Australian Universities As Battleground For HK Protests

By Professor Doom


      As I recover from lung surgery #2 (and a new 9" scar), a somewhat shorter post than usual.



     A while back I wrote about Chinese influence on our campuses; I still believe it’s an infinitesimally small problem compared to  other issues in higher ed, but a reader took me to task for it, believing I was underestimating the threat. I suppose there’s room for disagreement to just how much evil the Chinese government can possibly do on campus while a great deal of definite evil is being done by the "leaders" there, but the reader did have a point about what’s happening on Australian campuses:

Australian unis become battleground over HK protests



     While I’ve lightly covered the corruption of the Australian higher education system, it’s been a few years, and much has changed recently, particularly with regards to events in Hong Kong.

Tensions in Hong Kong have rippled across Australian universities, as supporters of the pro-democracy protests have been targeted and harassed by “patriotic” mainland students – with the tacit backing of Beijing.

But that has angered some mainland Chinese students, who have physically confronted protestors, torn down message boards and demanded universities provide a “pure study environment” free of political messages that “insult” their homeland.

--emphasis added.




     And here I am feeling like a Chinese apologist again. Before going further, I’ll give such disclosure as I have. I’ve been to Beijing, China, speak a bit of Mandarin, have Chinese friends—the latter is almost a necessity in my field, as grad school in mathematics has plenty of Asian students. To my knowledge, I’ve never taken a penny from the Chinese government (feel free to use the donate button, President Xi!). Every Chinese mathematician I’ve known has cared far more about mathematics than China, although I’m sure there are exceptions.


       In any event, what’s wrong with making universities a pure study environment? Politics has warped the American university system to the point that many campuses are little more than ideological training centers, and similar activity occurs in Australia…so, I rather see the point of Chinese students counter-protesting the pro-Hong Kong protests. While the article references “tacit approval” for the counter-protests, this seems a bit of a slant—it’s quite reasonable to assume the Chinese government would be in support of the Chinese government after all, there’s no need for the article to emphasize the obvious here.

“We wear masks because we know they will take photos and put it online on their social network sites and they try to find who (we) are,” said 23-year-old student James, who witnessed the skirmish.

He said several students who participated had their details published online and at least one had been the target of harassment, including anonymous phone calls.

       I’m not wild that the “pro democracy” students are wearing masks, even as I get that these days, “doxing” is a real thing. Why don’t the pro-Chinese supporters wear masks, though?

Australia’s cash-strapped universities have struggled to respond, weighing support for free speech with the need to sustain a lucrative supply of Chinese students.

More than 181,000 Chinese people are enrolled in Australian universities – by far the largest cohort of overseas students – bringing more than US$6.8 billion into the economy each year.

   Much as in the United States, universities are more about “the dollar” than about education, and so I have to worry that, yes, the universities will be coming down against the HK protestors to support their meal tickets from China. To put the above statistics in context the reader should note that something like 360,000 Chinese students come to American universities—considering the US has about 15x the population of Australia with a smaller relative college student base, Chinese students do represent a far larger concern in Australia than here.


      The Chinese Students and Scholars Association – a government-backed body – has led complaints about the pro-Hong Kong protests.

…“We are all students, we should focus on our study,” it said.




      Yes,  I concede the above is a little sinister overall, and I even respect the pro-Hong Kong students needing to be careful about their identities, lest their families (and themselves) face trouble in China or Hong Kong. China doesn’t have the free speech protections which Americans enjoy (unless they speak out against the SJW narrative, anyway--I encourage the gentle reader to watch the Dave Chapelle Netflix special, by the way), so we do have a problem here which is very different than in the United States.


      Of course, the Australian higher education leaders could just start tossing students on both sides, if they protest on campus, although I don’t see them doing that, since it would cut into the money. And so this problem will continue to fester on their campuses, eventually damaging the already corrupted higher education system of Australia. 


      That said, the pro-Hong Kong protesters could move their protests off campus. If they’re hiding their identity, then none need know college students were involved, and the Chinese students could then stay on campus and focus on their studies. 


