Tag: woke colleges

Ending the Woke Madness

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I’m just plain disgusted with humanity today.  We’ve reached a very low point.  The fact that this kid Robinson could come from a good family in a very conservative area and still end up as a far-left psycho involved with a “transgender woman” and at twenty-two years old assassinate someone so that he has ended his own life either literally or effectively, sickens me.  The world has become insane.

What seems apparent is that colleges have now become leftist indoctrination centers.  And the only way out is to set up a network of normal colleges to act as an alternative in order to protect young minds from this poison.  I think that’s the only thing that can be done.

As for those who have already been brainwashed, I think it’s too late for them.  I don’t think there is a “deprogramming” protocol that will work.  Somehow, we will need to protect ourselves from these rabid individuals and find ways to interact with only the normal.  I haven’t thought this stuff out deeply.  It’s just my visceral reaction to what has gone on this week.  But I think it’s important to continue the government program to defund all institutions of higher education that indulge in DEI.  But more than that it’s time to stop funding colleges that have disciplines like Queer Studies.  If a college decides that this is meaningful education for young people then it should find its own money to fund it.  And that goes for any “study” that is essentially a grievance group complaining about the United States or “whiteness” or any other woke hatred subject.

A society, no matter how freedom-loving has to have limits to freedom.  We already draw the line at pedophilia.  I think we’re going to need to revisit the way we look at deviant sexuality in general.  If it is thrown back to the states that should be enough for now.  This will allow certain areas of the country to reestablish normalcy as an operating principle.  And if there are places for deviants to go to practice their sexual preferences like the West Coast and the Northeast then there shouldn’t be a problem deporting these people from the other areas of the country.  That would seem to be a humane way to remove them from the environment.  Win/win.

As I said, I’m pretty disgusted with the current situation in our country (and globally).  It’s going to take a lot of work to make much of an improvement on the current sorry state.  I guess the real first step will be for the Justice Department to uproot Antifa.  That all by itself will be enormously difficult.  But it is such an important job that we should be able to tell very soon whether it’s being tackled or not.  My way to measure whether anything is being done will be whether co-conspirators are named in the Charlie Kirk assassination.    From what I’ve heard there were many people aware beforehand that this murder was scheduled.  It is the Justice Department’s duty to find these people, prove their involvement and indict them for murder.

If that does not happen, things will not improve.

Overhead

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I was reading an article about how at one particular college, from 1990 to 2022 the number of tenured faculty decreased.  But during that same period the administrative staff increased 500%.  So, let’s say there were a thousand administrators at the college in 1990.  That would mean that there were six thousand in 2022.  Think about that.  They must have had to build out the campus enormously just to provide desk space for that many new people.  And try to imagine how these non-teaching employees made learning better at this college.

Obviously, this is absurd.  During those thirty-two years automation has made all of these “administrators” worse than useless.  Whate they really are is a drain on society.  All they do is attach more mouths to the government trough that pays for all those enormous loans that colleges manufacture as their primary product.  So, most of the increase in college costs over the last thirty years has absolutely nothing to do with the cost of educating college students.  Certainly since 2020 a new component of this scam is the DEI infrastructure.  Whole wings of college buildings must be crammed with bureaucratic activists writing propaganda papers and issuing edicts to force ever more oppressive requirements on students and teachers to pay homage to the holy trinity of diversity, equity and inclusion.

What is wrong with this picture?

Well, it’s two-fold.  Most importantly, it’s eveil.  It’s harmful, toxic and stupid.  We’re damaging the students who are being propagandized with this stuff and we’re warping society with these lies.

But in the second place, we can’t afford this waste.  America is the most affluent society that has ever existed on the face of the Earth.  But we’ve drained the well dry.  Everywhere you look people are drowning in debt and can’t pay their bills.  And worst of all are all the college students and graduates staring at six figure student loan debt.  And a lot of them can’t find any jobs better than Starbuck’s barista and will have to move back into mom’s basement because rent just doubled.

