Watch a White Hate Indoctrination Video (At Your Own Risk)

By Professor Doom

     I know I’ve said many things in this blog that the gentle reader could find unbelievable, and, this being the internet, I completely respect and even encourage skepticism. I’m telling the simple truth, however, and am always eager to provide evidence of the things I say.

      I’ve mentioned before the painful, excruciating “multiculturalism” meetings faculty are often forced to attend, and they go by many names. While going through an account of the Social Justice Warrior (or SJW, or Leftist, or Bolshevik, among other names) takeover of Evergreen College, there was a reference to a “canoe meeting.”

      Amazingly enough, Youtube has a video of this meeting, which is somewhat representative of the things I’ve seen with my own eyes, though more sophisticated than most.

I encourage the reader to at least watch this abomination for a minute or so. While there are quite possibly dangerous mind control techniques involved here, it may be worth the risk, just so the gentle reader can see with his own eyes the things I've claimed are quite true.

     Does the drumming give you a headache? This is supposed to be a college campus, a meeting of scholars…and the obnoxious drumming throughout the meeting makes it impossible to think clearly.

      Is the drumming merely to make it impossible to reason, or is it to put people into some sort of hypnotic trance, where they’re more susceptible to suggestion? I offer no proof one way or the other, but the gentle reader’s own eyeballs and ears can tell something is wrong about any sort of academic meeting going on concurrently with drums pounding away.

     The meeting begins with the Poo Bah heaping praise on his “incredible equity council,” a council, I might mention, responsible for the incredible violence and hatred that marks Evergreen College. Every meeting like this I’ve been to starts with this self-congratulatory praise, even, possibly especially, when it’s completely unwarranted.

      Next comes the discussion of “equity gaps,” though such gaps are never defined, and, far more importantly, shown to exist, shown to be wrong, or shown that attempts to correct the gaps would do more good than harm.

     Always, the problem is created from nothing, to justify huge boondoggles and massive expenses, primarily on things that no rational person could believe would actually help to achieve elimination of the gaps. Assuming, of course, that elimination of the gaps is a good idea, or that they even exist in the first place.

     The Poo Bah goes on to call the gaps pervasive, pernicious, and problematic…but at no point will this imaginary problem be clearly defined enough to address the name-calling.

     The gentle reader should note how none of the scholars at this school dare to speak out against the obvious lies being forced down their throat, or to ask for any rational discussion. I concede some might think it’s just that obnoxious drumming that keeping dissent down, but I assure that it’s the culture of fear in higher education keeping faculty silent.

     Next comes the virtue signaling:

“I refuse to let whiteness consume me.”

     I…have no idea how a rational person could say something like this. What does this even mean, anyway? These people are insane. Yes, there are lots of crazies out there, but why pay $50,000 a year to have this madness shoved at you? This virtue signaling gibberish continues for some time, eventually ranting about privilege, and the poor deluded woman even gets emotional over this shibboleth…while the maddening drums continue.

     The Poo Bah continues to blather about equity, as this is now the new buzzword (I’m grateful, as I’m so tired of hearing about “leadership”). I remind the gentle reader, and the Poo Bah too if he’d deign to hear me, that higher education isn’t about equity. It’s about making humanity, making humans, better, through education and dissemination of knowledge.

     The Poo Bah continues:

“our mission is unique…abiding commitment to social justice.”

--apologies if my transcription is inferior.

     It’s not about social justice, and no, the mission of no college is social justice. I trust the gentle reader notices the resigned faculty just sitting there, doing all they can not to be rendered insensate by the drums.

 “we do equity well here…”

     The requisite minority speaker mis-spoke here, because she corrected herself. But it’s important to know the Social Justice Warrior is never satisfied, they will never, ever, admit equity, whatever that may be, is fine.

      Eventually the meeting ends with everyone getting into an imaginary canoe, leading to this mission of defeating this imaginary problem.

     A common aspect of brainwashing--yes I said brainwashing--methods is to get the victims to utterly deny reality, to acknowledge something obviously false as, in fact to the victim, quite true.

      I’m sure someone far more familiar with mind-control techniques can put together an extensive thesis about how these types of indoctrination meetings  are so effective.

     But the gentle reader need not concern himself with the “how,” as we see the effects of the brainwashing almost every day on campuses now, with rabid, extreme hatred of white people now being expressed in student guides, in school newspapers, and other forms of open, public, media. If this level of hate were directed at any other racial group, the protests would be loud and constant. Since it’s against whites, and many campuses have constant anti-white indoctrination on them, the racist bigotry continues unchallenged.

