Posts Tagged → University
Is DEI really gone with Claudine Gay’s departure from Harvard?
So embattled plagiarist and Mein Kontext-touting DEI diversity-hire Claudine Gay resigned from her crazy person high perch at Harvard University on New Year’s Day 2024. Good. Apparently Harvard University’s board decided that setting their reputation on fire to save this incompetent buffoon was not such a good idea.
Interesting how those “reasonable man in the street” trade-off decisions work when unfettered free market forces are at work, right? I mean, Harvard could have decided that Claudine Gay was the ultimate symbol and pinnacle of American academic achievement, notwithstanding all of her now oh-so-public failures of scholarship and loooow moral character, and then staked the school’s reputation on their choice to keep her in place forever after.
But what Harvard faced with Claudine Gay as president was receiving eternal dismissive sneers of 90% of the America that Harvard deigned to sneer at. Being on the receiving end of moral judgment and intellectual mockery is not where Harvard’s caretakers see the institution or themselves, and so they had to cut loose the anchor that was dragging them down into the depths. Bye-bye Plagiarist President Claudine Gay, you will not be missed.
Is her dismissal the sign that normal, healthy, honest, hard working, tax-paying, meritocracy-loving America has been waiting for? You know, the beginning of the end of the evil DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) fad that bizarrely swept across America? DEI, the racist, mean spirited, violent, anti-intellectual, Neo Nazi anti-meritocracy belief system touted as the utopian solution to all of the ills that America never experienced, was what Claudine Gay represented and symbolized most. And with her sudden departure, DEI has taken a big hit.
Others are pointing out the delicious irony of Claudine Gay having in effect been “canceled,” because she, Ms. Gay, was the ultimate canceler of innocent people at Harvard. She of low quality and even lower achievement was the destroyer of their hard-earned careers and lives, and the brutal enforcer of the arbitrary and subjective standards for which DEI is best known and despised.
If Harvard University had at one time been best known for rigorous intellectual debate and achievement, and academic scrutiny, Der Fuhrer Ms. Gay took the school back to the Stone Ages with her implementation of DEI’s racism and savage cruelty. It was one way or the other, and Harvard was definitely going backwards at rocket speed under her watch.
Whether or not DEI is now on the chopping block remains to be seen. My sense is that rumors of its sudden demise because Harvard’s Wicked Witch of The East is now gone are greatly exaggerated, because if there is one thing the Left does not like doing, it is going backwards in their Long March against Western freedoms. Claudine Gay may be gone at Harvard, but look to this so-called “school” to select someone just as horrible as Ms. Gay, or even worse, to make their point that they and they alone now own Harvard.
Harvard U is fake, no longer “Harvard”
The plagiarism scandal around Harvard University’s low quality, diversity-hire president Claudine Gay has now destroyed not just Gay’s personal and academic reputation, but Harvard’s as well. Harvard is no longer an academic institution based on rigorous intellectual debate and merit, it is a nakedly and proudly political activism site motivated by far left wing ideas and values.
In her PhD dissertation (the subject is useless nonsense and subjective fluff), Claudine Gay plagiarized material from a number of authors and academics, not the least of which was her own PhD dissertation advisor at Harvard. Her plagiarization has led to a lot of discussion across the Harvard University campus, some academic advisory boards, the Harvard University board of trustees, academics, racially-based groups, and American society. Understandably so, because Harvard University has been the flagship educational institution in America since its founding nearly four centuries ago.
Harvard’s reputation has always rested upon two simple things: 1) The highest intellectual rigor for its students and its educators, 2) the most exclusive and competitive screening of its students and its educators. For hundreds of years, to either teach or be taught at Harvard has been the gold standard for academic achievement in America and worldwide. The cold and uncaring application of logic, reason, proofs, and meritorious capability have winnowed the desirous from the truly stellar there for centuries. Well, no longer and not any more, as Inspector Clouseau said as he smashed the priceless Steinway piano into splinters.
