of $500K annually. It's the primary care docs who are the ones on the hamster wheel rather than the gravy train.
I think you missed the point of the article. Yes, America may be culturally divided. But this article is not "biased" just because it doesn't show "the other side of the story". Are you looking for "Net Neutrality" in every article?! This is an opinion piece. It is presenting a personal opinion based on the writer's experience.
This liberal professor is saying that his liberal college students are hypersensitive like never before. He says this is putting pressure on the faculty not to say anything or present any content that could be perceived as offensive. He is also saying that the students have adopted a popular understanding of social justice that is too simplistic and doesn't make sense. It has no relation to the real literature on social justice. He laments that real intellectual discussion and debate is being stifled because of this change in the students' attitudes.
America is hopelessly shattered, not merely divided, and no accident, that. And this prof writer is as whiney about threatened self interest as the percieved scary students, yet is utterly blind to that irony of complaint.
That we're risk adverse is the product of societal trauma, ..and we all understand why, post 9/11, eh?
This great quote applies only after example is made of those trapped in complacency with usurpation of equity and soverign power:
"Physical violence is for the amateur in dominance. Structural violence is the tool of the professional." -- Johan Galtung
Structural violence is everyone's address now in the new order of things.
Suck it up or spit it out, but quit honoring pathetic moaning about it.
Freedom lives, it's just not free.
.
Check your privilege, cis scum.
These people are lunatics, and the fact that they are taken seriously (rather than being hauled behind the woodshed by some of "the boys" and beaten within an inch of their life) is a sign that the end of the American empire is upon us. Similar lunacy haunts the end of all great empires.
Hey, if people hire governments to kill millions and steal trillions, does this really matter?
Most people think emotionally first and foremost and objectively by mistake.
"This is what originally drew me to this site. It is one of the few places where people still argue, and worry far less about offending people. Unfortunately, even here the surrounding culture exerts an influence, and so we have our many banned friends. "
We will not be discouraged...
His name was Francis Sawyer.....
You guys do love Francis, how does he apply here?
Francis Sawyer was probably Dr David Duke. He called it as he saw it and exposed the historic global conspiricy in terms that would put an undergraduate into high speed rotation. His writing was compelling. He had effect. He was banned.
I suspect ZH is now owned by Rupert Murdoch.
Watch a few David Duke videos on utube while they're still up.
Francis was a bigoted, ignorant Rense douchnozzle. And the people who upvoted his comments are too stupid to realize that his purpose here is to discredit Zerohedge's opposition to the Federal Reserve interventionist fasicst system that has displaced capitalism in America.
...........................yous joozs are the most bigoted slimes on the planet........francis told the truth. the truth is not racist
thisson I think your anger is toward the Legend of Francis Sawyer, the real person had no such purpose.
thisson is a Wall St bankster type himself so I wouldn't expect anything less from him.
He is a pussy and a coward.
I certainly don't speak for Francis but I recently found out his former zerohedge Identity (he introduced me to ZH a couple of years ago and told me he was booted) and realized how often his name comes up... alot of misinformation.
but I agree, Thisson does strike me as a giant gash.
He isn't David Duke, he just likes to read. He also says hi :)
Real Estate Geek:
We need a war to draft these kids into. That will make it very clear to them how the real world works.
I am a professor.
I teach a course that includes an exploration of all kinds of criminal behavior. One of the things I have to get students to understand is that the process of being "offended" is grist for the learning mill and that the definition of criminal is something that has changed through history and is different in different cultures. They complain sometimes about the material, it is against their religion so they won't attend the lecture, then complain when they fail the test, all kinds of excuses you would not believe.
I tell them at the outset, not only will I offend them, but I have not done my job if I have not offended them at least one time during the semester. Some students take it as a challenge and will let me know "hey you have not offended me yet." All of them will be offended by the end of the semester, every time, my material guarantees it. I make "offense" part of the lesson for both pedagogical reasons and as a way to protect myself against this bullshit. I do not count attendance towards their grade. That way, they can be adults and skip class if they want to. It is on them if they attend something that has offended them.