     Great numbers of people on our campuses are now succumbing to this hatred-indoctrination, and now the gentle reader can see how this is happening, with his own eyes and ears.

     Now that you know, what can be done, short of bulldozing the schools that have been taken over like this? Sadly, I see no options, although I will, as always, suggest ending the student loan scam.

      There’s just no reason the white taxpayer should pay for the brainwashing of people into violent monsters which will someday rip him and his family to shreds, after all.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

How Hatred of Whites Takes Over A Campus

By Professor Doom

     Many (not most) campuses are hotbeds of racial hatred, hatred of white people and white culture in particular. It used to be weird demonstrations of hatred of white people (eg, “Whites Are An Abomination”) were a “once a year” thing…then every six months.

     Today, hardly a week goes by without some idiocy slouching out from campus regarding the evils of white people.

     This isn’t happening at all campuses, however, not by a long shot. In fact, it’s a minority, or so I suspect…we have thousands of colleges in this country, and these reports only come from a few hundred places. What separates these weird places from the normal (ish) campuses is they are converged, i.e., taken over by Leftist lunatics.

     The takeover of campuses by Leftists is normally a slow process. First they take over the hiring committee or HR departments, then after that point only Leftists are hired, to the exclusion of any other political belief. The average of Leftist to Conservatives among faculty is around 12 to 1, but that’s an average: on a converged campus it may be 20 to 1, or even higher. That’s just faculty. Thanks to departmental hiring policies and the tendency of faculty to stay with a school a long time, the convergence of faculty is hard pressed to become complete in less than a couple generations.

      Amongst administration, convergence is much easier to achieve quickly—high turnover amongst administration (most administrators have careers where they rarely spend more than a few years at any institution), combined with HR control, convergence can be achieved in a decade or less.

At Evergreen, a small fraction of students was the face of the protests, some even going so far as to patrol campus with baseball bats, threatening people, and vandalizing property. But the vast majority of students were not part of the protests. Some were yelled at, insulted, assaulted, even battered…they wonder why their experiences are apparently of no interest to the college administration.

     Evergreen College is an example of a converged school, completely taken over by Leftist lunacy. Recently whites were threatened with violence if they even showed up on campus. A recent article gives a long and thorough discussion of how the takeover occurred, but I want to add my own observations.

      If you’re worried about your school becoming converged, I encourage you to read this article in detail so you can at least see it coming. So let’s take a look at the factors leading to the eventual downfall of a school:

In 2015, Evergreen hired a new president.

     The Poo Bah, the grand high ruler of a school, wields incredible power now. Primarily, they use their power to plunder the school, padding both resume and checking account before moving on to another school to repeat the process anew. These guys are paid insane amounts of money (in addition to luxurious bonuses and perks the Emperor of Rome would envy), but have nothing to do with education. I doubt that 1 reader in 100 can recall anything the Poo Bah at his school did for him.

…he hired an old friend to talk one-on-one to members of our community — faculty, staff, and students. We talked about our values and our visions for the college. But the benefit of hindsight suggests that he was looking for something else. He was mapping us, assessing our differences, our blind spots, and the social tensions that ran beneath the surface.  

     The Poo Bah has wide latitude when it comes to hiring cronies—I’ve literally seen dozens of administrators spring up at a school over the course of a few months, even as the student base and general funding drops. Many Poo Bahs use their power to award do-nothing patronage positions.

… fired the provost, Michael Zimmerman. The provost, usually synonymous with the vice president for academics, is the chief academic officer at an institution of higher education. Zimmerman would have disapproved of what [Poo Bah] Bridges had in mind and would have had some power to stop it. But he was replaced by a timid (though well-liked) insider who became a pawn due to his compromised interim status…

     In addition to hiring, the Poo Bah also has considerable firing power. I reiterate that Leftist takeover of administration can be extremely fast as a busload of admin leave and new Leftist admin arrive with the new Poo Bah.

He fattened the administration, creating expensive vice president positions at an unprecedented rate, while budgets tightened elsewhere due to drops in student enrollment and disappearing state dollars.

     I’ve seen the above with my own eyes on other campuses…I’m simply citing the above as reinforcement of my eyewitness testimony.