The debate about whether or not Claudine Gay has the academic merit and the necessary high character to remain as the university’s president has torpedoed Harvard’s reputation. Simply because the widespread formal response by Harvard University to Gay’s failures of judgment and moral character, and to her academic cheating, has been to not only allow her to stay on as now a really, really blatantly incompetent diversity hire (no white man or white woman in that position would have ever made it beyond the first few minutes of this multifaceted crisis), but to also literally allow Gay to cheat even more, only this time in public.
Claudine Gay is now being allowed to retroactively amend her PhD dissertation with the necessary citations and quotation marks that were missing when her doctoral thesis was approved. This is like the judge allowing the robber to go back to the bank and put the money back in the vault, in order to avoid being charged and held accountable for the original crime of robbing the bank, now that the robber has been caught.
Gay is being allowed to do this re-crime so that her detractors are no longer empowered with the truth, so that they can no longer accurately accuse her of academic cheating. And for those who don’t know it, academic cheating is an automatic FAIL on every real academic report card, and it is usually the means for ejection from whatever school the cheater is enrolled at.
Harvard University’s board of trustees and the academics behind this brazen sleight of hand have basically told everyone in academia, in research and development, in the business of important ideas, and in the competitive world of merit that some animals are more equal than other animals, and that there are harsh rules for everyone, except for those few special people who some remote, self-anointed elite group has artificially determined should not be judged by the same standards as everyone else.
No society can sustain itself with this kind of fake justice system, or this kind of fake educational system. With this decision to both allow Claudine Gay to retroactively amend her already finalized dissertation, and to retain her as president, every single internal brake and decision-making system designed to ensure that all of Harvard University’s outputs are the best possible on Planet Earth have failed.
It has been determined by the powers that be at Harvard that the institution is now a (leftist) political activism center with no intellectual rudder, no universal standards for behavior or achievement, no universal code of conduct. Only subjective political decisions will be used henceforth to run the school, and we now see that certain skin colors and certain Marxist outlooks will be the preferred choices.
There are a lot of things I did not expect to see in my lifetime. I did not expect to see a presidential election fraught with so many wild irregularities across so many states and jurisdictions. I did not expect to see the entire media establishment and the entire political establishment not only fail to address those electoral irregularities, but to jointly sweep everything under the rug, declare a winner who had not even campaigned in public, and to accuse those who questioned the election results as “election deniers.” I did not expect to see the force of law be used against the “election deniers” for questioning the outcome and legitimacy of the questionable election, and who have since become persecuted political dissidents and outright political prisoners in their own “democratic” country. I did not expect to see the rule of law fail as widely and as quickly as it has, and I did not expect to see the rise of a totalitarian federal bureaucracy as fast as it has happened.
I also did not expect to see America’s flagship academic institution (the school now formerly known as Harvard University) gleefully burn down its own reputation in a public bonfire of vanities.
With all of these spectacular and unbelievable failures, Harvard’s just being the latest, we are seeing the severe cultural rot America has been experiencing since the 1960s finally come to fruition. All of the cultural safeguards, institutions, and legal infrastructure designed to keep America functioning as a constitutional republic are failing and being failed on purpose and in front of our faces. We are told by the agents of these failures that we must accept these outcomes not as failures, but as inevitable changes necessary to re-make America into the socialist utopia it was always meant to be.
It now seems possible not just that the Hamas loving racist academic fraudster Claudine Gay will be retained by Harvard as its president, but that she could be forcefully installed by the federal bureaucracy and its media wing (not elected by the people) as the next president of the United States “for our own good.”
Symbols have now officially become more important than facts in America. We all see that Harvard is fake, and we are told that it is still Harvard.
Hanuka 2023, every USA conservative is a Jew
The past seven years have seen increasingly aggressive censorship and violence against American conservatives, especially on college campuses. Since the October 7th Hamas massacre of Israelis, American Jews find themselves under violent attack, especially on college campuses. Conservatives and American Jews don’t often occupy the same space, but now they do, and they should support each other.