      Could give that a try, at least…


www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

“White Left” as Chinese Insult

By Professor Doom

     Intelligence is a tough thing to measure. We have all sorts of tests, and all of them are subject to various criticisms, many valid. Despite this, it’s clear the tests are at least a little reliable, because one ethnic group consistently comes out on top: Asians (statistically, which means very little when addressing a specific individual).

      It’s no secret that the status of the Social Justice Warrior has dropped a bit in the last six months. Despite their deep self-righteousness and assertions of well-meaning, they’re often held in disdain. This disdain is returned, of course,  and we’re told ad nauseam how people that don’t like SJWs are rednecks, hicks, fascists, Nazis, or, of course, deplorable.

     The Chinese, of course, can hardly be called rednecks or Nazis, and they even adopted communism, the favored ideology of the SJW. And, they’re smart. So what do they think of the beliefs of the SJW?

The curious rise of the ‘white left’ as a Chinese internet insult

     They have a word for the SJW, bai zuo (literally, “white left”). To be sure, they’re talking about the SJWs with this expression:

baizuo is used generally to describe those who “only care about topics such as immigration, minorities, LGBT and the environment” and “have no sense of real problems in the real world”; they are hypocritical humanitarians who advocate for peace and equality only to “satisfy their own feeling of moral superiority”; they are “obsessed with political correctness” to the extent that they “tolerate backwards Islamic values for the sake of multiculturalism”; they believe in the welfare state that “benefits only the idle and the free riders”; they are the “ignorant and arrogant westerners” who “pity the rest of the world and think they are saviours”.

     While there’s no assertion of insanity in the above, it’s a fairly close description to what a deplorable would call a SJW. What’s interesting here, is this loathing comes from Chinese who have no actual personal experience with SJWs. Yet, they still can formulate a strong opinion.

     For quite some time, the US higher education system has had, especially at the graduate level, a high number of Chinese students. While not true today, the US higher education system used to be the best in the world, and we still have that momentum which causes wealthy Chinese to send their kids here to study. For a while, we worried about “the Chinese problem,” wherein China sends so many students here that it overwhelms our system. Luckily (?), our leaders in higher ed have corrupted and debased higher education to the point that there’s little risk of that anymore.

      Anyway, the Chinese higher education system is now getting the good reputation, and they’ve opened their borders enough to accept foreign students onto their campuses. This is a big deal—as a visitor to China, I assure you a  non-Chinese person really, really, stands out in a way that someone born and raised in America can’t readily appreciate. In any event, Chinese universities that quite literally have never had a non-Chinese student on campus now are getting “foreigners” in numbers. This provides a unique opportunity to see the ideas of social justice in action.

       A white professor at one of these “newly integrated” universities in China is in a unique position to observe how this is working out:

I’m particularly well positioned because my university has an especially large number of students from Pakistan and sub-Saharan Africa. As one of the few white people in my province, I am able to witness interactions between these diverse racial groups who have rarely, if ever, come into contact before they went to college. Some of my students have told me I’m the first white person they’ve ever seen, and almost all say the African students are their first blacks.

           It’s not so rare for have white professors in Chinese universities. Due to the massive glut of Ph.D.s in America, we have lots of scholars looking for work, and there’s great demand for English teachers in China, whatever their doctorate may be in (I myself have even considered it).

     He may be an English teacher, but he’s a scholar, and thus knows to have a nuanced view of things:

I have around 200 students every semester, and about 90 percent are girls. This has something to do with the way the system approves students for certain areas of study, and a lot more girls than boys end up in my English classes. In a class of 30, it’s not uncommon to have no male students. As a result, I am far more familiar with the girls’ perspectives than with the boys’.  The average age of these girls is 19-21, so they are fresh enough not to have fixed views about race, but old enough to want to explore the question.

     So, the professor breaks views down by gender, and has some fascinating insights (although I’m so jealous that his classes only contain 30 students…). So what do his female students say?

When I ask my students what they think of black people, they express mixed results depending on sex. The girls often react with disgust, revulsion, or pity…
The girls’ disgust is often combined with fear, and they associate blacks with crime…

     Part of why the SJW is hated in the US is because of their blatant lies, lies in obvious contradiction with truths most people can see with their own eyes, in addition to their willingness to use violence to silence any who dare speak truth.