Many of my students think this course is life changing. Those who are offended do not have a leg to stand on. I never require them to agree with a perspective to pass a course. Every voice is heard in there, conservatives and liberals will both say that about my class. All my students feel safe. When they disagree with someone, they must do it respectfully, that is the only limit. But they should disagree. I have had students change my mind about issues. The learning goes both ways.
There are ways to deal with this issue, it is called "head on." My colleagues are pussies. You have to take a stand, you have to draw a line in the sand. You cannot let them dictate to you what you can say in class or academic freedom is bullshit.
You are teaching students how to think for themselves by challenging their pre-existing belief systems. Sad that it's controversial to do so, but I would say the controversy in this is nothing new.
Just don't challenge their belief in Brad Pitt movies or new U2 albums or you might get fired.
Hey, wasn't Fight Club a Brad Pitt movie? So maybe they're half right. And don't tell me the Tylers read the book given their avatar.
Speaking of reading Chuck P and being offended, I give you a short story I bet will get under your skin...
I mean that in a weird way...
Guts
http://chuckpalahniuk.net/features/shorts/guts
Explains why bugs bunny's parents never needed to invest in a salad shooter.
"If you get offended by any word in any language, that means your parents were unfit to raise a child."
- Doug Stanhope
"MsCreant": I'm not surprised to hear you're a professor, having read your comments these past 6 years or so.
Do you ever get in trouble with the Administration for flustering the customers? My relatives who are professors get this all the time. I'm the "white sheep" of the family; the only one for several generations without a 4-yr. degree, and one of the very few without an advanced degree. Rebellion comes in many flavors; I've rebelled by being self-employed.
I remember in the 70s when Academe adopted the corporate model, embraced Finance, and started talking about students as customers. By the early 80s when I was in college, student course evaluations really started gaining in weight. And when Administrator salaries skyrocketed, along with the bloat of ranks of Executives and their Assistants for everything. Not coincidentally, that's when tuition started rising double-digit percentages annually. And that's when Universities really emphasized vocational degrees, as a partnership with Business that allowed employers to outsource "on-the-job training" to the prospective employees themselves, at their own cost. That's when we started seeing entry-level office jobs requiring a 4-year degree.
My father taught Poly Sci. for nearly 50 years. At the very end of his career he started getting pressure from Administrators to change failing grades and overlook blatant cheating, so as not to upset the money train. Two of my sisters are profs now, and they get it every term. One has patched together three adjunct positions, two at for-profit schools, and she has to routinely award passing grades to failing students whose parents are paying big bucks to buy the little fuckup a degree.
"Political Correctness" has been part of Academe since Socrates. That's not what's new. What's new is this notion of the University as a business, with the students as customers and the professors as customer service reps.
Enjoyed your brief history of the installation of the business model.
I respect entrepeneurs a great deal. My parents did not make it out of high school so I come from the flip of your own perspective. Other relatives I have not met, were professors. It was neat when I learned of it, later.
We had the business model inserted hard with a particular president who was put in place by the govenor. What we are doing is not sustainable, so it will evolve or fail. Does not matter what I think the university experience should be. They have to make it make money, tax receipts will not support us. Used to get 60+% from the state, now we only get 20%. Times are a changin'.
I am under pressure to compromise in ways I do not think are healthy for the students.
I don't give out As and Bs easily. I give out lots of C-. I have dropped the bracket for the C to a very low percentage, other wise I would be (I am serious) sent to a "camp" they put on for professors who are running "bottle neck" courses. One of my colleagues calls it "Gulag." He was sent to Gulag. At this "camp" they take your whole course apart and strongly suggest how you should teach it differently so that more students pass.
Does not matter that many of our students come to us from a poor urban population who need to rehab their math and writing skills. We must pass 75% of them. Oh, I am not supposed to say that publicly.
I just hope my C- on the transcript delivers a message, just like my A and B are meant to deliver a message.