Historically, Jews have been the canary in the coalmine for civilizational health. Countries where Jews have enjoyed freedom have done exceedingly well, and countries that murdered, robbed, raped, and expelled their Jews have fallen by the wayside. The proofs for this assertion are legion, and they include ancient Rome (what is Italy today?), 15th century Spain (what is Spain today?), modern Germany, Soviet Russia, and almost every single Muslim country today. And yes, modern Germany is rapidly swirling down the toilet. England is swaying wildly on the fence, and America is not far behind.
Western civilization is failing, and one of the victims, the beleaguered Jew, is the most prominent symbol of the evil forces that are tearing our western nations apart.
As a result of Hamas’ October 7th massacre of Israelis and their still unending rocket barrages on Israeli civilians, and then Israel’s just response to that blitzkrieg, the world has been engulfed by a mostly Islamic movement to dehumanize Jews and delegitimize Israel and Western Civilization. A bunch of white sadists and envious losers have joined in the pro-Hamas, pro-genocide, pro-Apartheid marches.
In case you have not been paying attention, Jewish-owned restaurants in Australia, Britain, Canada, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, have been targeted by violent mobs chanting about Israel and killing Jews. This same effort has also engulfed nearly every single American university, where conservatives and free speech have been aggressively banned for the past seven years. It has been interesting to see this intersection of Jew haters against freedom of speech, because their actions have shined a bright light on the plight of all American conservatives.
Turns out, American conservatives share the same fox hole as American Jews. Both are subject to unfair and unconstitutional vilification, dehumanization, and suppression of their basic human rights by the very people who claim to be the most tolerant, most open minded, most caring. Ahem.
The other day three major university presidents (UPenn, MIT, Harvard) sat before Congress and each testified that people calling for the genocide of Jews on their college campuses was not necessarily against their college policies. What a disgrace. It was shocking to see these cookie cutter leftist women presidents smirking and being coy while playing their word games. Had the words black, Hispanic, gay, transgender, lesbian, Muslim etc. been substituted for the word Jew in this policy discussion, well my gosh, of course that would have violated their college policies against hate, bullying, and harassment.
But not Jews. Nope. With Jews, these very sophisticated and exclusive women leaders had to judge the “context” in which the calls for genocide happened. Was the Jewish student actually being genocided on MIT or Harvard’s campus, like hanging from a lamp post with a rope around his neck? Well, that would certainly violate their school policy against hate, harassment, and bullying. But up until that physical violence, why, calls for genocide against Jews is just free speech, they said.
University presidents who never gave a hoot about free speech, but who rather inflicted un-American McCarthy-esque speech codes against their ideological opponents are suddenly all for free speech when it comes to calling for massacring the Jews. And this strange thing has naturally and refreshingly caused quite a backlash.
What is happening here is that the Jew is the breakwater for the American conservative, who has been illegally pounded into dust for years by the same racist , Stalinist, Hitlerite Diversity-Iniquity-Equity university/ media/ government people as were testifying before Congress the other day.
If America can agree that treating Jews differently and much worse than everyone else is wrong, then I think we are also about to agree that the evil Stalinist Diversity-Inclusivity-Equity critical race theory nonsense that put both Jews and conservatives on the chopping block was a huge un-American mistake. It is time for this nonsense to end, and for the rule of law and constitution to return.
Tonight is the first night of Hanuka, a 2,300-year-old Jewish festival that is about religious freedom in Israel earned by the edge of the sword. There is nothing joyful or miraculous or oily about Hanuka. This holiday was and still is only about the need to fight like hell with everything you have if you want to survive. The ancient Jews prevailed militarily against the enemies of all that is good, in the land of Israel, and this is what is celebrated this week.
Sounds like a good message to American conservatives and Jews alike: Fight back against the evil that is engulfing America, including the college campuses that are supposed to be beacons for learning, or you will lose everything. Firing these three evil university presidents at UPenn, MIT, and Harvard will be a good step forward.