     The professor’s university also takes students from Pakistan, a largely Muslim country. How’s that working out?

The Pakistani boys have mixed results. Some of them are successful, but if they are too traditional in their Islamic behavior, the Chinese girls reject them.

     Obviously, dating is a big deal for Chinese females. With different priorities, the Chinese males have a different view of African students:

The opinions of Chinese boys about black people are almost exactly the opposite of the girls. To understand this difference you must understand how important basketball has become in China within the last few years.

     Chinese universities don’t have the corruption and foolishness of official sportsball teams, but they do have courts and such for the students. I do hope they don’t make the mistake of going the route of having school teams. They probably won’t, though if they do, I suspect it’ll be little different than the U.S., with sportsball players completely isolated from the “normal” students. In this case, it’ll be even more clear that the sportsball players are not even remotely related to the actual students on campus.

      Dating is still a factor to the boys, of course, and their views are as insular as anyone familiar with Chinese culture would expect:

However, Chinese boys are not attracted to black women and would never think of marrying one. I was once in a group discussion in which it was jokingly suggested China should invade Africa to acquire women to fill the sex gap plaguing China (thirty million Chinese boys have no girl to marry). One of the Chinese men in the group looked perplexed, and said: “But there are no women in Africa for us to marry; there are only dark-skinned people there.”

--a thinking person who does not wish to be highly alarmed should under no circumstances consider how those 30 million males will eventually get wives…

     What’s most interesting about these views is the students are not getting this message through the official Chinese government schooling. One might suspect as much, as these students do get some of their views from government school (much like in the U.S.):

Despite their obviously low opinion of blacks, when I ask my students whether blacks are as intelligent as whites and Asians, they almost universally reply, “Yes.” This is because of their [Chinese] schooling…

     Now, obviously, when a child learns something in school from a government official, it’s generally taken as fact (there’s a reason government wants control of your children, after all). But, at some point, a child grows and is exposed to the real world and, well, reality sets in:

I often get interesting reactions when I explain the actual IQ scores for each race. My students’ first reaction is laughingly to celebrate the Asian results: “Ha! We’re smarter than white people!” After we joke about this, I ask them what they think about blacks being so far below whites and Asians. Almost without exception, they cite the arguments made by the American Left: “It’s because of white racism,” “It’s because of European colonialism,” “It’s because they have bad nutrition,” or “It’s because they don’t have proper education.”

     Hey, there are some issues with racism on intelligence tests, and absolutely “intelligence” is a vague concept even on a good day…but it’s funny to hear the Chinese students recite the same things our kids recite. Funny, but no accident.

      But, again, propaganda is one thing, reality is another:

My race-realist perspective is almost always vindicated when my students travel to America with foreign work programs. One of my students worked in Ohio over the summer. When he returned, I met him in a tea shop and asked him what he thought of America. The first thing out of his mouth was: “The black people . . . they’re so . . . dangerous.” I got a similar unprovoked reaction while I was sitting at a gate in the Shanghai airport. A complete stranger was returning from Massachusetts and suddenly delivered a rant about how blacks were brutish and weird.

When African students began arriving at my university in higher numbers last year, the Pakistani and Chinese students were initially excited about getting to know them. I watched the excitement turn to confusion and disgust.

     Now anecdotes like the above are essentially meaningless. Some things, some people need to see with their own eyes. On the other hand, for the sufficiently intelligent, reviewing data and considering empirical evidence can help:

One of my Chinese friends couldn’t believe there was evidence for blacks having lower IQs and higher crime rates than whites and Asians. I pulled up Jared Taylor’s American Renaissance video “Race Differences in Intelligence” on YouTube and let her watch. I then showed her videos of the Ferguson riots, flash mobs carried out by “youths,” and videos of the knockout game. Her perspective changed in a single evening. She was shocked, and told me her whole perception of America and race relations had changed. She’s been “red-pilled” ever since.