…forged an alliance with factions known to be obsessed with race. He draped the “equity” banner around everything he did. Advocating that Evergreen embrace itself as a “College of Social Justice,” he argued that faculty autonomy unjustly puts the focus on teachers rather than students, and that the new VP for Equity and Inclusion would help us serve our underserved populations… 

     Again, I’ve seen this before. Anyone reading this and working at a university needs to see the above, to know the signs of when the convergence draws near.

…concerns about policy changes were dismissed as “anti-equity.” What was in the nicely wrapped box turned out to be something else entirely…

     This is the bludgeon that keeps faculty complaints down. Every time someone spoke up, the label of RACIST came out. Nobody wants that label, and so dissent is silenced, even as we know what admin is proposing is stupid and evil.

…he felt he should have let the protesters dominate and derail the proceedings…

     The students eventually pick up how admin is warping the school beyond its mission of education. They’re told over and over again how they’re entitled to more. And when the students ask for more, often violently ask for more, the “leaders” of our schools always do the stupidest thing possible:

     They become intimidated by the protesting students, rewarding them for their un-scholarly behavior.

What happened next was predictable. Protests became more frequent and intrusive.

     Evergreen is now buried in endless protests…if your school gets to this point, brush up the ol’ resume, because there’s no coming back from here. Admin doesn’t care that these protests will eventually destroy the school (Hi Mizzou!), as they’ll reward themselves with golden parachutes on the way out.

     After the administrative takeover, comes the faculty takeover:

Meanwhile, the “Equity Council” that Bridges had appointed and empowered shifted into high gear. It produced a document laden with proposals that tear at the foundations of a liberal arts college. It recommended, for example, using “diversity and equity in the criteria for prioritizing faculty hires.”

     Again, having been on hiring committees, I always found it odd that we consistently gave advantage to “protected minorities.” I kept my mouth shut, of course, because I didn’t want to be called RACIST. When I finally did speak up about the wrongness of what we were doing, admin responded with, as usual, the opposite of integrity: I was removed from hiring committees.

In Nov. 2016, the Equity Council held the “canoe meeting.” 

    There are also indoctrination camps for faculty. The canoe meeting is available on Youtube, and must be seen to be believed. I’ve seen the like, of course, but it’s very clear that these people are insane. The re-education is madness, and here’s where the seeds of massive white hate are planted, while hypnotic drums pound away.

     So, as painful as the video is, I encourage the strong-willed reader to view it, to understand how the weak-willed are indoctrinated into white hate.

The audience was told that there was a binary choice between being allies of the plan or becoming enemies, and that regardless of anyone’s opinion, “we’re going to do it.”

     Again, I’ve mentioned many times how lunatic administrative plans are slammed down the throats of faculty, and so I’m merely showing above that the things I wrote of in this blog, years ago, are nothing but the truth.

    But wait, there’s move. Of course there’s more.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

An Inside Look At A US Indoctrination Camp

By Professor Doom

     Quite often in my blog, I reference things I’ve seen with my own eyes. I completely understand that many of the things I’ve claimed are so ridiculous as to be impossible to believe. Faculty forced to nod their heads in agreement as an ideologue tells us there were no European battles in pre-colonial North America because they united to keep the black man down? Sure. Documentation that 1/3 of the courses on campus were so void of material that students who didn’t know they were signed up for the course still got an “A” grade? Absolutely. Have I seen times on campus when 1,000 students were supposedly in class but with only a dozen cars in the parking lot? Of course.

     Hey, you’re just reading on the internet, I commend the gentle reader for viewing my assertions with suspicion. Understanding and respecting my readers, I have no choice but to highlight when others give eyewitness testimony confirming the things I claim (and my apologies for patronizing those who, hopefully long since, have come to understand that I’m simply telling the truth here).

     Here goes:

What I Learned at the Racial Justice indoctrination Camp

     I’ve dealt with similar things myself, of course. Often the Poo Bah uses some racial incident (typically a hoax) to justify forcing faculty to come and listen to ideology for a while, and what we have here is no exception:

	Several months ago the president of Loyola University Maryland, Brian Linnane, announced to the faculty that he had been thinking a lot about the Baltimore riots that took place two years earlier.

     I don’t know how anybody can take Poo Bahs seriously, they don’t even try to make their lies credible. If the Poo Bah honestly thought he could do something relevant to those riots, taking two years to decide upon a course of action in response to rioting bespeaks a horrific level of incompetence. At least we can be deeply grateful that he’s not head of a fire brigade.