Jews are the original “indigenous people”
Harvard University is now universally known as the place where capable young minds go to die. Literally only a few hours after the Hamas massacre of roughly a thousand Israeli civilians, and while the beheaded babies and raped women’s corpses were still warm, something like forty (40… 4-0 count ’em) student groups at Harvard University publicly announced their “solidarity” with Hamas and its broadly broadcast images of butchery.
Included among this Harvard University gathering of aspiring young sadists and Stalinists we also saw the Black Lives Matter students raising their fists against their imaginary foes, colonization and imperialism. Somehow, somewhere on the Harvard University campus, which to be fair is not anywhere near alone among so-called universities in this epic mis-educational failure, these students had been incorrectly taught that Muslim Arabs are the sad victims of a colonizing and imperialistic state of Israel. Probably more propagandists than we care to think of masquerading as serious university professors at Harvard University have been unchecked in stating lies as facts to the “young heads full of mush.” Not just about Arabs, Jews, and Israel, but a whole host of subjects.
So wackily radicalized and so failed has the universal university “educational” experience become (check out Miss Irony Of The Year award recipient and terribly mis-educated black NYU student Ryna Workman in her full on racist mode) that the political orthodoxy enabling the propagandists-faux-educators prevents college campuses from even hosting guest speakers who speak something different. Never mind that the different topics usually involve the actual, factual truth…
The factual truth about Israel and Jews and Arabs and Muslims, as evidenced by several hundred years of archaeology in Israel that jibes hand-in-glove with the Torah/ Bible, as well as well documented history of the Near East/Middle East region, is that the Jews are the only indigenous people in Israel, and likely in a good bit of the surrounding region.
But aren’t Arabs and Muslims the majority there? Weren’t they oppressed by the World War I and World War II European governments? Were Arabs and Muslims not moved, re-settled, dislocated, and treated badly?
- Everyone in Europe and the Near East was mistreated, re-located, dislocated, displaced, and treated badly in Word War One and World War Two. Literally every single ethnic and religious and linguistic group suffered greatly at some point beginning about 1912 and ending never. Germans started both wars, inflicted unbelievable suffering on their neighbors during the two wars, and then suffered very badly at the end of both wars. Everyone around Germany suffered. The suffering was shared and meted out liberally by the Turkish Empire, ally to the Germans.
- Yes, about 500,000 Muslim Arabs were dislocated about ten to twenty miles by the 1948 civil war they started in Israel, and also about 1,000,000 (one million) Jews were similarly displaced from across North Africa to Iran, in the same time period. If anyone is a sad refugee in this situation, it is the Jews.
- Arabs are -historically speaking- and -factually speaking- from Arabia, which is known today as the Saudi Peninsula or Saudi Arabia. Islam (Muslims) began in Arabia and spread throughout the region due to the violent colonizing of Arabs and the imperialistic success of Muslims.
- Arabia is not Israel or Judea or Samaria or the Golan or the Galilee. For people to leave Arabia and then lay claim to Israel and Judea and Samaria and the Galilee and the Golan (all areas with unbroken Jewish communities for the past 4,000 years) they would have to be really aggressively practicing both colonialism and imperialism.
- Sick irony of moronic ironies, the word Palestine is now used to fakely name an artificially new place that never historically existed with this name…except when the ultimate colonizers and imperialist ROMANS used it.
- Again, are you the reader not amazed at the weirdness of people who right now lay claim to the ultimate symbol of Roman colonization and imperialism as their evidence of being “indigenous” to the land they occupy? There was no Palestine, there never was a Palestine, and the only time there was any historic referral to the name Palestine was by the Romans, who fought the Jews in a long and brutal civil war, and who then tried to de-Jewishize Israel and Judea by renaming the area. And this is why modern day colonist Arabs and imperialist Muslims seek once again to re-name and de-name Israel into something else.