     Now, I’ve quoted lots of “unpopular” things from the article above (and left a few things out that are just too dangerous for me to even quote), things that would easily cost a person his job if he dared say them in the United States. As always, one must review the comments section to see how well the ideas fly. None of the comments dispute what’s being said above, none of them are particularly critical, and most are in agreement.

     On the other hand, when I look at an article that says the things SJWs say are politically correct to say, the comments—the few articles that even allow them—consistently have people laughing at how ridiculous the ideas are.

     Why is that?

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

The Chinese Government’s Influence on Campus

By Professor Doom

     These are the days where we’re supposed to be very paranoid over other countries’ influence on our institutions…even as our media refuses to mention how our country influences entire governments of other countries.

     That said, the Chinese government does have outposts on our campuses. I see little reason for outrage, as these things are hardly subtle, being called Confucius Institutes—Confucius is a famous Chinese philosopher, so anyone with even minimal education might suspect anything named after him would have a Chinese connection, after all.

     Compare this to our various Diversity Institutes, which push a Marxist progressive ideology that you’d never could suspect simply from the word “diversity” (except, of course, for their track record).

      Unlike Diversity Institutes which are funded by a student loan scam destroying the lives of millions of American citizens, Confucian Institutes are funded by the Chinese government:

China has directly provided more than $158 million to U.S. universities to host Confucius Institutes since 2006, according to a report from the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released in advance of a hearing on China’s impact on the U.S. educational system scheduled for this morning.

     I don’t want to come across as a Chinese apologist, but if they’re paying for it and up front about what they’re doing, I’m not sure I see the problem. Around a $100 billion in student loan money flows onto campus every year, and billions in other taxpayer dollars also end up there. China’s little over $10 million a year hardly seems to be an issue, considering all the problems in higher ed today. The article I’m quoting from sees problems, however.

It alleges that “the Chinese government controls nearly every aspect of Confucius Institutes at U.S. schools,” down to having veto authority over events and activities included in the annual budget submitted for approval...

     Oh no! Not veto authority over events they’re paying for! That’s…terrible? Doesn’t the gentle reader have veto authority over everything he pays for (except for taxes, of course)? Someone should tell these people how conservative speakers and Christians are being vetoed off campus. What do these tiny institutes do, anyway?

More than 90 U.S. universities host the CIs, which supporters say offer critical resources for foreign language learning at a time when such resources are hard to find.

     So they teach Chinese, mostly. Considering the tiny amounts of funds involved, that seems about right, and seeing as our own universities are shutting down their language departments, I support China doing this (if they deem it important), and other countries wishing to spread knowledge of their languages should do the same…if our own knowledge centers can’t do it on their own anymore (cuts into the lakefront property for the administrators), why not allow this?

At least 10 U.S. universities have moved to close their Confucius Institutes over the past year as scrutiny of the Chinese government-funded centers for language and cultural education has intensified and lawmakers from across the political spectrum have raised concerns about Chinese influence over American higher education.

     Nothing wrong with scrutiny, but has anything ever been found? Alas, the article gives no instances of what, exactly, these little institutes are doing wrong (the gentle reader should compare to the number of non-Chinese institutes my blog has identified plundering, embezzling, or otherwise looting student loan money…).

      Here’s the worst they have:

The subcommittee obtained a 2018 contract between Hanban and a Chinese instructor requiring the instructor to “conscientiously safeguard national interests.” The contract would terminate if the instructor were to “violate Chinese laws” or “engage in activities detrimental to national interest; participate in illegal organizations and engage in activities against local religions and customs, hence causing bad influences.”

      I’ve been forced to sign loyalty oaths as a college teacher, and I’m sure if I acted not in the national interests of America, I’d lose my job, too…I certainly can lose it for violating quite a number of laws. Goodness, if the above job responsibilities really are a problem, they should consider the starvation wages, no benefits, and being forced to lie about the students in their classes, which are all part of the job description for a typical college adjunct, who also must adhere to the above job responsibilities.