And colleges aren’t the only bureaucracies staggering under the weight of administration inflation.  Federal, state, municipal and local bureaucracies are full of libraries, schools and other offices that have grown their own bureaucracies where expansion is a constant state and no one ever gets laid off.

Barack Obama and Joe Biden have grown the bureaucracies with single-minded intent.  Every one of those administrators or whatever they call these civil servants vote Democrat, every time they can.  It’s not even a question.

Every red state governor should make it his highest priority to eliminate all of the DEI and other leftist headcount in all government agencies and especially in state colleges.  But if Trump gets back in the White House his first priority should be to drain the swamp.  And whereas the most strategic departments to empty out must be the Justice Department, FBI and CIA, nevertheless, right afterwards it behooves him to make a general purge of all the agencies that perform affirmative action and all the other DEI related damage.  And then if I were he, I’d write executive orders that would mandate colleges to bring their finances in line with a more reasonable overhead.  No more $50,000 or $100,000 a year tuition bills.  Tell them the government can only afford $10,000 a year.  I’ll bet there’ll be a whole lot of Associate Directors of DEI slinging coffee at Starbuck’s that next year.

So that’s my idea.

Guest Contributor – Milo Mindbender – 25FEB2024 – Higher Mis-Education

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“in the same way that the government puts a brake on the cost of drugs by acting as the largest provider of medical insurance through Medicaid and Medicare they can put a brake on the costs of college tuition”

The rise in tuition cost is caused by government intervention. Every year they back loans to 17-20 year old students, and increase the amount they front. These loans wouldn’t be available to buy hard goods, real estate, or stocks but they will purchase a seat in the university. The terms of the loans are predatory, but voluntary with almost no forethought regarding getting out from under them. Without the influx of wide eyed government sponsored students the higher education system wouldn’t be offering doctorate degrees in “The Tao of Harry Potter”, “medieval Russian Literature”, or “Social Responsibilities of Porn” because nobody would purchase said degrees for a real world application.
I believe this got started 60 years ago in an effort to level the playing field in pursuit of equality. When the IQ test became no longer usable as a entry to the job market, a substitute had to be procured, and a college degree, in any subject became the new standard. It wasn’t immediately viewed as just any degree, but slowly morphed into the pursuit of the sheepskin, vs receiving an education.

TikTok Socrates

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Our current awful culture is still western culture.  Of course, it’s been dumbed down so that any idiot can sing along.  And it now includes a whole preface that tells everyone that Westen Culture is a terrible thing that destroyed the rest of the world and the people that invented it are monsters.

But essentially, the whole world is adopting this impoverished version of western culture.  And the stupidest people will fit in perfectly with it.  While waiting for my car’s oil changes, I’ve been forced to see some of the programming that exists out there.  Words cannot express the level of stupidity I witnessed.  These are people who must have to be told to start and stop chewing their food while they eat.  Vapid can’t begin to describe them.  It was physically painful to have to hear their conversation.  Chickens clucking around a farmyard pecking at droppings would tower as mental giants above these “tv celebrities.”

That’s the base line that our culture has established.  And I’m sure that setting the bar so low is doing incalculable damage to our civilization.  Children mimic what they see on screens.  That has been going on since the invention of moving pictures.  And with our high-definition video and ubiquitous internet connectivity young people spend countless hours watching idiots on TikTok and all the other venues for this mindless stuff.

But I think it’s a mistake to think that the lowest common denominator will define the complete spectrum of what our culture will consist of.  On the contrary, I think there will be a reaction to the lobotomizing of our society.  People will search out information and entertainment wherever they can find it.  And as much as social media tries to restrict everything to content that conforms to the narrative, reality will find a way to break through.  In fact, the taboo nature of the truth will make it that much more fascinating.  All it needs is the right packaging to make it seem more forbidden.