On the correctness thing, it has always been with us. For me, because of what I do, I had to confront the material and how to deliver it, long ago. Example: spousal abuse is equal in both genders. Gets reported more for women because they are more likely to be hurt when it occurs. That is not politically correct, but it is true. I can get away with it because I AM a woman. Men get accused of mysogeny if they say it in their classes. I feel obligated on these kinds of things to say what others can't because of who they are. And feminists don't want to look deeper at "people" they want to work the agenda (and I do count myself as feminist, just not that variety).
It is complicated. No big trouble from admin yet. But "I walk the line," as Johnny Cash used to sing. Enjoyed your post. See you around.
Yup. I hear you on all freaquencies (extra "a" intended).
My gig involves anticipating the next whims of the neo-feudal aristocracy. Much simpler.
Take a few of your classes and screen Blazing Saddles. There's something in there to offend absolutely everyone.
How are these pampered brats going to cope in the brass-knuckled real world with such thin skin? Scary...
The real problem with hate speech is the element of truth within it.
That's simplistic. Hate speech, properly defined, is pure hatred towards an entire group, and wanting to do violence to that group due to abject hatred. I see it here all the time. The problem is that any criticism of a group for having certain tendencies -- even when demonstrably true -- is defined as hate speech.
So if I say that blacks on average have distinctly lower IQs than whites on average, and I wish no harm nor harbor hatred towards them, that that is not hate speech?
Okay. But according to the protagonists of outing hate speech, it is hate speech.
By my definition, what you said is not hate speech. I may (or may not) quibble with whether IQ tests properly test intelligence among those who are not well educated and who grow up with poor parents who do not teach basic reading and math skills because they don't have them and/or because they are not valued, but that's the kind of discussion we can have in this context.
I like your definition better than reality's definition.
In the Middle Ages it was heresy/hate speech to say the Earth rotated around the sun, because religious zealouts said they knew everything. Pendulums swing. Don't get so caught up in the moment and say what you believe.
It's "hate speech" when you don't refer to and discuss a particular group in the manner that they want to be seen, regardless of whether or not their past and present actions dictate a different conclusion by an independent outside observer.
No, hate speech explicitly or implicity invites violence.
And in your PC bullshit world, we couldn't possibly identify anyone responsible for this situation could we?
You know the Greenspans, Bernankes, Yellins, Dudleys, Blankfeins, etc....?
IQ and correctness are only very tenuously correlated. Really smart people can start off with a bad set of axioms and wind up with ideologies so wrong they destroy any society that adopts them. My absolute favorite FOFOA article of all time goes into this in some detail: http://fofoa.blogspot.com/2010/07/debtors-and-savers.html
Well it may not be hate speech, but it's definitely a "hate fact"!
Note: a hate fact is the Right's version of "an inconvenient truth".
You have to prove first that IQ tests are actually intelligence tests and not social?zation tests. Good luck with that.
There is no such thing as "hate speech". It doesn't make any sense. This is a B.S. concept has been invented to destroy freedom of speech. Why has this new category of speech been created, if not to label and therefore stop certain types of speech? One we allow "hate speech" to be controlled, then ANY speech that someone doesn't like can be classified as "hate speech". That is the danger.
Do we have the right to hate? To love? Do we have the right to our own emotions and thoughts? Yes, we do. And we are FREE TO SPEAK, even if it offends somebody. We just don't have the right to initiate violence against others.
Yes, you should have the right to speak as you will.
OTOH, I should have the right not to listen if I so choose. So you could argue that the "hate speech" label is the assumed collective we choosing not to listen, i.e. censor from public discourse.
My problem with the broadly racist/sexist/team red vs. team blue stuff that is prevalent here is that it reduces the number of people likely to be exposed to the root ideas of the site re:cronyism, corruption, and unsustainable and harmful financial shenanigans.
If I share something from here and the person actually reads it and dives into comments there is a good chance that they will encounter some kind of irrevelant or offensive comments. Then their mind could slam shut and they write off the entire site as "that conspiracy theory site", or "that right wing site", or "that racist site".
And from then on they won't even open a link from here.
That is why I have wondered if some of it might be sown here intentionally to scare off the sheep.
Fucking OJ!!! The distractions may not have started with him however his Tragicomedy franchise has enjoiyed a long line of spin-offs.