       They’re really trying to make something out of this, but this is yet another big fat nothing-burger:

GAO found that 64 agreements had language saying "that institute activities would be conducted in accordance with the Confucius Institute constitution and bylaws," but also found that "some school officials we interviewed stated there had been no instance in which the constitution and bylaws had been invoked or conflicted with school policies."

    In other words, the evil, draconian policies of China are no different than the policies we already have on campus? Does anybody ever think about the implications of these reports? It’s as cognitively dissonant as taking Cohen’s claims that Trump never intended to win the election…but worked closely with Russia to collude for victory.

     Anyway, yes, the Chinese government does indeed have a tiny sliver of influence over our higher education system. If you want to avoid being influenced by “them,” all you need to do is not set foot in any Confucian Institute, and to avoid taking classes in Chinese from a Chinese citizen. Both are pretty easy to do on our campuses.

      On the other hand, good luck avoiding Gender Studies and other political indoctrination courses, since those are mandatory.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

Chinese Hackers Target Research Universities

By Professor Doom

Admin: “Please be aware we had another phishing attempt on our servers, do not respond to e-mails in the following format…”

--I get phishing/hacking e-mails on my institution’s account about every week or so.

     Like most folks, I get many “phishing” attempts on my e-mail. Some are quite good, but many have a weakness which exposes them. English is a ridiculously complicated language, you see, and a non-native speaker, even one very fluent, often reveals himself as such with a phrase that no American would ever use. For example, you can buy “hot water cylinders” (legit site, but clearly not American despite the English language), but in America we just call them “water heaters,” even though, yeah, they’re usually cylindrical.

     Earlier I feel like I came off as an apologist for China, in addressing hysteria over that country’s establishing little fiefdoms on some of our campuses. To be more clear, those fiefdoms aren’t the real issue, so allow me to cover something far more sinister being done by China, though pretty much common to every country on the planet:

U.S. universities urged to step up cybersecurity protections after report reveals Chinese hackers attempted to steal military secrets from dozens of institutions.

     Before moving on to the issues in the article, I want to point out that while most of our campuses are drowning in ideology and corruption we still have universities, particularly “research universities,” where we investigate far more relevant things than the number of possible human genders, where we invent things far more useful than new personal pronouns like “xhe” or “xhim.”

      This vastly more important research doesn’t make the news, because it’s not supposed to be common knowledge. It’s sad that this knowledge must be classified as “military secrets,” but the fact remains, other countries, including China, would like to have that knowledge as well.

Chinese hackers are ramping up their efforts to steal military research secrets from U.S. universities, new cybersecurity intelligence suggests.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Hawaii, Pennsylvania State University, Duke University and the University of Washington are among 27 institutions in the U.S., Canada and Southeast Asia to be targeted by Chinese hackers, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.

     Hey, want to know where to go to get involved in real research that will matter? Well, you can bet if China is interested in it, it’s probably worth something, so the serious student should look carefully at the list helpfully supplied above, to get some ideas of real graduate schools (where the research is done) worth applying to. Do carefully note how few of those schools have time for race riots…

     The primary target, this time, was undersea technology. Our oceans represent a vast source of resources, and the country best able to control/explore/exploit the seas has been the dominant country on the planet for several centuries now, it’s reasonable to think the undersea will be the next big frontier.

     One school is absent from the list:

One wonders why Harvard wasn't on the list of targets. Maybe it has something to do with this?

"The fact that Bo Guagua was a couple months from his Harvard degree has sparked interest in the number of so-called princelings—the offspring of powerful Chinese Communist Party officials—attending elite U.S. universities... But there are people far more important than the children of Chinese party leaders attending Harvard and other elite U.S. universities: Chinese leaders themselves... Carefully vetted officials—a selection of some of the regime’s rising stars—were sent abroad to study in specially designed programs at some of the world’s finest universities. The first crop was sent to Harvard...

     It’s certainly an interesting theory, and I rather believe it to be true. We have an analogue here in the U.S. Most of our higher education system is corrupted or outright fraudulent, but each state still generally keeps one school, the “flagship university” mostly legitimate. Why? Because the political leaders need a place to send their kids. They can’t all go to Harvard, after all…

     Again, a hidden takeaway: if you’re looking for a legitimate university to send your kids, see where the political leaders of your state send their kids. It’s not a sure thing mind you, but it’ll increase the odds of getting an education.

