Universities or Clown Towns? [KT]

Happy Saturday! Even though politics have been heating up lately, I've been thinking about school. Still. It's Saturday. I thought that today would be a good day to consider some of the crazy stuff going on in our universities. Stuff that would make you laugh if it didn't scare you so much.

Bozo Land

First, a piece by Adam Perkins in the UK, from Quillette. Narrow Roads of Bozo Land: How We Came to Be Governed by Online Mobs

We all know the routine: an academic publishes some data that are incompatible with left-wing ideology, or maybe even just makes a non-PC joke, as in the case of the Nobel laureate Tim Hunt. They are then targeted by an online mob, the university administrators side with the mob and the thought-criminal is duly defenestrated. The firing of James Damore shows that a similar routine operates in tech giants such as Google.

It's not the first time intellectuals have enforced extreme left-wing views -- just think of the U.S.S.R. during Stalin's reign. But one can at least understand such behavior because failure to implement political correctness on campus in 1930s Russia would lead to a 4 a.m. date in the Kurapaty forest with a leather-aproned N.K.V.D. executioner.

But the situation is different in today's universities, tech giants and government departments - the administrators aren't going to be executed if they ignore a cis-heteronormative microaggression by one of their employees and the demands for PC enforcement aren't coming from a paranoid tyrant and his pistol-wielding henchmen. Instead, our new overlords are a bunch of pudgy, blue-haired manimals who can barely wash themselves, let alone dig a mass grave in the Siberian permafrost. As Toby Young pointed out following his purging from public office, this crowdsourced form of orthodoxy enforcement is a new thing and, considering it has no legal standing, a puzzling thing.

Wonder if someone in the USA would dare make that comment about "blue-haired manimals"? Perkins then goes on to set forth a theory about the balance between "Visionaries" and "Implementers". Interesting stuff. Worth reading.

. . . . perhaps the most extreme example of an implementer-takeover lies not in Silicon Valley, nor in a national government, but in U.K. universities. These institutions are bankrolled by the tax payer but are not subject to elections and hence are immune to the self-correcting tendency for implementer-dominated entities to go bust or, in the case of governments, get voted out. As a result, we are still feeling the effects of a bozo explosion initiated by the huge expansion of U.K. universities in the 1960s.

Not all of the bad effects of the "bozo explosion" which Perkins mentions can be blamed on online mobs. I'm going to have to think about them in relationship to other descriptions of the rise and fall of organizations and civilizations. Are we seeing a variation on the model where a degraded bureaucracy leads to a mentally warped aristocracy? What would Heinlein say?

The Hoax Grievance Studies

This project, to place hoax studies in peer-reviewed journals, has been covered by Ace and others here, but it is so rare for lefties to shine a light on their own culture that I think it's worth pointing out a few highlights.

Stephen Hayward had a couple of interesting quotes from the authors on October 3 in My Critical Theory Theory. My favorite:

Part III: Why Did We Do This?

Because we're racist, sexist, bigoted, misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic, transhysterical, anthropocentric, problematic, privileged, bullying, far right-wing, cishetero straight white males (and one white female who was demonstrating her internalized misogyny and overwhelming need for male approval) who wanted to enable bigotry, preserve our privilege, and take the side of hate?

No. None of those apply. Nevertheless, we'll be accused of it, and we have some insights into why.

Hayward's favorite:

Another tough one for us was, "I wonder if they'd publish a feminist rewrite of a chapter from Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf." The answer to that question also turns out to be "yes," given that the feminist social work journal Affilia has just accepted it. As we progressed, we started to realize that just about anything can be made to work, so long as it falls within the moral orthodoxy and demonstrates understanding of the existing literature.

Hayward posted a postscript, noting that Kevin Drum at Mother Jones had come around to the idea that something had to be done about these Grievance Studies Departments. Amazing.

On Tuesday, JJ Sefton linked a nice little summary from The Federalist:

The virus has already spread. The worst part? You are paying for it, in more ways than one. The taxpayers are paying for neo-Marxists and feminists to hijack higher education and shape society, and lead us toward a frightful, dystopic future.

And CBD linked the Authors' summary in Areo. They struggled with this project and had some tense moments. The piece includes a video you might consider sharing with certain people exposed to grievance studies.

Time to defund? Quillette has a piece up in which five academics respond to the scandal.

Some on the left don't seem too concerned.

The authors won't apologize. The dog rape paper was honored for excellence.

The University Milieu

Not all universities are the same, of course. But some of the more elite universities are the most worrisome. Be careful where your kids go to school. This video on the subject of Palo Alto University, where Christine Blasey Ford is on the faculty, sort of helps to explain some recent events.

VDH, who works not far from Palo Alto University, talks about things he does not like about today's university. He is familiar with both a state university and with Stanford. This video focuses on the hypocrisy of the leadership and faculty. But it also emphasizes the changing and erasing of history, especially military history, as examples of unfortunate changes in today's universities.

Music

A little piece from the man who brought Bach to the world's attention. This is Mendelssohn's Song Withouth Words Opus 19, No. 3, commonly called the "Hunting Song". But you can think of it however you want. Kind of exuberant. Fun to play. Does not remind me of Grievance Studies.

Note: This is the Thread before the Gardening Thread.

Hope you have a great weekend.

posted by Open Blogger at 11:23 AM

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