Of course, there is a bell curve that defines the distribution of intelligence and that creates a distribution of various types of content; from the example of the television morons I described above on the left side of the x-axis to complex mathematical course work at the far right.  People will search out the information they need and are interested in.

Without a doubt the “narrative” has done a lot of damage to the younger generations.  The millennials and those who came after them have been gaslit by their teachers into believing a lot of the political propaganda about western civilization and the environment.  And there will be a price paid for this indoctrination.  I think a larger than normal percentage of these kids will fail to marry and have children.  And this is regrettable but at this point I think it is inevitable.  This will be a bottleneck for our culture.  And this was intentional.  Adding this to the policy of encouraging millions of third world migrants to move here produces an environment where western culture will be weakened and attenuated.

But this is still a partial change.  The more gullible people will remove themselves from the gene pool and those who produce children will look for a culture that encourages human survival and excellence instead of the Greta Thunberg version.

Currently there is an effort being put forth by right-wing activists to cleanse some of the colleges of the leftist propagandists.  Notably Chris Rufo has been appointed a New College of Florida board member and has broken ground on how woke colleges can be purged of woke ideology and practices like DEI, critical race theory and all of the LGBTQ agenda.  I think this process is the best way to improve the state of our culture going forward.  Eliminating all of these dangerous concepts and practices like affirmative action will be necessary to repairing the damage done by the Left.

Of course, the question remains whether the Left will allow themselves to be displaced.  At the federal level they are in charge.  We should have an answer in 2024.  If the federal government remains in the hands of the Left, then only a partial geographical reversal of the dumbing down of western culture will be possible.  What will be interesting is what the Left’s areas; the east and west coasts, will look like after the areas have a chance to follow their differing philosophies.  Let’s say after a century of DEI will the people in California still be able to walk upright and use fire?  We’ll have to wait and see.

U. of Penn. Donors Attempt Reform of Ivy League School

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Heather Mac Donald at the City Journal documents a revolt that seems to be going on behind the scenes at at least a couple of the Ivy League schools that have been in the headlines of late.

Apparently the donors have been chafing for some time at the direction the university has taken.

“University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill would not have been forced to resign last weekend had Penn’s donors and alumni not been organizing against her for two months.

…

The Penn rebels have now upped the ante. They have drafted a new constitution for the school that makes merit the sole criterion for student admissions and faculty hiring. The new charter requires the university to embrace institutional neutrality with regard to politics and faculty research. The rebels want candidates for Penn’s presidency to embrace the new charter as a precondition for employment.”

Could such a thing happen?  Would the federal government allow it?  I’m sure everyone reading this would be highly skeptical of such an outcome.  If nothing else it would require the un-employing of hundreds of DEI commissars that fill the corridors of the ivy-covered halls of Penn and Harvard.

And what of the grievance study departments?  How could such organizations fit into a merit based regime.  Other than employment for the “professors” what merit exists in what they do?  No meaningful purpose is served by what they do.  In fact, everyone is harmed by it; society, the students and the parents who have to pay for it.  Could this be the beginning of a revolt against the degradation of academia?  Hard to believe.

But when the ox being gored is that of the rich and powerful, things can happen.  Well, isn’t that how most revolutions occur?  Antisemitism has collided with progressive privilege and this has awakened the donors to the monster they themselves have fostered.

We’ll have to see.  After all you can’t turn a ship on a dime.  And the academic world has been corrupted for not decades but generations.  The only thing that favors reform is the sheer crushing weight of the bloated bureaucracies that have been created in these woke places.  America can no longer pay for the cost of the parasites sucking at the lifeblood of these dying schools.  Especially since they’ve almost stopped teaching anything meaningful.

Will the reforms at Penn happen?  Stay tuned and I’ll comment as information becomes available.

Update:

I just read the ZMan’s post for today.  He addresses this incident and he says that nothing will come of it.  Well, we’ll have to see.  Maybe a Festivus miracle is in the offing.