     Tossing his pathetic excuse for faculty indoctrination aside, it’s clear the Poo Bah is looking to pad the ol’ resume. There’s big, big, money in diversity these days, so “politely asking” a bunch of scholars to endure indoctrination will go a long way towards a huge pay raise.

     In response to all of this the college president decided that what is needed to reduce the likelihood of such events in the future is to put the affluent, mostly white, Loyola University Maryland faculty through a round of cultural Marxist “racial justice” training.  Such language reminded me of Chinese and Vietnamese communist “re-indoctrination camps”…

     The professor doesn’t consider the real reason the Poo Bah is doing this, but I feel it’s important to understand this great flaw in the structure of higher ed right now: our “leaders” receive great financial rewards for pushing this ideology on us. Take away those rewards, and I suspect the pushes will become less common.

      So, what did the professor learn at the camp?

What I learned is that all the problems of the 65 percent black population in Baltimore city (one of the highest murder rates in the world, poverty, horrible government schools, criminal gangs randomly attacking tourists at the Inner Harbor, street crime run amok, “no-go zones” where even the police won’t go for fear of being shot at, etc.) are caused by “white privilege.”  The lowliest, indigent, white redneck who lives in a rusted-out old school bus down by the river in Tennessee is “privileged,” by definition, whereas the children of  multimillionaire Barack Obama or multimillionaire Tiger Woods are not privileged.  In fact, since they are black they are, by definition, “oppressed” by the white redneck who lives in the rusted-out old school bus down by the river.

     Well, gee, that’s pretty much the same stuff I “learned” too. That said, there’s a dog not barking here that annoys me greatly.

      The professor giving his testimony sure doesn’t mention a single scholar challenging this stuff being foisted upon them by race hustlers, but, seriously, it’s the lack of challenge that’s the problem here.

      See, to advance human knowledge you must challenge what is already “known.” I don’t have a problem with people standing up and saying things like the above, challenging how (rational) people view the world. The problem is faculty are now scared, far too frightened to dare point out how ridiculous the assertions are.

       Yes, we have plenty of professors too entrenched in the ideology, or are themselves outright frauds, so I wouldn’t expect them to challenge this narrative. But the professor giving this testimony knows he’s having lies shouted at him:

A close second in terms of the causes of Baltimore’s problems, I learned, was the bigotry of white men who died fifty years ago or longer.  We were shown parts of a video documentary about “the history of racism” up to the 1950s and were told that little or no progress has been made in Baltimore’s black community because of this permanently-debilitating history….No mention was made of the fact that, just a few miles down the road in Columbia, Maryland one will find some of the most affluent black professionals in the world who share this same history. 

     --emphasis added

                                                                                                                                                                          

     It’s so sad that this professor, possessing knowledge in direct contradiction to the assertions being made in indoctrination camp, did not speak out. I’ll give him a pass, because I know the culture of fear in higher ed today.

      After having their intelligence insulted, at last the scholars speak up, sheepishly (to use the professor’s own words):

I also learned that only white people can be racists or commit racist acts.  This is because the cultural Marxists have redefined racism to mean an act of discrimination plus “power,” and only white heterosexual males can wield this “power.”  Several of my faculty colleagues sheepishly questioned this obviously bogus idea, based on their life experiences, but got no response from the presenters.

     Again, this is what I noticed, too, when I experienced indoctrination: even if you gently point out how what you’re being told makes no sense, you get no answer. I’ve seen it before: if you ask a question, they simply repeat the lies they just told you, as though you simply didn’t hear them the first time. So, it’s not all fear in higher education, there’s also futility.

      The professor himself does try to ask a question:

I asked the presenters the following hypothetical:  If the Congressional Black Caucus got a law passed that funded “minority scholarships” for black students and advertised that white people need not apply (we do have such programs), would that be discriminatory?  I did not get a yes or no answer, but another mini lecture about white privilege.

     This really is key to an ideology: it simply cannot tolerate questions. All it can do is repeat, and repeat, and repeat. Again, I suppose it’s not entirely fear that keeps faculty from challenging the narratives presented at these indoctrination camps, but the established futility of trying to make even a little headway against the tsunami of fake information washing over the scholars.