If you are truly bothered by colonization and imperialism, then you have to question how the heck there came to be more Arabs and more Muslims in downtown Cairo than there are Jews in the entire world. Islamic imperialism and Arab colonialism are responsible for the spread of Arab Islam and Islamic Arabs across a huge swath of the planet.
The question of whether or not these Muslim Arabs today across North Africa and the Near East and the Middle East are entitled to claim all of the area they came to dominate through terror and violence and ethnic cleansing is a discussion the world ought to have. I mean this. Neither Arabs nor Muslims are indigenous to any place except the Arabian Peninsula. I am not advocating that they all go back there right now, but to the more educated and clear-thinking readers here, I am asking you to weigh out the actual history of the region and the causes of the problems that the region now faces.
We must have an authentic discussion about this, which I recognize is something today’s university student has probably not experienced.
Israel and its indigenous people – Jews – right now face a genocidal force that is unhappy about not controlling every corner of the earth, including lusting after Spain and Austria and Israel to begin with. We gotta address this problem, people, or the problem is going to continue.
In the meantime, Am Israel Chai – the Jewish People Yet Live, a battle cry, slogan, a rejection of foreign colonialism and imperialism, whatever you want to call it, that has persisted from the throats of Jews standing on the dirt of Israel for thousands of years, until this very day. Like right now today, as Jews in their homeland of Israel fight back against foreign imperialism and colonization as presently embodied by Hamas and their evil supporters.
We actually saw a movie
The other night, the Princess of Patience and I actually went to see a movie. Like the kind of movie that used to entertain, inform, and inspire Americans, instead of the dreck Hollywood has been excreting, lo, these past thirty years or more.
We saw “Oppenheimer,” a Hollywood movie that is based on fact, based on historic events, based on real people who did and said real things. It is not based on the vomitous Woke PC corrosive nonsense that Hollywood has specialized in for decades. We were entertained and informed by this movie, and inspired about the greatness of America. What a treat! This makes four movies we have seen in the past…five years? Or longer?
Oppenheimer is about a man named Robert Oppenheimer, a genius and socially inept physicist who is considered “the father of the atomic bomb.” Aside from all the sciency stuff about the why and how of developing the bomb, the movie also delves deeply into World War II, the ensuing Cold War with communist Russia, and the very real threat that communists living in America posed to a free America itself.
There is no spoiler alert here, because we all know that the atomic race against the Nazi Germans and the communist Russians resulted in The Bomb being dropped on a fascist Japan, thereby signaling America’s ability and willingness to use the Mother Of All Weapons. Genocidal Japan’s well-earned come-uppance in Nagasaki and Hiroshima also demonstrated how easily the entire blue planet we live on could be destroyed in a tit-for-tat use of atomic weapons, thereby ushering in the “Mutually Assured Destruction” doctrine of mutual atomic deterrence that shaped American, European, and Russian foreign policy for fifty years.
This strange conundrum of “I won’t blow up Planet Earth if you don’t blow up Planet Earth” became a strategic stalemate between superpowers, thereby forcing them to fight their battles in low-intensity conflicts around the globe.
I digress. But such is the force and pragmatic usefulness of such a movie as Oppenheimer that it naturally results in discussing all that came before, during, and after the film’s historic time.
The other important thing that this movie focuses on, but does not follow up on, is the communist takeover of the American universities. That really did happen, despite the Hollywood oh-so-sad depictions of meanie anti-communists trying to stop real communists from infiltrating American institutions. Today, sending your dear child to college is not likely to get them a real education, but rather an expensive indoctrination in (failed) cultural and economic Marxism at the hands of the successors to Oppenheimer’s fellow leftists.