OJ, one of Norm Macdonald's favorite targets. He had some good ones on the Clinton's, too.
https://youtu.be/FZbTZf5VO8I
"Old George Orwell got it backward. Big Brother isn't watching. He's singing and dancing. He's pulling rabbits out of a hat. Big Brother's busy holding your attention every moment you're awake. He's making sure you're always distracted. He's making sure you're fully absorbed.
He's making sure your imagination withers. Until it's as useful as your appendix. He's making sure your attention is always filled.
And this being fed, it's worse than being watched. With the world always filling you, no one has to worry about what's in your mind. With everyone's imagination atrophied, no one will ever be a threat to the world."
from Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk
Boom, Bust and Exodus - a good read on the results of 'free trade' and its effects on both Americans who lose their jobs and the Mexicans who inherit them.....
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/boom-bust-exodus-9780199765614?c...
Endless pursuit of the cheapest possible labor costs is destroying the jobs base in the US. Ironically, the older workers try their best to do 'whatever' they can to earn a living while the spoiled twenty-somethings going to college have a sense of entitlement that exceeds even that seen among some welfare recipients.
Considering that the fiat King Dollar is basically what is keeping the government, which costs half of the GDP, afloat in the US, I would seriously consider moving any business I had elsewhere.
It is just as Hicks once said:
"Where's my commercial?!"
the working man's hero, the noblest of humans.
It's all much wider and deeper than people realize.
Across the world, we are seeing all established Bonds of human relationships being weakened, corrupted, compromised and hijacked. This is NOT a coincidence or 'natural development' -- quite the contrary.
For when all such bonds, social contracts and norms are rendered useless, there is NO COHESIVE STRENGTH or RELENTLESS DETERMINATION left for an effective and successful organized resistance against the Overlords and their era of a Global Neo-Feudalism.
Hiding in our solitary faux-shelters adds to the self-delusion of Safety and puts salve on our frail bit of Civic Courage (the kind that actually takes physical and material effort and risk of loss, injury, incarceration or even death), but it does not replace it. Keeping a low profile might be part of deliberate Tactics, but is not and cannot be part of a winnable Strategy against said Overlords and army of minions. People who proclaim this, are deluded, naive or immature personalities at best, and agents, shills and trolls at worst.
The real enemy that must first be vanquished, is within us all -- for the simple and undeniable mathematical reason of how the 1-2% is able to subjugate and rule over the 98-99%.
Great rant, Kirk. I'm surprised you're getting all the upvotes with the reference to the social contract, but glad that the message seems to have made it through even to the usual downvoters who don't actually understand why it's important.
In America the victim class rules all. This is the natural result of affirmative action and anti-white male racism/sexism. Anyone who is critical of others is "mean" and the herd bands together to destroy them. Try to "shame" them. Get them fired. Get them blacklisted.
Because even young white male liberals want to be part of the victim class now. They have seen that standing on your own and succeeding is considered anti-social behavior for white men in America today. The white man who is first to say "check your privilege" to another white man in conversation/debate wins.
America's middle to upper classes are all giant pussies today. But the ghetto dwellers and their "oppressors" (police) are getting more savage by the day. History shows what happens when the lower class protectors (police, military) of these HUGE VAGINAS (upper middle to upper class) turn on them. Our presidents used to box and hunt and were military men in their youth. Now? We're seriously considering electing a 76 year old woman that was a lawyer with her greatest accomplishment in life being spreading her legs for Bill Clinton.
The real victims being the poor oppressed billionaires.
http://inthesetimes.com/article/16204/dont_pity_the_billionaire
That Bitch of Buchenwald ain't 76.
Nah...more like "Welcome to Carl's Junior, would you like biggie size fries with that?"
"Here's what i have been doing..."
Selling your sister to construction workers for $80 an hour?
I doubt construction workers can afford $80 / hr. after they've procured their daily dose of meth.
My guess is $25 / hr.
Construction worker = meth user ???
Fuck you.
Don't sweat it, he/she has to live being them, you don't.
I worked construction when I was younger, finishing end work. No meth.