      The professor does point out how terrible the ideas presented here are, in his essay…but he sure didn’t do so at the actual “seminar” of indoctrination. Again, I’ve seen what happens when you try that: the dean will send you a formal statement, telling you how disappointed she was that you weren’t collegial at the meeting, and that further displays of non-collegiality on your part will lead to termination.

     So, for me, the “futility or fear” question is easily answered by “fear,” but reasonable people can disagree.

       Just don’t do that at an indoctrination camp.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

Jingle Bells is RACIST?

By Professor Doom

     One thing about the social justice warriors (SJW) is they are never happy. It’s why our campuses are now obsessed with micro-aggressions, offenses so tiny they cannot be seen, and yet still can merit punishment because they annoy the SJW.

      Racism annoys SJWs as well, and because they being miserable and spreading misery, darn near everything is racist, from milk to financial literacy to mathematics.

     In the holiday spirit, then, allow me to address one more thing to make the SJW angry:

Boston University professor claims Jingle Bells is RACIST 

--the title is arguably misleading, however, and I ask some forgiveness if I’ve clickbaited by using their title.

     Filing one more in the “I can’t make this crap up” category, I really think we’ve gone overboard here. Everything, apparently, can be called racist now, and, more importantly, you can get kudos from admin (as well as press coverage) for making a claim that something is racist.

     So why is the song racist?

In the course of her research, Hamill discovered a playbill indicating that Jingle Bells was first performed under the title One Horse Open Sleigh in blackface, for a minstrel show at Ordway Hall on Boston's Washington Street in 1857.

      So, the song was performed in blackface in 1857. And? Almost every professional musical performance in the United States in the mid-19^th century was made in blackface…even black performers put on blackface. An actual history professor knows this, and knows that if “was performed in blackface” makes a song racist, every song sung in that century would be racist.

      SJWs are nuts, plain and simple.

      The song, as I trust the gentle reader knows, is about having fun riding a “one horse open sleigh.” What about that is racist? Essentially nobody in the United States owns a horse anymore, and only a fraction of those rare few have a sleigh…are they racist, too?

      To her credit, the theatre history professor is backtracking and clarifying only that Jingle Bells has racist roots…but I find this pretty thin sauce. Simply singing a song in blackface, at a time when that’s how songs were done, does not make the song racist, or even attribute racism in any way—it would be scores of years later before “racism” and “blackface” would become linked. This it taking “guilt by association” way too far, and the possibility that this song’s possible debut was possibly made by blackface singers is a historical detail, nothing more.

     Checking her other works, I do concede that she’s a legitimate scholar, and probably not a true SJW, so perhaps she’s being honest in saying her work is being misinterpreted. Still, you know the SJWs upon finding out about this legitimate research, will use this as justification to be offended some more.

      If so, I hope some folks will take the opportunity to bellow it out just few decibels higher than reasonable just for the non-benefit of the SJW.

      The comments section uniformly laughs at the idiocy here, and rightly so. However, I take it as a message of hope: the general public is now starting to pay attention not merely to what’s being said on campus, but also to what’s being considered as publishable research.

     Happy Holidays, all, and best wishes for the new year.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

   

Every Campus Race Hoax Is A Success

By Professor Doom

     I can’t emphasize strongly enough how our campuses are being mismanaged. Yes, many administrators have (bogus) Ph.D.’s in Leadership and Vision, but those degrees really don’t represent any actual knowledge of how to run a campus.

      One of the weird thing about the many hate crimes on campus is how often they are hoaxes. Nearly every day in this country there are such fake hate crimes, so many that I quickly gave up keeping track of them.

     Our incompetent admin always seems to respond to hate crimes, even fake crimes, in the worst possible way: by hiring more Vice Presidents of Diversity. Even when everyone agrees the hate crime didn’t happen, it’s still quite possible for the campus to spend another million dollars a year for all eternity, to “keep it from happening again.”

     Now, when there’s a fake hate crime, a good leader would track down the people (students, usually, but sometimes faculty) perpetrating the hoax and punish them, hopefully punting them off campus. That’s good management: make sure students know they will not benefit, and will be punished, for making fake hate crimes.

      It seems a pretty simple idea, one shouldn’t need a Ph.D. to understand how this works. If students are rewarded for crimes, they’ll continue to commit crimes.

      Kansas State had a couple of fake hate crimes recently. The first was simple confusion:

In October, a Jewish ceremonial tent was destroyed. Initially, it was investigated as anti-Semitic vandalism. Authorities later concluded the tent was damaged during inclement weather. …

     It really is amazing how a storm can push over a tent and the first possibility is “this was a hate crime.” Sheesh. At least Kansas State didn’t decide to blow $1,000,000 a year to keep storms from knocking over tents.