Professor Oppenheimer was like not only a lot of his fellow Marxist academic intellectuals at the time, that is, exceedingly generous with other people’s money in order to vaguely “be nice to everyone,” but he was also like the many non-religious European Jews who had landed in America, abandoned their faith, and then embraced various degrees of Marxism in its stead. Some had already made this transition in Europe. This is a whole other subject, but it is very much threaded throughout Oppenheimer because a) so many of his fellow genius physicists and scientists on the Manhattan Project were former European Jews and b) so many of them were various shades of pink to bright red Marxist, and thus intrinsic threats to a free and democratic America.
While these brilliant minds were needed to make The Atomic Bomb from 1942-1945, they subsequently were very real security threats because of their….divided loyalties…or, said another way, their commitment to genocidal international communism rather than to the well being of their wonderful host country, our beautiful America. And Professor Oppenheimer captured this split or dual personality disorder very well. And so the Father of The Atomic Bomb ended up losing his security clearance in a ridiculous, procedurally deficient, dog-and-pony shadow kangaroo court proceeding that nonetheless had at its core the very real need to protect America from its own openness.
I could say more about this particular subject, but I am saving it up for an essay I have been writing for three years. Maybe longer. It is forthcoming here, because when I read yesterday about the ADL’s fascist Jonathan Greenblatt excoriating his political enemies for calling out American leftist fascism for what it is, I know I have to say whatever I can say to stem the tide of genocidal leftism that began in America in the 1920s, gathered steam among Professor Oppenheimer’s fellow academics in the 1940s, and is today utterly destroying America as a free and democratic country.
So…Oppenheimer. If you have not seen it, it is worth the nearly three hour watch and the ten bucks. I give it two thumbs up.
We saw Oppenheimer in a quaint old-time theater in rural America. Note the diametrically opposed movies: Puke -woke ninja turtles and Barbie vs. very real and important Sound of Freedom and Oppenheimer. Pretty good summation of where Americans are at right now.
Four easy things you and I can do to reclaim college education
College education needs to be reclaimed if America is going to succeed in coming generations.
Getting a “college education” these days has zero to do with getting educated, and everything to do with being indoctrinated and shamed, coerced, and guilted into agreeing with extremist teachers just to get a passing grade. Nothing today about college is truly educational. College is 100% radical anti-America indoctrination, even for kids pursuing a technical or scientific degree, because the electives alone are Man-Hating 101, Sexual Confusion 202, Inconsistent & Hypocritical Argumentation 303, and Moral & Intellectual Relativism 404. Four years of this junk and even the brightest kid is gone.
Having put one of my kids through “America’s most liberal college,” and with another one being similarly indoctrinated with huge malfeasance at a second university, sensitivities to the mis-education of American youth are honed razor sharp around here.
If you are one of those easy going liberals who is just fine with your kid being barked at and browbeaten into submission by people you yourself would never hire into your own business, then shame on you for allowing your own child to be ruined. Your kid will not be prepared to think straight after undergoing the kind of nonsense now passing as college education. All your hard-earned money is being poured down a drain. I do not desire any of this for my kids.
College indoctrination is a soup of subjective notions and unprovable ideas that cannot stand the light of day, and it is for this reason that universities have circled their wagons with anti-free speech codes and all kinds of other unconstitutional foolishness meant to insulate the indoctrination from being challenged. And the few challengers are brow beaten and given poor grades.
No diverse or free thinking allowed for you!
So if you are interested in seeing universities once again become centers of learning and ideas, of critical thinking skills and robust debate, then here are some easy things you can do:
a) Do not donate a dime to your alma mater or graduate school. Don’t give them a penny, and if you feel like telling them why, do it, and tell your alumni association, too. Explain that you will not give one red cent toward political indoctrination and the crushing of free thought and individual liberty.
b) Write to your elected state representatives and demand that they eliminate faculty tenure from whatever your state university system is. Tenure is what shields the biggest losers, the most incompetent frauds from being outed as the academic nincompoops they are. Tenure was supposed to protect free thought; now tenure is used to eliminate free thought. Make every college professor at a state university work hard and compete for a five year contract. Make professors actually earn the money they are paid and the class room time they have. That will eliminate about 80% of the ideological foolishness now presented as “education,” and it will incentivize private colleges to follow the same course.
