By Professor
Doom
When writing of the madness of today’s
higher education, I’ve been picking on California a bit much. This is a little
misleading, because the foolishness that dominates higher education isn’t
restricted to California, it’s country-wide. No state is immune from the
corruption and incompetence that defines much of higher education today.
So let’s look at the madness at the opposite
side of the country from California:
--there are actually 9 new words being added to the vocabulary. The
reader can click the link to see them, but will possibly become less
intelligent by doing so.
The point of this was to make a campus of
27,400 students, already larger than some towns, “inclusive” by no longer
including language references to gender in pronouns. The simple fact that using
this language exclusively to this one campus will exclude normal people from knowing what the heck is going on when
they come to this campus clearly didn’t occur to administration. This is
insane, although already some faculty penalize
students for using “wrong” gender pronouns.
Officials have since insisted that the guidelines are not
compulsory and that they do not want to 'dictate speech'.
Donna Braquet, who runs the university's Pride Center, wrote
the guidelines, which are accompanied with a long table demonstrating how to
replace the regular parts of speech.
While not mandatory, there’s a real risk
here. The sane people will simply continue to use the English normal people
use…and will quickly become excluded by the “inclusive” nutbars that think
changing the language in this way will accomplish something.
I feel the need to point out here that
gender is “baked in” to many languages in the West, but is far less a part of
Eastern languages. Mandarin, for example, doesn’t have distinct gender
pronouns—this presents an extra hurdle for native speakers of this language
when they learn English. If admin had their way, Chinese students coming here
would have an extra hurdle on top of that. It’s worth noting that despite this
supposedly “superior” aspect to the language, there are still the same gender
“issues” in China as here. These issues have nothing to do with the language.
She also advises staff members not to call roll in class,
and to instead greet every student by asking them to announce their name and
pronoun of preference.
Because so much of tuition is now paid for by
Federal loans, the Feds want to know that the students are at least coming to
class. While admin prefers professors to commit fraud and just say everyone is
coming to class (because that way admin can claim more money for itself), the
rules mandate that you should call roll every day. It’s reasonable enough,
although with the large huge gigantic Brobdingnagian
classes of today, simply calling roll is a significant chore, consuming, over
the course of a semester, an hour or more of class time. Professors have no
real chance of learning student names…the possibility that the professor will
recall “pronoun of preference,” beyond what should be obvious, is goofiness
that only an administrator with no classroom experience would consider.
Now, this “suggestion” has been roundly,
and justifiably, mocked as absurd, but, as is so often the case, the news
article misses the real issue here.
“Donna Braquet, a gay
rights official at the university, wrote the guidelines,…”
See, the above is the real problem. Higher
education is getting more, and more, and more expensive, even as the teacher’s
pay drops, in many cases, to below the poverty level. All the
money flows, not to education, but to a bloated administrative caste that
literally has nothing to do but try to figure out a way to justify their highly
paid jobs.
Part of the tuition expense is to pay
for, and I’m obviously serious here, “gay
rights officials” governing our universities. Where exactly do they work?
In fiefdoms, in this case the Office for
Diversity and Inclusion at the University of
Tennessee. These kinds of fiefdoms are overrunning our campuses, sucking up
dollars by the oceanful. Each fiefdom has its own staff, each usually making
far more than any educator or researcher.
Inside this particular fiefdom is the
sub-fiefdom where Donna Braquet rules:
Donna is the director of the Pride
Center, which, mercifully, includes only a few assistants to Donna’s needs, as
well as keeping the Center open for 12 hours a day, most days (seriously, do we
really need this fiefdom to be open this much? Do they honestly get many
students coming in at 8:30 pm looking for help with gender pronouns?).
There’s a fundamental rule to fiefdoms:
do not interfere with any other fiefdom. Each fiefdom is staffed with
administrators whose primary concern is feathering xyr (sic, “xyr” is a
proposed new word) own nest, and secondary concern is for maximum sycophancy to
the ruler of each fiefdom.
So, when a ruler comes up with an idea,
no matter how idiotic (and it gets far worse than today’s topic), there’s nobody to stop it. The Poo Bah is so far
removed from campus events that he may as well not be there (in fact, getting rid of the Poo Bah would be wonderful for
education). The other fiefdoms won’t
stop a stupid idea because doing so might lead to interference with their own
stupid ideas…and nobody inside the fiefdom will dare tell the ruler xe (sic, and
I defy anyone to pronounce that in a way that doesn’t sound much like “she”) is
being ridiculous.
There really needs to be an honest
discussion about all these little fiefdoms on campus. More accurately, there needs to be an annihilation of these fiefdoms,
which consume much of the resources of higher education today. Not only could
tuition then be lowered to more reasonable levels, but higher education would
be greatly improved without all the distractions these useless fiefdoms cause.
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