From the Bursar to the Dorm, Shouting We’ll Perform

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During the Summer of George riots back in 2020 I tried to think of a silver lining to go along with that cloud of violence and chaos.  I wondered if there was a way to get Antifa and BLM to burn down the Ivy League colleges.  Imagining Harvard, Yale and Columbia engulfed in flames and the merry arsonists roasting the students and faculty for being white supremacists warmed my heart.

But no such luck.  They only burned down the homes and businesses of hard-working people.

Currently, these same august, ivy-covered halls are embroiled in a scandal.  The various student organizations that advocate for social justice have become spun-up over the Gaza war.  After Hamas’s October 7th massacre in southern Israel, these lunatics appeared on the campuses of many colleges and proudly declared that the Palestinians were completely justified in raping, maiming, slaughtering and mutilating women, children and elderly people because of colonization.  In fact, many student groups went so far as to say that Israel was solely responsible for the bloodshed.

Now, that’s an interesting claim.  Apparently, the infants and children who were brutalized and killed had it coming.  Even Vlad the Impaler would have blushed.

During the ensuing weeks after the attack and the start of the Gaza War, demonstrations on campus became quite heated and at times the pro-Palestinian crowd became abusive and threatening toward Jewish students or any organization that had a relationship to Jews or Israel.  Finally, Jewish groups and others across the country became outraged at the harassment and the lack of response by college administrations.  Congressional investigations were convened and complaints were sent to the boards of trustees of the various colleges.  And at least one $100,000,000 donation was cancelled to one of these august seats of learning.  Ouch!

During the hearings, the college presidents were grilled, and to a woman, they declared that calls for the clearing out of Israelis “from the river to the sea” was not necessarily actionable speech on their ivy-league campuses.  Of course, after being pummeled in the pages of every newspaper and with calls for them to be fired by many prominent donors they walked back every line of it.  And so, we see what a tangled web we have when questions of free speech and harassment are in play on a college campus.

But what are we to make of it?  Usually, colleges don’t reprimand their leftist students.  Three factors need to be examined.  The first is the egregiousness of the case.  The crowds were completely unconcerned with the horrific nature of the October 7th attack.  Even people who normally are unsympathetic toward Israel might be unwilling to overlook the deranged violence that Hamas perpetrated.  This alone prevents the full-fledged support that many left-wing Americans might feel for the Palestinians.  Secondly, antisemitism is a very taboo behavior in Western societies after the Holocaust.  And so, the targeting of Jews quickly becomes a news headline.  Also, there are many Jewish philanthropists in America that are responsible for large college endowments.  Accordingly, they have a great deal of clout with these colleges.  Putting these things together you can see how the normal leftist slant on campus toward “people of color” could run into opposition from even the left of center parts of the population and the powers that be.

But now that this bias in the way that free speech and harassment are doled out on campus has been showcased surely it can be the basis for a more general reform of these practices as they relate to other groups on campus.  I mean, now that the colleges have admitted their poor judgement in defining acceptable and unacceptable discourse why should we not demand the same objectivity from these colleges for conservatives?

Think of innumerable examples of harassment of conservatives on campus and the complete lack of free speech that they operate under.  When a conservative is invited on campus by a student group or faculty member, the crazy leftists not only show up to shout him down during his speech but in some cases violent mobs literally chase him off campus in fear of life and limb before he even has the chance to speak.

And what is the administration’s position on this situation?  In some cases, there is an unofficial approval for it.  In other case they pretend to be upset by it.  But there is never any attempt to prevent it and absolutely no punishment for the perpetrators.

And this does not even begin to cover the almost total disparagement of the rights of white male students by faculty, student groups and administration.  Every facet of college life including admission is slanted to disadvantage and disrespect white men whenever possible.