c) File a lawsuit against your kid’s university on behalf of your kid for all of the racial profiling, racial harassment, and racial discrimination now masquerading as being against “white privilege.” That phrase, “white privilege,” is a disgusting racist epithet meant to prepare people of a certain skin color for genocide. No two ways about it. If you said this about anyone else’s skin color, you would be rightly booted from polite company. So take it to the courts and get real justice, because under most state law public institutions and private institutions taking public money cannot engage in this kind of official racial discrimination. Lawsuits at NYU, Oberlin, and Google are paving the way. Join in, you just might win back your kid’s college tuition.
d) Write to your state representatives and demand that no further taxpayer funding be provided to schools where “white privilege” racism and anti-male discrimination is being taught or promoted, or any other fake racial/sexual nonsense is being bandied about as truth.
And again, if you are one of those liberal parents who is just so happy that your kids got degrees in gender studies, critical race theory, underwater basket weaving, and drawing rainbows for fifty thousand bucks a year, then you are dumb, foolish, even stupid, because those kids who did not undergo that trash will be out-thinking and out-competing your dumbed-down kids for the next fifty years. And it is all your fault; you were not just complicit in the ruination of your own children, you caused their failure.
Yeah, way to go Mom and Dad; great job.
End University Tenure, Now
College professors enjoy employment-for-life called “tenure.”
Long ago tenure was created to attract the best and brightest educators, and to buffer them from the whimsy of changing administrations by ensuring they could remain in their ivory tower and continue to think Big Thoughts.
The tenure process is pretty much an in-house show, where the most senior fellow academicians in the particular department pass judgment upon an applicant’s teaching and publishing history, as well as her personality, professional demeanor, and other considerations that are utterly forbidden in the rest of the hiring process everywhere else in every other line of work.
Once tenured, a college professor is more or less untouchable. Even egregious violations of basic workplace conduct, such as sexual harassment of students and colleagues, are usually swept aside in the interest in of preserving face. Department standing usually trumps actual productivity and usefulness. Toxic cruelty, viciousness, and unprofessional “bomb throwing” by university staff are behaviors now not only expected but nearly de rigeur to establish street cred, irrespective of field.
Galileo comes to mind as someone who could have benefited from tenure. The great ground-breaking Italian philosopher and astronomer was constantly harassed, victimized, physically threatened, and nearly bankrupted by a religious-political establishment unhappy about Galileo’s deviation from the conventional narrative.
Other free thinkers like him in his day were publicly flogged into a screaming bloody pulp before then being burned alive atop a pile of fresh green boughs, which give a low, slow heat that hurts and does not char. Slow-roasting in the public square was a risk Galileo ran to improve science, a benefit we all today enjoy.
Today, many Galileo-type educators and researchers find themselves professionally stranded by a ring of fire commanded by a politically correct band of tenured faculty who behave much like Galileo’s tormentors back in the 1400s.
Real academics and researchers are now trying to understand “global climate change,” but they reach scientific conclusions contrary to the politically acceptable talking points propounded by tenured faculty who themselves are funded by extreme foundations far outside the mainstream. Free thinkers and real scientists today stand much less of a chance of getting their PhD, much less achieving the protection of tenure in which to pursue their scientific research. The careers of intellectuals who do not conform with the left’s narrative about human-caused global climate change find their careers abruptly terminated.
Political orthodoxy trumps actual scientific curiosity. Science has become heavily politicized. This condition marks the end of science. Galileo’s attackers could not have done any better, and in fact just today anti-Trump, anti-democracy agitators from within the Hillary Clinton campaign are publishing personal details and home addresses of professionals who do not toe the Left’s line on the outcome of the election. They have done the same with college professionals who dare to stand alone, to think differently.