You have been giving $7 dollar blow jobs on the NY Subway.
You have been giving $7 dollar blow jobs on the NY Subway.
Cavalier overgeneralization. No college, no doctors. No college, no scientists. No college, no engineers.
Hey I have an idea - how about we don't pay these pieces of shit an ungodly amount of money for useless knowledge impartion, and we can learn the same shit for free because it's all common knowledge at this point. Blind faith in the false authority of certification is dangerous to your self and to others.
What a wonderful irony. Liberal professors afraid of liberal students. Liberal professors being sacked for not being liberal enough and having the gall to offend the tender feelings of the liberal students who have been taught to be offended by almost anything and everything.
Liberals being brought down by their own liberalism
What goes around comes around.
I could not believe he added that conservatives don't have these difficulties. Right, because they are practically extinct on campus. Get a false accusation of racism or some such that the admins treat as gospel, and the politically incorrect can see the writing on the wall. All in the plan, but the progressives only whine about it when it hits them personally.
match made in hell. perhaps they deserve each other.
"It is for you to pay and for us to think is a formula by no means limited to the ecclesiastics." :)
Conflating correlation with causation. What you mean is no college, no AMA Cartel/State Approved (READ: licensed, therefore artificially pushing up wages) peope who wear white coats and go by the meaningless title of "Doctor."
In any case, when do we get started? College doesn't train doctors, it trains future pharmacologists (drug pushers), and largely eliminates critical thinking skills. College is the place to make social connections.
Ben Franklin = no college
The Wright Brothers = No college
The Tyrant Abe Lincoln = no college...oops.
Steve Jobs - Caligraphy class.
Frank Lloyd Wright - No high school
Bill Gates = College dropout.
College is where great minds go to die. Paraphrasing Frank Zappa, If you want an education, go to the library.
A Nanny Moose. Want to up arrow you but your italic lead prevents me from doing so. Consider this a green from me.
" Eventually I came to conclude that I could not find real knowledge in academic life, only hierarchies of knowledge that led, ultimately, to more hierarchies, not to more knowledge. I began to see university learning as limited, human, and relative. What was seen as absolutely up-to-date did not consider the infinite and timeless.” — Sharon Daniels, author, The World of Truth
"Drop out of school before your mind rots from our mediocre educational system." — Frank Zappa, musician, liner notes from the Freak Out album
Not all doctors are drug pushers. Many doctors are highly trained, dedicated harworking professionals who see their mission to help heal patients and save lives. Some doctors really care about their patients and fight for their well-being every day, even as the insurance, government, and hospital systems become more and more corrupt and dysfunctional.
Horseshit. Show me a doctor trained in nutrition, then I might listen. Until then, my generalization stands. Generalizations are supported when something is the rule, rather than the exception.
There will be no interest in healing, while sick is so profitable.
Try again.
Sherry A. Rogers, MD?
Some doctors are in it for love, others only care about the money. The technical term for the latter is "anesthesiologists".
Libraries are obsolete, or will be, unless you include search engines.
Okay. I overgeneralized too. But my experience is that there are good teachers and bad teachers in every school. If you go to college, you're probably going to have to wade through a lot of stuff that just wastes your time. But you are also going to be exposed to some teachers who have "been there, done it all, and yet for some unfathomable reason want to help you learn about it". No matter what it is that you want to learn about. So, as with everything else in life, it is your responsibility, and that may mean that you will have to sift through haystacks to find the needles you want. So, ask not whether all colleges are bad and all college teachers are bad, but rather ask what you want, and what college and teacher can help you get that.
An older aunt used to say, "I take it all back, and I wish I'd said more to take back." :-)
Liberal professors scared of student monsters they created with their liberalism. LOL! Reap what you sow.
Hopefully if the SHTF - the whistling sound these MF'er elites will be hearing - will be .223 headed straight for them.
Do these liberal professors teach medicine, science, or engineering?
And I thought this was comedy. Apparently not.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgBD94cs0T8
This is not old news, it's ancient news. See The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom from 30 years ago for fuck's sake. PC bullshit was no different back then.