So, what are we to think about the consistency of the policies surrounding free speech and harassment on college campuses?  I’d say that the rules for determining what was and wasn’t free speech or harassment is completely subjective and based on a point of view powerfully eschewed to the left.

Well, if I were the President of the United States and I was handing out money to colleges, I sure as hell would have my Education Department head reviewing the records of how enforcement of free speech and harassment was handled by each of these colleges and I’d shut off the funding to any of them that wanted to play these sorts of games.  And colleges in red states should be (and some already are) cracking down on this leftist discrimination.

College has become unbelievably expensive.  And the value of the education is becoming highly suspect.  And these problems are tied to this leftist tilt.  The case of leftist psychopaths attempting to extend the Gaza War battlefield onto college campuses is a good point at which to awaken Americans to the radical leftist indoctrination camps that are the colleges of this nation.

Maybe burning them down would be the best option.  What are BLM’s rates?

Rufo’s Short Film on the “Cluster B Society”

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Christopher Rufo has made a ten minute video claiming to define the current psychopathology of the Left as the “Cluster B Society.”  It describes four different personality disorders that taken together allow for the phenomena that we see at work in the world today.  And being an academic he is able to draw the clearest examples from the college campus where narcissists, border-line personalities, sociopaths and hysterics have indeed captured the campus and established their own stable institutions that everyone else there must endure.

I don’t find myself competent to judge the accuracy or the importance of the details that Rufo is using to prove his thesis about the particular personality types that he points to in this video.  But the overall effect that he describes is familiar to everyone who has lived through the last ten years.  The feminized and hysterics-driven environment we find ourselves in is all too clear to those of us who grew up in a much saner world.

I’m not sure who is the audience for this video.  Maybe those with a grounding in psychology.  Even lacking that background I found it interesting.  But I’m not sure how it can be used to change the problem.  But I acknowledge that Rufo might find this explanation for the dysfunctional campus useful for someone like himself who is attempting to purge a particular college of its shrieking madwomen.  Kudos to him for that.

SCOTUS Bans Affirmative Action by Colleges. Finally!

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Now let’s ban it throughout American society.

 

Witness to a Friendly Quarrel

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Back on Monday the 27th of February I found a link in my mailbox to Curtis Yarvin’s substack, the Gray Mirror, with his latest post.  It was a critique of Ron DeSantis’s efforts to replace the woke management of a small state college in Florida (called prosaically, New College of Florida) by replacing the board of trustees with conservatives.  DeSantis put Chris Rufo and some other conservatives on the board and told them to excise the cancer of wokeism.

Yarvin tells a parable about how a drunken man chops down the mighty oak that shades the town square in some mythical Lithuanian town and the townspeople decide to replant the rootless trunk.  But the wise man goes and scoops up acorns and plants them around the fallen tree’s stump.

Further on Yarvin explains that DeSantis and Rufo trying to reform Florida colleges is the town trying to replant a dead tree in the ground.

“The fallacy of replanting the tree is to believe that the past is something we can just have back. It isn’t. We can be inspired by the past. We can want a beautiful oak tree in our town square. But we live in the present and we have no oak tree, just raw lumber. We can build the future under the inspiration of the past—but it is not the past. And we have to be patient enough to wait for it, or we are just losers. Press F to pay regrets.”

But the wise man (according to Yarvin) is anyone who tries to build a new culture from the ground up by supporting coffeehouse artists in New York City that somehow aren’t woke.

“Do you want to win? Or do you want to wring your hands? Where did wokeness start? Among the cool kids. In the Village arts scene. To hear the story the world will be telling itself in 50 years, always listen to New York now. The future always starts at the center and at the top.”

So that’s one side.  Today I read a rebuttal by Rufo.  He calls Yarvin’s take “right-wing doomerism.”

“Yavin’s basic theme is that the progressive-managerial state, or Cathedral, is so powerful, that any action to challenge it will end up reinforcing its power. This is right-wing doomerism—if the beast is all-powerful, better to adopt the position of a prey animal and do nothing.

