Tag: education

SJWs improve science

I’m sure this new SJW policy bodes well for science and academia. You know, say what you will about the National Socialists, but at least they had functional science. At this point, the options are rapidly coming down to a) the Alt-Right and indoor plumbing or b) mud huts and 30-year life expectancies.

Academics and scholars must be mindful about using research done by only straight, white men, according to two scientists who argued that it oppresses diverse voices and bolsters the status of already privileged and established white male scholars.

Geographers Carrie Mott and Daniel Cockayne argued in a recent paper that doing so also perpetuates what they call “white heteromasculinism,” which they defined as a “system of oppression” that benefits only those who are “white, male, able-bodied, economically privileged, heterosexual, and cisgendered.” (Cisgendered describes people whose gender identity matches their birth sex.)

Mott, a professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey, and Cockayne, who teaches at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, argued that scholars or researchers disproportionately cite the work of white men, thereby unfairly adding credence to the body of knowledge they offer while ignoring the voices of other groups, like women and black male academics. Although citation seems like a mundane practice, the feminist professors argue that citing someone’s work has implications on his or her ability to be hired, get promoted and obtain tenured status, among others….

“Today, the field is more diverse, but this diversity is largely represented by earlier career scholars. Citing only tenured, established scholars means that these voices are ignored, especially when it is well-known that today’s brutally competitive academic job market continues to privilege the white heteromasculinist body,” they wrote.

Actually, forget the Nazis. At this point, I’m beginning to conclude that the Khmer Rouge had the right approach to academia.

Educating orcs

It’s mostly impossible. So why even bother?

King’s College London will replace busts and portraits of its founding fathers with ethnic minorities amid pressure from students, according to a dean. The world famous institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience plans to move portraits of former faculty staff from the main entrance wall.

They will be replaced with likenesses of more black and minority ethnic scholars, it has been reported. The decision follows concern among academics that the current teaching is too ‘intimidating’ for ethnic minorities.

It’s not too intimidating, it’s simply too difficult because they’re not intelligent enough, on average, to grasp the required concepts. After 50 years of constant dumbing-down to no avail, at what point are the universities going to finally recognize the obvious fact that orcs cannot, in general, be educated? They just can’t. The evidence is overwhelming. It is not even remotely deniable any longer, not even by the most generously inclined.

Sure, there are exceptional individuals from low-IQ minority groups. That doesn’t mean that MIT and Caltech should change their academic programs to accommodate the average individual simply because there are the occasional +4SD and +5SD individuals capable of handling them.

Mailvox: white privilege

A reader writes of his experience with valedictorian politics in the 1990s.

When I was a junior in high school, my family moved to a different state. The high school I wound up assigned to was one of the early adopters of the weighted GPA system, where it was possible to exceed a 4.0 GPA average by taking honors and AP classes. Honors counted for 4.5, and AP for 5.0.


I had only two years in this system, as my previous school didn’t do this, but took as many honors and AP classes as possible, and obtained straight As in all of them. I was in the running for valedictorian despite a two year disadvantage. There were two others in the running, a black girl and an Asian man. The teachers and administrators didn’t care much for me. I don’t know if it was because I was white, or if it was because I just wasn’t from the area, but they tried to sabotage me at every opportunity. 


To get into the AP and honors classes, you needed certain prerequisite classes, of course, and they tried to argue that the classes I took at my previous school didn’t count. My old school’s pre-calc was, for example, not equivalent to their pre-calc, they argued. I would have to retake classes in order to get into the AP programs. My father managed to argue around some of these restrictions, but not others. I had to retake a number of classes. This wasted slots that could have been used for weighted GPA classes.


Despite that handicap too, at the end of my senior year, it was very close. Where roadblocks were put in my way, prerequisites were waived for the black girl. She was able to skip some. To be fair to her, she was a smart and studious woman. But they did make it easier for her. I realized I probably wasn’t going to make valedictorian unless she made a big mistake, which she didn’t.