Niggerific .... now, I'll go peruse the article !
It's a natural progression of Political Correctness.
Can't speak truth without being censored is asking for generations of naive masses, and corrupt masters.
Which is the goal, of course.
"To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize" - Voltaire
Nice, that quote is a keeper.
The problem here is not with the students. The problem is the school administrators. Why didn't they tell the fuckin kid to suck it up and get to work? Instead they made it open season on their faculty.
"Administrators" are only paid to get asses in the seats. The spice must flow in academia as it does elsewhere. And the spice in academia flows from the government in the form of student loans. And the government loans flow from..... the banks.
A liberal professor is scared of his liberal students. Perhaps because he is not aware his students aren't liberal. They're statist thugs in training.
Funny, take away the object that CcAsSsTtSs the shadow and the shadow dissapears. These edumacation guys aint too smart, I reckon.
Yeah, he's what you would call an "old school" liberal. What "liberal" meant decades ago. He's only catching the edges of it and not able to quite see the whole. This is the whole:
The government holds those students' paper, so the government owns their asses. When it comes time for the government to start taking shit from people by force and in large amounts (on behalf of the real masters- the banks) these are the ones who will be sent forth. And open mind, and critical thinking are not required for such positions. In fact, they are a total liability. A sense of righteous entitlement fueled by a long list of perceived wrongs will fit the bill much better. They are today's brewing batch of Brown Shirts.
I can not argue with that.
....I always try to sugarcoat the facts with my kid. More so now that I am trying to convince my wife to have another. Got kids, No Debt? I hope so.
I always tell my son...bee the bee, Philo Jr. Bee the bee.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmVn6b7DdpA
A kid that can watch puddles all day gathering rain or going dry...now there is a fucking kid with a future!
Yeah, two. I have to un-teach them some of the stuff they learn at school. It's not just the usual global warming bullshit, but the forced social norms that even little kids can vaguely sense is wrong, but can't put words to it.
Easier to explain with an example.... my little one is a very bright kid. He rarely brings home a test that isn't a perfect score or within one answer of it. Yet I ask him to self-assess and he gives himself inexplicably low marks. It took me MONTHS to figure out why. THEY ARE NOT ALLOWED TO DISCUSS THEIR SCORES WITH OTHER STUDENTS ON FEAR OF PUNISHMENT!
You already know why (somebody might get their feelings hurt who didn't score well). After I got up off the floor.... I had "The Talk" with him. And that has led to more talks since then.
Funny how The Talk used to be about the birds and the bees and now it is about The Bullshit and even more Bullshit.
Son, this is where education, monetary policy, civil rights, abortion, the drug war, poverty and general societal ainxt come from.
Dad...can I still fuck the hot chick.
Son, Yes you can. In fact, if you do not.......
The three R's have been replaced by the three S's: Sex, Self-esteem, and Social justice.
When the time comes, there will be plenty of snitch programs. Your neighbor has gun? Some gold coins? Has a copy of the Constitution? Buys rice in 50 pound bags? Has a rain barrel? Call this number, get double Benny bucks on your EBT card now!
Absolutely fucking right.
The monsters we fear are of our own creation. The crux of "Frankenstein"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Masque_of_Anarchy
Vox,
http://www.vox.com/
Enough and too much said.
Must need a revenue pop.
"Things have changed since I started teaching. The vibe is different. I wish there were a less blunt way to put this, but my students sometimes scare me — particularly the liberal ones.
I once saw an adjunct not get his contract renewed after students complained that he exposed them to “offensive” texts written by Edward Said and Mark Twain."
I'm deeply offended by blunt honesty and literature that does not conform to todays PC indoctrination & morals!
Someone should be fired immediatley and placed onto the welfare rolls! ;-)
Yet another reason for hiring 55 year old workers!
USSA is eating itself from within by first eradicating intellectual thought, hence a guy like Chomsky is marginalized in popular thought of the common american as a "communist" when in fact nothing could be further from the actual truth. He has written counltess books on the structural decline of the USSA for decades and has been pretty much the closest one to identifying many of the problems and for years in advance of them actually manifesting themselves. Yet most americans and even many on ZH don't have a clue what his ideas really mean. Why? because intellectual thought within the common american is basically a dead cat on the freeway driven over for decades because nobody cares enough to stop and clean it up.