       Could the “leaders” of Kansas State be so competent as to make two good decisions in a row? No way:

In the past week, a 21-year-old black student at Kansas State confessed to law enforcement officers to having defaced his own car with racist graffiti and slurs, including “whites only” and “go home,” in what was described as an out-of-control Halloween prank. No charges were filed against the student.

--Emphasis added

     This student actively tried to pull  off a hate crime hoax, could possibly have started a race riot. But no charges were filed?

     What a horrible, horrible decision. How can our leaders not understand that, if there are no penalties for creating fake hate crimes, that this might well lead to more fake hate crimes?

       So, one good decision, one bad decision. Could the leaders at Kansas State make a worse decision? Sure, absolutely:

Classes at Kansas State University will be suspended for two hours Tuesday to allow students, faculty and staff and members of the Manhattan community to participate in a unity walk and assembly in response to a series of racially charged incidents on campus.

     That’s right, the “series of racially charged incidents,” which is to say two non-hate crimes, leads to a reward for the students: classes are suspended.

      Hmm, students know they won’t be penalized for faking hate crimes, and also know that if they fake a few such crimes, classes get cancelled. How can anyone not understand that these decisions will lead to more fake hate crimes?

      I have my “end of the semester” flu today, so I ask forgiveness of the gentle reader for the short post. But I do wish to point out that the guys running these places, even the low level deans, commonly make $100,000 or more a year, while the many vice presidents score $250,000 a  year, and the Poo Bah can easily make $1,000,000 a year.

       Almost all of them have Ph.D.s in university leadership, management, or vision, and all of them put together can’t see how managing these types of decisions might lead higher education into a death spiral of more fake hate crimes.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

  

A Look At Some Strange College Courses

By Professor Doom

     When it comes to math, I’ve already shown that most of what’s offered in college, especially at community college, is just repetition of the material students saw in the 9^th grade or lower, for about 90% of the coursework.

     In times of yore, the way how a college course was created was faculty, in a department, would get together in a committee and decide what a course would have in it. As the entire point of college is preparation, each course would be filled with the material which would prepare the student for ever more advanced material. You couldn’t just come with a course, make up your own curriculum, and have it offered without other scholars looking it over and verifying that the course would be worthwhile for students to take.

      This process has changed at many campuses. Instead of a committee, all you need now is just one faculty saying he has an idea which will sell. He then goes to admin, and tells him the course will sell; if they believe him, then, just like that, we have a new college course. Whether the course is a waste of students’ time or not is irrelevant…sales growth is all.

     Now, courses which will sell are naturally courses students are interested in. A key component in this is to have very little material (because studying isn’t fun for most students), and today students have a wide variety of fake courses which they can take…and learn nothing.

     This is a big factor in why so many college graduates have literally nothing in the way of new skills or knowledge: the bulk of their coursework is, at best, introductory material which anyone can learn in a few weeks, a month at most.

      A recent article on ZeroHedge listed a great number of fake courses—it’s a small sampling, I assure you—and I want to discuss how some of these courses highlight the issues in today’s higher ed.

“…the quality of education that our college students are receiving is a complete joke.  Especially on the undergraduate level, almost all testing consists of either true/false, multiple choice or fill in the blank questions…”

     The above actually addresses what goes in the “real” courses. Even fairly advanced courses are now taught in huge lecture halls. There simply is no way you can grade hundreds of tests in a sane amount of time except through “fill in the bubble” testing.

     Similarly, there’s no way to address even mildly confusing material in a huge course. It’s one thing to address a topic that 6 students will have questions about (in a 30 person class), as you can handle that many questions in a typical 50 minute course. But if now you have 60 people with questions (in a 300 person class), well, there’s no way to handle that many questions in a sane amount of time. Best not cover things which generate questions.

     The end result is many of course college courses only address the lightest part of material in the most superficial way, putting it all down in a few dozen PowerPoint slides; I’ve reviewed a number of these courses, and you can literally read/learn everything in the course at a passable level in an afternoon, two at most if you knew nothing of the material before you started.

      But these courses soak up 4 months of a student’s time while generating thousands of dollars of tuition per student.