But salutatorian was mine. Or at least it should have been. The Asian kid wound up getting a C in his Spanish class. Languages were not his forte, he was much better at math and the sciences. He was out of the running. When his teacher found out that I had dethroned him for this spot, she went back, offered him the opportunity to do a boatload of extra credit work, and gave him an A. The grade was changed at the last minute.


This was controversial, and blatantly against school policy. But it didn’t matter. I later found out why, when the local news gushed about how a high school in the racist South had a black valedictorian and Asian salutatorian. Even in the 90s, virtue signalling was thing, I guess.


In the end, my GPA was the third highest in that school’s history, up until that point. Any other year, I would have been valedictorian by a mile. They had moved heaven and earth to make sure I didn’t get on that podium. It had all been mapped out before I even got there. They wanted minorities on that stage, and my graduating class provided them with a very intelligent and studious black girl, and a math-bruiser Asian kid. It was a rare opportunity for them to virtue signal. Stupid out-of-towner white boy wasn’t going to mess up their big news story, of course.


So even before this notion of eliminating valedictorian and salutatorian came about, they were already, in effect, becoming political appointments.

Generation snowflake

They can’t handle the academic competition now. Everyone’s a valedictorian!

At many American high schools, the graduation-day tradition of crowning a valedictorian is becoming a thing of the past.

The ranking of students from No. 1 on down, based on grade-point averages, has been fading steadily for about the past decade. In its place are honors that recognize everyone who scores at a certain threshold — using Latin honors, for example. This year, one school in Tennessee had 48 valedictorians.

About half of schools no longer report class rank, according to the National Association of Secondary School Principals. Administrators worry about the college prospects of students separated by large differences in class rank despite small differences in their GPAs, and view rankings as obsolete in an era of high expectations for every student, association spokesman Bob Farrace said. There are also concerns about intense, potentially unhealthy competition and students letting worries about rank drive their course selections.

Among those weighing a change is Lancaster High School in suburban Buffalo, where students are leading an exploration of replacing valedictorian-salutatorian recognitions with the college-style Latin honors of summa cum laude, magna cum laude and cum laude.

The principal, Cesar Marchioli, said he’s neutral on the issue, though he feels for the 11th-ranked student who falls just short of the recognition awarded to the top 10 seniors honored at the annual banquet.

Graduating Lancaster senior Connor Carrow, 17, has pressed for the switch to Latin honors since his sophomore year, well before landing just out of the top 10, at No. 14, while serving as student union president and playing varsity lacrosse and hockey. He said it’s a better fit with the school’s collaborative and cooperative ideals.

“You’re striving for that (honor) personally, but you’re not hoping that you’re better than these other 400 people next to you,” Carrow said.

And really, isn’t the concept of grades intrinsically anti-egalitarian, if not downright racist? Students should attend school for the experience, they shouldn’t be expected to actually learn anything.

The vanishing male college student

Pretty soon there will be no one left to claim fake-raped 4 out of 5 college women:

Whatever the reason, enrollment data show men are becoming less of a presence on college campuses both in Colorado and across the United States.

A higher percentage of Colorado’s female high school graduates than male graduates were enrolled in college from 2009 through 2015, according to state records. In 2015, 61.2 percent of Colorado’s recent female high school graduates attended college in the fall, compared to 51.8 percent of male graduates, according to the Colorado Department of Higher Education.

A similar trend is occurring nationally. Although more people than ever are attending college, the ratio of male to female students is nearly 1:2. Compare that to 1960, when there were 1.6 males for every female graduating from a U.S. four-year college and 1.55 males for every female undergraduate, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Today, women hold almost 60 percent of all bachelor degrees, and women now account for almost half of students in law, medical and business graduate programs.

This is socially disastrous and societally dysgenic, as it not only demonstrates the declining value of a college degree, but due to hypergamy, functionally sentences half of the USA’s most intelligent women to barren celibacy. Women always tend to drive men out of previously male occupations, and education is no exception.