The author paints a grim picture indeed. However, like all things there is a positive side. In this case, the good professor still has the comfort of knowing that the hypersensitive twerps in his class will leave college with a mountain of debt and no prospect of finding a job.
Well, most of them anyway. A small subset of graduates (i.e., the good looking girls with great tits) will find employment at Hooters.
Your assumption, which may or may or may not be correct, is that the author's school is non-Ivy.
The Venn diagram of "Ivy school" and "good looking girls with great tits" has overlaps... exactly nowhere.
Not to worry, soon enough the students won't be able to afford college, the classrooms will be empty, and the teacher can burn the offensive books for heat.
This is for all those socisl justice students. If you go to university to study social justice, then you are pissing away time and money. Any good political blog on the web will serve that function and a library card.
What teachers fear most, is student failure. Be it in Grade School, High School or College. Do you know how pissed parents get when their kid comes home with C's and D's? F's are unheard of. Parents blame the school if their kid fails to produce good grades. In college, it is the student and family who are outraged at low grades. That is why grade inflation began to take off decades ago. Teachers feared the families and students, thus, in order to life a quiet life and keep the paychecks rolling in, most all teachers began to pass everyone just on the face of it. B's are for any student who even tries a little bit. A's are for anyone proving to be literate. C's are considered failure by parents, and if a teacher in High School sends his kids home with C's, his ass will be in big trouble, parents call the school, administrators go after the teacher. When I was in High School, a C was consider a firm pass, and about 75% of any calss got C's. 15% B's, around 5-10% A's. On average, it vaired alot. I had a college professor who announced after finals that he gave no A's at all, nobodies work was up to that high standard. This was 1978! Imagine that today!
Grade inflation is out of control. parnets and students power over a teacher career make them prone to pass the A's and B's and live in blissful peace. Some teachers, a womans studies teacher I knew, gave all her girls A's automatically. She was renowned for discouraging males to enter her classes, as this terrified her girls! She got away with it. Probably retired now, she was one of those 60's activists who got into the womans studies boom of the 70's.
Teachers live in fear, they have good jobs with 4 months vacation every year. Who would let grades threaten that happy life!
This is all solve by market forces. Parents and students currently have no choice. Parents are forced to pay for pewblik skewl. Students are forced to attend some form of pewblk approved skewl.
Let the market, or at least localized forces determine the best path.
When the SHTF, all those liberal arts courses and even STEM ones are going to be worthless. Learn how to grow things, make things, repair things. if you don't, you'll be wiped out in the first wave. WHEN ALL IS SAID AND DONE, HOW MANY DEGREES DOES IT TAKE TO SHOVEL SHIT? OR EAT IT?
Yep, my neighbor called the cops because I scolded him for being too noisy. The cops called him childish so no harm done. But this is the type of mangina running around loose these days.
People have been calling cops on noisy neighbors for centuries.
Sounds like the noisy neighbor called the cops after the other dare complained to him about the noise.
The failure to not understand simple intercourse is also pretty pervasive on Zero Hedge.
+1
clearly a non-white rayciss professor
Huge reason why I have so little respect for college "kids" today - they're fucking idiots.
The colleges brought this on themselves. In the 70s, after the Baby Boomers had graduated, enrollments plummetted. That's when colleges really started pushing the vocational programs, the corporate management structure, and the attitude that students were customers. Big Business loved it because instead of paying people whille training them on the job, now prospective employees had to take out loans to finance their own training. A heavily-indebted new hire is a lot more malleable.
So yeah, sure, political correctness. But that's always been part of college; that's nothing new. College is the place for people to try on ideas and ways of thinking and make fools of themselves without lasting consequences. What's new is the amount of money, and how that money talks. Now that you have to buy a 4-year degree to get any job with the slightest chance of supporting you, the purpose of colleges is entirely different. The cost is undeniably different. The small state university I left 30 years ago now charges 10x more per credit hour than it did then, even adjusting for the fact they changed from the quarter system when I was there to the semester system now.