China is not the first country to target U.S. universities with a coordinated cybercampaign. Last year nine Iranian hackers were charged for their role in a phishing scam that ran from 2013 to 2017 and attempted to steal the passwords of hundreds of thousands of professors.

     Yeah, no kidding. While I don’t want to underestimate the legitimacy of this kind of threat, there’s a slant to this article, expressed in two ways.

     The first way is from the above, the “nine Iranian hackers.” Yeah, sure, but that’s not Iran, those are hackers who happen to be from Iran. I get hit with phishing attempts from foreigners on a very regular basis, you don’t need a government to do that sort of thing. Why didn’t the article go ahead and mention the Nigerian scam as well? I mean, at least a dozen people have died there, leaving me tens of millions of dollars, after all.

     The second? What moron thinks the United States government doesn’t do much of the same, at least when we can’t get their Secretary of State to simply just sell the secrets off her private e-mail server (like many countries did with us)? I respect our government is going to do that sort of thing, and thus we should not be so quick to anger when other countries do unto us as we do to them. We should be quick to guard our secrets, of course.

It is "just inevitable" that research universities will be targets, Wheeler said. "The open culture of universities make us an enduring target."

      Jeez, these people. I’m sorry, criminals and thieves have always been a big part of society, and while universities are certainly targeted by them, so is every business, and I daresay every human being on the planet with anything worth taking.

      That said, yeah, we need to safeguard things we value…but no harm in letting them take all they can from our converged campuses.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

Duke Professor Removed For Asking Students To Speak English

By Professor Doom

     Even though our schools are well-supported by a student loan scam pouring money on them in an ever increasing deluge, they always want more. A sweet spring of such funds comes from foreign students—they get to pay a “non resident” tuition penalty on top of the usual bloated tuition price.

     It’s particularly prevalent in graduate school, and, I daresay, even more so in the sciences…I was the only person in my department’s varsity soccer team who spoke English as a first language, for example (in fact, it’s where I first started to learn Mandarin, although a Russian striker left many an “Adidas” imprint on me during practice sessions…I was the goalie).

     So, it’s quite common to hear non-English being spoken between graduate students. It never bothered me—I’ve studied enough other languages to realize English is such a difficult, unfair, language, that I’m far more inclined to respect foreign students who speak English when they don’t have to than be annoyed by students who don’t when they can get away with it among themselves.

      As is so often the case, admin sees things differently than me:

A US university professor has been removed as director of a graduate programme, amid a furore over an email she sent urging students not to speak Chinese.

--I’m quoting from the BBC here, though the incident occurred at Duke University.

     Gee whiz, “Chinese”? Mandarin, or Cantonese? There are a few other viable guesses which sound close enough to Chinese to even the mildly initiated. Telling people what language not to speak seems harsh. What prompted this?

…two unnamed faculty members of the biostatistics Masters programme had complained to her about students speaking Chinese in public areas in the department.

     You better believe those faculty want to be anonymous in their complaints. All complaints by faculty are made anonymously, because fear of retribution is quite justified. This culture of fear is far more a concern than a language being spoken on a university campus that isn’t from the tiny part of the universe where the campus is located.

She said that not speaking English could lead to "unintended consequences" for international   students…

 

    I’ve played Dungeons and Dragons plenty, read my share of fantasy novels and…I simply lack the imagination to come up with an “unintended” consequence here. Can anyone give me a clue? This is how our leaders on campus rule, by fear of the unknown, even unknowable.

      Naturally in our wildly over-sensitive campus society, even daring to complain about anything a foreigner does is deemed racist, and the label was quickly slapped on her:

…Dr Neely, describing her as a supportive programme director and "definitely not a racist, not even close".

     Well, there it is then. Just say you’re not a racist, and you’re cleared from all accusations of such for all time. Imagine how many lives wouldn’t have been destroyed if it were common knowledge that this is how to escape the pitchfork-wielding mobs whenever the cry of RACIST is raised?

