Saturday, December 10, 2016

Criticize Campus Insanity = Suspension





By Professor Doom

     “The Emperor has no clothes!”

--all it took was someone to tell truth to absolute power to end the insanity. Of course, the emperor in the story was unlike college admin—once he had input, he responded to it reasonably, while admin would simply have executed the child.

     It’s no secret our campuses, many of them, are descending into madness. Instead of being centers of education and research, they’re turning into massive safe spaces and party-towns, where the poor kids stumble out after 6 years deep in debt, with nothing to show for it beyond damaged livers and a fake education of no use to anyone.

      It’s also no secret that campus administration, bent on “growth at all costs” and possessing campus power to rival any Emperor. is the primary source of all this. I assure you, no professor wants to stop his lecture and say “Trigger warning, I’m about to challenge your beliefs, so if that’s a problem you’d better leave now,” no professor wants to see classrooms converted into safe spaces, and, I promise you, no professor enjoys students stumbling into class reeking of marijuana smoke, or lectures interrupted by students rushing out to puke as a result of last night’s/this morning’s binge drinking.

     Trouble is, faculty, you know, the folks that are the primary reason for the university existing, have no say in anything that goes on in most campuses today. Oh, technically we have a say…but if we disagree with administration, we’re goners.

     And so we have many professors now who either keep quiet, or make their criticisms anonymously. One professor decided to speak out against the madness infecting NYU, a university already notorious for enabling students to their own destruction. NYU is no Podunk community college, they had the skills to “out” him:



     His criticisms were hardly over-the-top, just asking people to stop taking the Social Justice Warfare so seriously.

“…among other things, made fun of a poster circulated to NYU students advising them to avoid wearing culturally inappropriate Halloween costumes…”

     This guy is no right-winger, he’s pretty far Left. But not all Leftists are insane, and not all of them wear blinders when it comes to seeing that what we’re doing now is a bad idea. He was, of course, called a Trump supporter, which he casually disavowed:

'I don’t support Trump at all. I hate him — I think he’s horrible... it’s this crazy social-justice-warrior-knee-jerk-reaction-triggered-happy-safe-space-seeking-blah, blah, blah, blah culture that it’s producing this alt-right.

'I’m a left communist. But I think that in fact, the crazier and crazier that this ['new'] left gets, this version of the left, the more the more the alt-right is going to be laughing their asses off plus getting more pissed.

'Every time a speaker is booed off campus or shooed off campus because they might say something that bothers someone, that just feeds the notion that the left is totalitarian, and they have a point.'


     As I’ve discussed before, this new Leftism is a most toxic ideology, so destructive that, as I predicted, it will eventually turn on itself. Even avowed “left communist” liberal studies professors like the above are no longer necessarily pure enough. A word out of line, and you’re gone. At some point, they’ll start going back over a decade or more to see if you’ve said something impure, and use that to mark you as a target.

     If we could just make fun of the silliness infecting our campuses, point and laugh at the naked emperor, as it were, much of this stuff would just go away. But no, dissent is not to be allowed, and a response team was formed to seek vengeance against the professor who’d dare speak out:

“A committee calling itself the Liberal Studies Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Working Group wrote a not very liberal letter to the NYU student paper condemning Rectenwald. Like a 21st-century Inquisition, they acted as both moral guardians and stern judges. ‘As long as he airs his views with so little appeal to evidence and civility, we must find him guilty of illogic and incivility…”


     It really is disturbing how often the advocates of “liberal” ideas claim they have logic on their side…the departments that actually know what logic is are philosophy and mathematics, neither of which have members screaming about following this new fad of madness on campus.

     In my math classes, I wouldn’t dare to claim I have the thinking methods of Gender Studies on my side as I prove a theorem…

     Anyway, the professor was hounded by a made-up committee that didn’t even exist before. Eventually he was brought to trial in the lame kangaroo campus court system I’ve covered many times, and suspended, with an added penalty:

The department dean told Rectenwald that some of his colleagues were worried about his mental health and so he was instructed to take leave and get help.


     This is where we are in the world today, to even ask questions, to dare to laugh at the naked emperor strutting around, is to get yourself kicked off campus and be told that you need mental help. A few months ago, to question what’s going on this country was to be labeled as an unredeemable “deplorable”…how much longer until all “deplorables” will be forced to take leave, to get re-educated, to get mental help?

     For now, this is only happening on our campuses, and perhaps I’m simply over-reacting, although this isn’t the first time my blog has reported on a dissident professor being “recommended” psychological counseling.

      Hopefully, after the professor gets his re-education, he’ll be allowed to come  on campus again, but I bet he won’t post criticisms anonymously anymore. I can’t help but be a little worried that all the other professors who are, anonymously, trying to stop what’s going on in higher education today are getting the memo that anonymous complainers will hunted down and removed just as readily as complainers who do so without a pseudonym.

     It takes little imagination to conjecture what will happen when all forms of dissent are squashed.

     Even as I, and many other faculty, live in fear, it’s fun watching this toxic ideology slowly come to its inevitable self-destruction. In theory, it does all it does in the name of diversity, and it intends to achieve its goal by achieving absolute conformity…with no other options for all besides adhering to the party line.

      The core of this ideology is hypocrisy: achieve absolute diversity by enforcing absolute conformity.

      With such a contradiction as a foundation for behavior, how can eventual self-destruction not be the end game here?

     For now, however, things are good for the professor. In the end, NYU ended the suspension and gave the guy a raise. So is there hope? Perhaps, but I’ll be more optimistic it when conservative professors get the same sort of treatment, although I suspect in this case re-education for left-communists is a pretty quick thing.


    


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