A lot of Liberal Arts professors (including a good number in my family and circle of friends) don't understand or want to understand that the corporate management model and Finance have done to Higher Ed what they've done for housing finance, health care finance, retirement finance, and everything else it's gotten its mitts on. The last remaining large pot of money not yet subsumed into corporate finance is K-12 Education, and they're not far from getting that, too.
This is what happens when admissions aren't based on achievement.
I'm arranging to go to Germany for Asian- Lesbian studies in English.
We'll talk when I get back.
Many people today really just want to be lawyers and use "color of law" to steal someone else's money. Or, more easily, just go out and entrap someone, and run to a lawyer and sue that someone and steal their money. I see this being induced by TELEVISION, which preaches it endlessly with "tough guy" lawyer dramas and news programs which present people as being "victims".
It is the conservatives that scare the shit out of me. Ignorant of reality. Ignorant that soon the pitchforks will come out. They somehow think god is going to save them, and only them. Give me a liberal any day.
Remember, pay day is Friday, two weeks from now.
Your check will be slow if you are removed or criticized too much for your points of view.
My name and time is still open for sale.
$ 60, 000 USD
Oops. Not private chat?
Dude, the motherfucker was writing this about liberals.
But if this is what you want, please, take them and get the fuck out. With these idiots gone, we can take can of neocons.
The liberals you want are everywhere. You should be the happiest, most fulfilled person on earth. More than very other car on the road you pass is a liberal. They are the majority. So why should you be scared of the minority?
move your ass to liberal Detroit, plenty of empty houses just waiting for you.
Gosh you are funny......"ignorant of reality", god I laughed hard when I read that.
In my college we must perform like robots. Nothing exept new criticism is allowed as a way to talk about a text. If you ask the professors about what the author thought when they wrote it they tell you to look at the text to see what the text says; authorial intent is difficult to prove. We also learn that language does not express meaning but sort of symbolically implies this or that through diction and if you really want to prove something you should become a lawyer over at the school of law. That way you'll at least get paid for your opinioin. Give them your personal opinions on essays and you get the big C or D. They will accuse you of being a solipsistic fool and worse.
"It takes a [ Hillary ] village to raise a child [ an idiot ]."
I wonder what type of impact all this is going to have on all college degrees. It could be very positive for the smart people who avoided the college trap and got a trade skill instead. Anyone looking to hire a knowledgable professional will interview a college grad - then turn to a worker withen the industry and not even consider the degreed candidate because the degrees will be tainted by the bullshit grading.
This is really too bad for the higher education tradition and institutions as well as for the students wasting their time. It signifies the beginning of the end for higher education for sure. There is no point in spending time getting a degree that the employers will question. You are going to come out of "school" and start at square one where the kid who went straight to work will already be your boss's boss.
There's a long way to go to revert to the mean.
The chickens are coming home to roost.
One would have to believe that the liberal professors of two generation ago never would have imagined that this would be the result of their philosophies. Surely they thought that replacing a history of thought, ideas, and facts with their grand notions of how life should be and scrapping the concept of teaching how to think for telling students what to think would lead to the golden age of wisdom and an upward thrust of evolution for the human race.
Instead, we have the predictable opposite. And those self-proclaimed geniuses never saw it coming. The genius who wrote this piece never saw it coming. He's shocked that liberalism would begin to eat its own.
And so we have those early student's children and grandchildren running the education system ("triggering", common core, banning books (Twain? come on)), the government, and industry. Worse, they make up the unelected bureaucracy who write laws at their political whim.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-06-07/overeducated-writer-explains-wh...
One would have to believe that the liberal professors of two generation ago never would have imagined that this would be the result of their philosophies.
Anyone with any common sense could and did see this coming. Look at California how it has been ruined plus Detroit and other areas.
College professors live in a cocoon with impressionable and often dumb young people. The professors are like children who never have to grow up. They live in their tenured utopia with job security and like minded vermin.