      Ok, this rational denial didn’t work for her, and she ended up resigning. While I disagree with her, I don’t think this minor faux pas merits anywhere near the punishment she’s received so far. Will it end?

But will she be fired? Duke graduate director resigns after telling students not to speak Chinese

     Petitions were immediately started online calling for her firing.

         This stuff really needs to end. It really would be in the students’ best interest for them to speak English as much as possible, but I completely respect that sometimes the need to communicate quickly dominates the desire to practice a difficult language. An e-mail imploring students, many of whom will likely work in this country, to work harder to improve the (putative) language of this country. She actually was trying to help, and seeing as she never specifically threatened anyone with not following her advice, I see no need to threaten her job over this.

      I grant it wasn’t just one e-mail, as she did something similar a year ago:

In a different email sent by Neely back in February 2018, she issued similar warnings to students speaking foreign languages in public spaces:

‘Bottom line: Continuing this practice may make it harder for you and future international students to get research opportunities while in the program. Please keep these potential downstream effects in mind when you choose to or choose not to speak in English outside of the classroom.’

      And…what of it? She’s still not forcing anyone, she’s still making a case for why our foreign students should practice English as much as possible. In short, she’s just doing…her…job. As much as I want to be against administrative activity, I don’t see the foul here.

It’s unclear who the two faculty members are, or if they existed to begin with. 

      Wow, this accusation comes right out of left field. Please understand, these foreign grad students often teach the undergraduate courses…I promise the gentle reader, I’ve heard many complaints from the undergraduates in those courses about how hard it is to get through the accent. Naturally, I encourage those students to try harder—I’ve certainly had to muddle through some tough professorial accents in my life—even as yes, off the record, I may have asked the teachers of those courses to practice their English more.

      In other words, I ask all parties involved to try harder to communicate with each  other. I imagine that makes me a RACIST also.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

White Privilege Conferences Paid By Student Loans

By Professor Doom

    Time and again I’ve heard admin spew the most insane gibberish, things no normal person could believe, or could even imagine. I’ve looked at administrative degree programs, and while they are complete frauds, the issue there is a lack of content or requirements, not that they’re filled with insanity.

     It’s no secret that our institutions of higher education are vastly over-supplied with administrators. Mostly, they work to make the system less efficient or try to start a race riot but the simple fact is clear: we have so many of them there isn’t enough work for them to do.

      One of the things admin do to entertain themselves is go to “training seminars,” where they learn ridiculous things…which they then take back to campus. Next comes a mandatory meeting for faculty who must attend and listen to the concentrated idiocy the administrator acquired on her taxpayer-funded adventure.

     Let’s take a look at one of these:

      White Privilege Conference 19

     This big conference, supposedly an academic conference, will be held April 4^th through 7^th of next year. Could they be any more blatant about whom this is for? I mean, if you’re an actual academic, you’re likely teaching classes April 4^th through 7^th. If there was going to be legitimate academics here, then why would it be held at a time excluding most academics? They’ll just be spewing garbage here, and they know it.

      While faculty certainly can't go, our campuses are loaded down with administrators who serve no purpose, who can easily take a week off during the semester to go to this thing.

      What is “white privilege” anyway? Their website helpfully attempts to answer the question with a choice quote:

“White Privilege is the other side of racism. Unless we name it, we are in danger of wallowing in guilt or moral outrage with no idea of how to move beyond them. It is often easier to deplore racism and its effects than to take responsibility for the privileges some of us receive as a result of it… once we understand how white privilege operates, we can begin addressing it on an individual and institutional basis.” ~Paula Rothenberg

     I trust the gentle reader is no more illuminated by the above than I am. The “other side of racism”? The opposite of racism, then? Isn’t that a good thing? Unfortunately, this type of training obviously isn’t working, since time and again I’ve seen admin use racist (and sexist) hiring policies.

     With such a bizarre definition, I concede I might be confused here. The site gives some examples:

Being able to…

·         assume that most of the people you or your children study in history classes and textbooks will be of the same race, gender, or sexual orientation as you are

     You know, in China, I rather expect the students there study primarily Chinese history, filled with Chinese people. I don’t consider them privileged, and I certainly don’t think they owe me anything for it…and it’s the same for pretty much every country.

