Category Archives: Education

Business, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Obama Gets It Right

It’s not often I can have a post title like that, but I agree with Glenn:

President Obama was perhaps inspired by a recent article in The Atlantic by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, “The Coddling of the American Mind.” Lukianoff and Haidt describe in some detail the way in which college sensitivities have undermined teaching, to the point that some criminal law professors — in law schools — are afraid to teach about rape, and where “trigger warnings” and concerns about “microaggressions” rule the day.

Rather than respond to such complaints with a suggestion that the complainers might be better off under professional psychological care than enrolled in institutions of higher learning, university administrations have tended to go along, even though the complainers represent a rather small fraction of the student body. The result has been a sort of arms-race of oversensitivity, in which each complaint is trumped by one still sillier, until we have reached the situation that Lukianoff, Haidt — and Obama — deplore, in which student mental health may actually suffer, and professors worry that they’ll be pilloried for saying that something “violates the law” because the word “violates” may trigger rape anxieties.

In Monty Python’s Holy Grail, the knights decide to skip a visit to Camelot because “it is a silly place.” With college costs (as President Obama has also noted) skyrocketing even as students seem to be learning less and finding greater difficulty obtaining suitable employment after graduation, higher education administrators should worry that more and more students will draw a similar conclusion. Perhaps President Obama’s warning will get their attention.

This might be the closest he’s ever come to a “Sister Souljah moment.”

Business, Economics, Education, Mathematics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Bernie’s Proposals

59 Comments

They would add $18T to the national debt. That’s essentially doubling it (again, after Obama already did it once), not even counting the unfunded liabilities of social security et al.

Related: BS from Bernie:

Bernie Sanders, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, spoke at Liberty University today. You can read his speech here. It is useful, in that it exposes the extent of Sanders’s ignorance and radicalism. Any deconstruction of a speech this bad must be selective.

Read the whole fisking. It’s also worth noting, in contrast to when a conservative speaker comes to a leftist college, how politely he was treated.

Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

The War On College Men

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A Democrat representative from Colorado steps it up a couple notches:

The main result of adopting Polis’s approach would be to create — since we all know this policy is aimed at male students, and almost exclusively enforced against them by a university “diversity” bureaucracy in which men are wildly underrepresented — a hostile educational environment for male students. As the Pope Center for Higher Education, which conducted a study of gender representation among “gender equity enforcers,” found, “Considering that the overwhelming preponderance of sexual harassment allegations are directed by women at men, the disproportion of women to men in the positions charged with interpreting and enforcing the sexual harassment rules is a legitimate concern. Are male students who are accused of sexual harassment likely to receive fair-minded treatment in these offices?”

If even a false accusation of sexual assault is grounds for expulsion, the result is to burden student sex lives with fear. That’s doubly so when the enforcers are so heavily non-male. Men who fear that they may be so targeted — and remember, you don’t even have to have dated a woman to be falsely accused — cannot possibly enjoy college in a normal fashion.

These people are insane totalitarians. If you wanted to destroy academia, it would be hard to do a better job.

Education, History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

College Graduates

…don’t know much about the Constitution.

What a mess. This is shameful. They should be learning those sorts of things in high school. But instead, they’re propagandized about how we’re destroying the planet and how the US is the worst country in the history of humanity.

[Update a while later]

Related: Six questions you should ask about your children’s school:

If you want your child to grow up to be an independent thinker and a leader, take a look at the curriculum with this question in mind: Is your child being taught to learn in an objective fashion, or play political ball in a bureaucratic system?

If it’s a public school, it’s most likely the latter.

Education, Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

For Incoming And Returning College Students

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Ashe Schow has a warning:

Students, especially male students, need to stop viewing sex merely as pleasure or as an expression of affection or love, and begin seeing it as a potentially life-ruining moment. And as someone who has never advocated abstinence, that is a painful thing to have to say.

The situation has gotten so bad that one parents’ group has begun distributing flyers on California campuses warning students of how easy it is to be accused and expelled.

The reality of it is this: There is little trust anymore between the sexes. Women are being told that men, especially men they believe are their friends, are waiting to get them drunk and rape them. This in turn is leading men to believe that women are going to accuse them of sexual assault for just about any reason, even for consensual sexual encounters.

I’m glad I’m not attending college these days.

[Update a few minutes later]

Defining deviancy up: Remarks about physical appearance now constitute “sexual violence.”

Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

The Timothy Hunt Witch Hunt

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I don’t think I’ve ever commented on this, but almost three months later, it’s pretty clear now what happened, and there’s a good description over at Commentary. His treatment was shameful:

Like most of the science journalists who covered Hunt’s solecism, Zadrozny and Ferguson were content to rely on a handful of tweets as the only evidence in an obviously controversial story. Sadly, the Hunt affair provides ample ammunition for those who believe Internet reporters are a tribe of third-raters with little or no ethical standards or training in Journalism 101.

But there’s another explanation for the fact that reporters such as Zadrozny and Ferguson felt no obligation to verify the facts of the case or do any old-fashioned reporting. In their cases, the temptation to cut journalistic corners may have been overwhelming. That’s because for anyone with an ax to grind about gender equality or sexism in science, this was one of those stories that the tabloids used to label (jestingly for the most part) “too good to check.”

Kudos to Louise Mensch on exposing this initially. I’d also note that my respect for Deborah Blum has plummeted.

[Update a few minutes later]

And then there’s this burn:

The most generous interpretation of Connie St. Louis’s bizarre behavior is that she was too intellectually limited to recognize irony that was somehow obvious to an audience composed mostly of people who spoke English as a second language. A leak of the unedited version of her “Stop Defending Tim Hunt” piece for the Guardian is so garbled and incoherent that this actually seems plausible, though it also makes you wonder how and why she came to be teaching journalism even at a third-rate institution like London’s City University.

The science journalism community has not covered themselves in glory here.

[Update a few minutes later]

Then there’s this:

One of the more depressing aspects of the affair has been the number of clever and influential people, not all of them women, who have stated that even if Hunt was joking, he still deserved to be punished. These people genuinely believe that jokes about alleged differences between the sexes are beyond the pale—the cause of anti-sexism, like that of anti-racism, being simply too important or too fragile to tolerate subversive humor.

This “even if they’re innocent they deserve to be punished attitude” is not a new one. Christina Hoff Sommers documented it in her book in the nineties, in which in 1991, Catherine Comins at Vassar (who, sadly, may be a childhood friend of mine, though I’ve never seen a bio) said: “Men who are unjustly accused of rape can sometimes gain from the experience.”