This week my daughter received two wild anti-democracy, anti-Trump emails from two of her biology professors at a nationally prominent university. Fearful of being degraded, humiliated, harassed, or literally downgraded for disagreeing with them, she found herself browbeaten and feeling coerced into showing up at a political rally having nothing to do with the subject of microbiology, for which our family is paying a princely sum. She did not show up at the rally her two biology professors urged her to join, and she now anxiously awaits their judgment that she somehow “failed” because she did not join in something she finds detestable.
This is the decayed state of academia today, and this is why tenure must end. Tenure no longer serves its original purpose, and in fact the beneficiaries of tenure have themselves become the very thought police and public executioners they were supposed to be protected from.
Tenure is a liability, and it allows university educations to become an expensive farce. Tenure is a benefit no other employee enjoys in any other line of work, and instead of being the outlaw exception, academia should be exceptional, derived through competition and the rise of excellence.
It is time to put all university faculty on five-year contracts, and judge them objectively: How well their students enjoyed their classes, how useful their publications are to their field and to larger American society. Professors who believe it is their role and right to harass and coerce students into politically correct thinking can be let go to find better work, and actual productive professors can stay on another five years and continue to bring real value to society.
Let’s start with the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education, and set a national trend. Pennsylvania taxpayers deserve their money’s worth, because God knows, I am not getting it at my daughter’s school.
Penn State Pain
Players names on football jerseys just does not compute. Feeling mucho pain over the NCAA atomic bomb on PSU’s football program, watching games the past couple of years has been tough to do. Am I a loyal PSU alum? Sure. But with superlame trustees, the school has given up on nearly all it stood for over the past five decades. If the trustees don’t care, why should I fight so hard to clear Paterno’s name and values? And why should I be expected to cheer on something a mere shadow of its former self?
My kids are mine, lady
“Professor” Melissa Harris-Perry of Tulane University says that kids do not actually belong to their families, but rather belong to the collective community around them. See the brief video here:
Collectivist talk is Marxist/ Big Brother/ tyrannical government, etc., and normally would be greeted in America with disbelief. But American culture has broken down under the weight of years of class warfare led by Obama.
Used to be that academia was for serious thinkers. Consider that Ms. Harris-Perry is a professor, or that Columbia University has hired Kathy Boudin, a convicted terrorist and murderer of a policeman. Boudin is a former Weather Underground member. She is now also a professor, worthy of teaching young people. Really!
Academia has been corrupted by people who are at war with America, with Western Civilization, with your church and synagogue. You’d better fight back, folks, or you will watch the equivalent of Rome burning in your own lifetime.
Easter vs. Academia
We are in the midst of Passover and just beginning Easter.
Passover and Easter are about birth, spiritual and physical freedom, and in America, the power of co-existence. Not only of different faiths, but different ethnic groups, different ideas.
However, for decades, college campuses have increasingly harbored anti-American staff, whose teachings run counter to everything America stands for. Many are at state-run colleges, where public taxpayers foot the bill for their salaries and benefits. Private colleges often receive huge federal grants that also support these anti-American professors and administrators. Number one on their hit list is usually Christianity, the dominant faith of our great nation. Christianity is the repository of values in America, so tearing down the faith leaves a vacuum they are trying to fill with secular humanism, atheism, etc.
A week ago a student at Florida Atlantic University complained about his professor, Deandre Poole, who had assigned the students in his class the job of writing the word “Jesus” on a piece of paper and then stomping on it on the floor. The offended student was suspended from class. Can you imagine if the word “Allah” or “Mohammed” had been written on the paper? It would have been an international incident. Yet because the student is a Christian, the school has nothing to say to him. Yes, the oppressive Mr. Poole is not in his class room right now, but that is because the school says he has been threatened, not because he is an awful teacher.
I don’t care what your faith is. Jewish, Christian, Hindu, Zoroastrian….if you are an American, recognize that people like Deandre Poole are at war with your ability to practice your religion without harassment or oppression, and that Poole and his friends will outlaw your ability to fight back.
It is Easter vs. Academia, and I hope Easter wins.