      And those are the “real” courses. Let’s look at just a few fake ones:

WOMGEN 1225: Leaning In, Hooking Up (Harvard University)

     For the uninitiated, let’s go over what the above says. “WOMGEN” says this course is taught in the Women’s and Gender Studies department, a department notorious for fake courses. The “1” in “1225” says this is a course for freshmen (if the number started with 2 it would be for second year courses, and so on).

     And the title says this course will teach students about “hooking up” and getting into sexual encounters.

     Yes, sure, this course will sell, but pretty much every adult on the planet knows about how to get sex, and it hasn’t been an issue anywhere for millennia. It’s obvious on the face of it that no useful job skills are here, and, far more importantly from the point of view of someone who cares about education, this course in no way prepares the student for more advanced study.

     But the title is obviously an easy sell to students, right? Way to go, Harvard.

SOAN 261: Campus Sex in the Digital Age (Washington & Lee University)

     “SOAN” refers to Sociology and Anthropology, and the “2” makes this a second year course (not all campuses use 4 digits for their course numbers). A second year course? Can the gentle reader even guess what about this title makes it clear you need to know some prior coursework to do well here? I sure cannot.

     Again, we have a title clearly chosen to maximize sales. Yes, I’ve mentioned many times in this blog how dubious sex-related coursework is big on campus, but, as always, I like to show that I’m not merely making things up in this regard.

GWS 462: Hip Hop Feminism (University of Illinois)

     Back to Gender and Women’s Studies (not all schools name their departments the same way), this is a senior level course, the most advanced coursework students in the Gender Studies degree program might see before graduating.

      And they learn about Feminism in the Hip Hop community. It takes 3 years of preparation before you can address this topic in detail? Seriously?

SOC 388: Marriage in the Age of Trump (Davidson College)

     You get the feeling this one was slapped together quickly by the Sociology department? I’m puzzled by this being a third year course, but I’m vastly more puzzled by the title. We’re living in the Age of Trump now? Gee whiz, it’s only been a year, and now it’s an “age”?

     Marriage is a serious commitment, in our Western Society a couple usually is romantically involved well over a year before they get married. So how could the Trump phenomenon, being less than a year old, affect a multi-thousand year old institution so quickly?

     Being taught in the Sociology Department (very notable for Leftism), it’s a safe bet the professor here is going to use this course to rage against Trump in a torrent of hate; I’ve a number of friends suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome, so I’m pretty confident of this.

     In any event, the “Age of Trump” might not even be 4 years, and can’t be more than 8 years…so what exactly could this course be preparation for?

SOCI 332: Alternative Genders (Texas A&M University)

    Just a quick comment on this one: we really, really, need to cut back on sex-related coursework, particularly when it’s based on fad material.

AFA 4430: Black Lives Matter (University of Florida)

     In addition to heavy emphasis on sexuality, there is a strong emphasis on ideology in fake courses. Now, absolutely, the BLM movement is worthy of study, even study by advanced scholars (this is a 4^th year course taught in the African Studies department), but…BLM is not so old, so huge, with figures so prominent, that you can spend 4 whole months on it. A seminar would have been fine, if there were more interest in educating students than soaking up student loan money.

ENVS 042: Ecofeminism (Swarthmore College)

     This course might technically not count as college level, at least (a “0” usually indicates remediation, but that word doesn’t seem to apply to this topic). How can there be any doubt from the title that this course is ideology? Environmental Sciences is now a department, apparently.

FRSEMR 61D: Trying Socrates in the Age of Trump (Harvard University)

     Again with the Age of Trump? This is a generic Freshman Seminar, so not a college course. With any luck at all, the students aren’t charged for this…but I’m worried that scholars at two different institutions honestly think a single year makes an “age”—actually, it’s less than a year, since these courses couldn’t possibly be proposed, much less created and offered, until after the election. Would “1 week” constitute an age? That’s seriously how much time could have passed between the election and creation of the course (when I review a course before teaching it, incidentally, it takes me more than week, even for a course I’ve taught many times before).

     The article goes on with courses on Star Trek, Lady Gaga, Harry Potter, and other topics, often taught in departments which didn’t even exist when I was in school. And, I assure the reader, none of this stuff is preparation for more advanced study.

     I’m so grateful I went to college in a time when the only coursework available was work that prepared me for better things. If my degree had been filled with the above stuff, things which will almost certainly be of no relevance a few decades from now, I would have nothing from my education…much like many students today.

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