But I’m more optimistic than this. The takeover of New College has already changed the dynamics in higher education. We have a strong new president who has a mandate to change the administrative and academic trajectory of the institution. You’ll see changes in the next 120 days.

…

I believe in an uncompromising new conservatism that attempts to restore the authority of the people over their government—and lay waste to woke institutional capture. The Republic is not yet dead. We have a duty to do whatever we can to save it.

I’m ready to fight—and win.”

Okay, so there is definitely a lot of rah-rah stuff here.  Rufo is cheerleading the efforts his people are making in Florida and anticipating victories and gains that won’t happen for years, or maybe decades.

But, so what?  The progressives worked at this poison for over a hundred years.  They worked away diligently and steadily.  And the results have been astonishing.  Horrifying, yes, but astonishing.  So why should we expect that our results won’t be slow and incremental.  As TomD said back a week ago or so in a comment “One step at a time is how we collectively got here and hopefully how we will get out.”

Sure, in my more pessimistic moments I fear that Yarvin is right.  The Elites control everything and they have all the money.  We can’t possibly win.  But then I think, “Then what have we got to lose by trying to win?”  So, I’ll take Rufo’s side in this cordial quarrel.

He’s making his play.  Let him finish it before we start declaring him the loser.  I hear DeSantis plans to roll out the same idea at other Florida state colleges.  They’re talking about eliminating things like gender studies and DEI and even affirmative action.  For all I know DeSantis is the next Pericles and Florida is the Athens of the new world.  It’s certainly no stranger than the original Athens having happened.

How in the world do you get the Plato, Aristotle and Thucydides from a bunch of bronze age barbarians like the Dorians toppling Aegean civilization and celebrating it in epic poetry?  Truly, the Afghanis aren’t that far removed in culture and lifestyle from the 9th century Dorian invaders.  Predicting the Parthenon from them seems a bloody miracle.

Maybe we’ll get a miracle too.  Our enemies aren’t geniuses they’re just better organized and better funded.  There is such a thing as luck.  And luck rewards persistence and intelligence.  It’s like the old saying, “God helps those who help themselves.”  If you’re just willing to lay down and die then you’ve already decided your fate.  Luck isn’t going to pull you off the ground, put your sword back in your hand and strike down your enemy.  You’ve got to try.  So, let’s give DeSantis and Rufo the benefit of the doubt and all the help we can think of.  Let’s cheer them on and provide all the rah-rah we can muster.

If DeSantis can turn around the Florida state colleges it’ll make guys like Abbott in Texas envious and might start a movement to clean up all the Red-State state-colleges.  And after that maybe it’ll spread to the grammar and high schools.  See what I mean?  Rah-rah is easy.  And it’s cheap.  What’s a few electrons rattling around in my computer?

Anyway, I’ll bet on DeSantis and Rufo in this quarrel.  Right wing doomerism just isn’t my cup of tea.

Here’s a Blueprint for Fixing Red State Colleges

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Ron DeSantis has provided proof of concept for disinfecting a college of its woke parasites.  The writer of this article goes through the why and the how of doing this to every Red State public college.  and he shows that even the private ones can be stopped from many of their worst excesses by anti-discrimination laws that prevent many of the equity hiring practices.

He draws attention to the fact that although college administrators were willing to adopt the progressive agenda of the woke movement, nevertheless they are easily cowed into following the mandates of the state that pays their salaries.  They’ll probably pay lip service to the cultural marxist outrage professed by the gender studies department but they’ll bend to the mandates of the governor and the legislature to keep their jobs and the gravy train of pension benefits.

And the same goes for the academics.  They know where their bread is buttered and they’ll back down and toe the line rather than lose their generous salaries and fabulous perks.  Kudos ot Ron DeSantis for pioneering this concept.  May all the other Red State governors copy his play book and rid half the country of woke campuses.