     My family came to this country in the late 19^th century (to the best of my understanding), and not from England/Germany/France. I’m not offended that when I studied history in school, I almost entirely studied people from a different nation than that of my forefathers…nobody owes me anything for that, either. My great-grandparents made that choice for me, and I’m fine with it (assuming I even put much thought into it).

     As far as gender goes, well, again, reality is a factor here. Genetically, males are a bit of a mess. Most murderers are male. Most drug addicts are male. Most schizophrenics are male. Pretty much every “bad” thing happens more often to males than females.

     Most morons are male, too. Due to quirks in our genetics, males tend to be more vulnerable to everything…they also tend to be more variable in everything. Part of that variation is intelligence. So, “most morons are male” is statistically equivalent to “most geniuses are male.”

      As far as history goes, you have to be a standout to make it into the history books—we generally don’t study Mr. and Mrs. Smith in Standard House, Plainsville, Everystate, who worked common jobs, ate common foods, and raised 2.4 kids.

     History is filled with the special people…and geniuses tend to be special. So, yeah, there are lot more males than females in the history books. That’s reality, it has nothing to with privilege, unless dying 8 years younger than females is also considered a male “privilege.”

     Sexual orientation is similarly a function of reality. It’s a fact that around 96% or so of the population is heterosexual. So, yeah, if you’re studying history, it’s reasonable to conjecture that you’re mostly going to be studying the actions of heterosexual people (that said, because non-heterosexuals tend to be special, they’re over-represented in the history books…just not a majority). Truth be told, I don't understand sexual orientation as a "white privilege" thing...I'm pretty sure not all whites are heterosexual, and it's sad that the the people at this conference are so bigoted as to advocate such a thing.

     The conference dances around things here, but the key, unspoken, concept is whites have privileges that blacks don’t.

     It’s not my fault that there no two story buildings in sub-Saharan Africa dating from before Europeans arrived. There were no enduring written languages from that part of the world, either. With no documents or architecture extant, I can understand why I didn’t learn much of southern Africa in school.

     You know, when I watch a sporting event, I don’t see many people of my color. Once again, I don’t feel penalized by this, or think anyone owes me anything for it. I’m no genius, but if I accept these claims of white privilege, I should also see that there’s a “black privilege” to watching sporting events…how is it that nobody in 19 iterations of this conference could see it? That, again, is the hint that this is a bogus event filled with pseudo-knowledge.

     In any event, this 4 day conference is packed with meeting after meeting filled with one-sided, incredibly biased, points of view. To even call this stuff pseudoscience is quite generous.

     To truly get an idea of shallow the people involved in this crap are, please look at the company store for this event, filled with many very ugly “Got Privilege” t-shirts…and only two books, at $100 apiece, no less. I assure the gentle reader, academics are more into books than t-shirts.

     The price of the books is also telling. Whoa, $100 for a book filled with ideology? Do the attendees really spend their own money on this? Of course not, and this leads to my real issue with this bogus conference.

     Our tax dollars go to pay to send hundreds of our redundant administrators to fake conferences like this.  They’re given expense accounts to pay for the hotel, meals, and, yes, overpriced books.

     But wait, there’s more.

     Then they come back, and force actual academics to listen to whatever garbage they heard at the conference, wasting the time of actual scholars who are in no position to challenge the rubbish they hear.

     But wait, there’s more.

     This garbage counts as actual training. So that that means that these $150,000 a year administrators are now entitled to a pay raise, which could be 10%, 20%, and even 50% isn’t out of the question here…for listening to drivel and forcing it down the throats of faculty.

     But wait, there’s more.

     Enough of this nonsensical training and these guys will get a big promotion…where they’ll even have even more time to go to even more of these conferences, and rake in even more money in the process.

     And it’s all paid for by the student loan scam. If we could just kill off this source of money pouring into higher education, many of these corrupt cycles could finally end.

      I suspect such an idea will never be advanced at any conference, ever…

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