A well-executed SJW hit

This is what happens to people who don’t read SJWAL and fail to understand exactly what they are up against when they question the sacred Narrative. Rod Dreher chronicles something called “the Duke Divinity crisis”:

1. On Mon, Feb 6, 2017 at 9:21 AM, Anathea Portier-Young  wrote:

Dear Faculty Colleagues,

On behalf of the Faculty Diversity and Inclusion Standing Committee, I strongly urge you to participate in the Racial Equity Institute Phase I Training planned for March 4 and 5. We have secured funding from the Provost to provide this training free to our community and we hope that this will be a first step in a longer process of working to ensure that DDS is an institution that is both equitable and anti-racist in its practices and culture. While a number of DDS faculty, staff, and students have been able to participate in REI training in recent years, we have never before hosted a training at DDS. Those who have participated in the training have described it as transformative, powerful, and life-changing. We recognize that it is a significant commitment of time; we also believe it will have great dividends for our community. Please find the registration link below. Details about room location will be announced soon.

Duke Divinity School will host a Racial Equity Institute Phase I Training on March 4 and 5, 2017, 8:30—5 pm both days. Participants should plan to attend both full days of training.

“Racism is a fierce, ever-present, challenging force, one which has structured the thinking, behavior, and actions of individuals and institutions since the beginning of U.S. history. To understand racism and effectively begin dismantling it requires an equally fierce, consistent, and committed effort” (REI). Phase I provides foundational training in understanding historical and institutional racism. It helps individuals and organizations begin to “proactively understand and address racism, both in their organization and in the community where the organization is working.” It is the first step in a longer process.

ALL Staff and Faculty are invited to register for this important event by which DDS can begin its own commitment to become an anti-racist institution.

Workshop capacity is 40 participants. Registration is FREE to DDS employees and students.

Snacks, breakfast, and light lunch will be provided. A 7:30 am liturgy will precede the Sunday training for those who wish to participate. Child care can be made available upon request.

2. From Paul Griffiths:

Sent: Monday, February 06, 2017 4:26 PM
To: Anathea Portier-Young
Cc: Divinity Regular Rank Faculty; Divinity Visiting Other Faculty
Subject: Re: Racial Equity Institute Phase I Training–March 4-5

Dear Faculty Colleagues,

I’m responding to Thea’s exhortation that we should attend the Racial Equity Institute Phase 1 Training scheduled for 4-5 March. In her message she made her ideological commitments clear. I’ll do the same, in the interests of free exchange.

I exhort you not to attend this training. Don’t lay waste your time by doing so. It’ll be, I predict with confidence, intellectually flaccid: there’ll be bromides, clichés, and amen-corner rah-rahs in plenty. When (if) it gets beyond that, its illiberal roots and totalitarian tendencies will show. Events of this sort are definitively anti-intellectual. (Re)trainings of intellectuals by bureaucrats and apparatchiks have a long and ignoble history; I hope you’ll keep that history in mind as you think about this instance.

We here at Duke Divinity have a mission. Such things as this training are at best a distraction from it and at worst inimical to it. Our mission is to thnk, read, write, and teach about the triune Lord of Christian confession. This is a hard thing. Each of us should be tense with the effort of it, thrumming like a tautly triple-woven steel thread with the work of it, consumed by the fire of it, ever eager for more of it. We have neither time nor resources to waste. This training is a waste. Please, ignore it. Keep your eyes on the prize.

Paul

——————–
Paul J. Griffiths
Warren Chair of Catholic Theology
Duke Divinity School

3. From Elaine Heath:

On Behalf Of Elaine Heath, Ph.D.
Sent: Monday, February 06, 2017 8:24 PM
To: Ray Barfield; Mary Fulkerson
Cc: Paul J. Griffiths; Anathea Portier-Young; Divinity Regular Rank Faculty; Divinity Visiting Other Faculty
Subject: Re: Racial Equity Institute Phase I Training–March 4-5

Dear Colleagues,

First, I am looking forward to participating in the REI training, and I am proud that we are hosting it at Duke Divinity School. Thea, thank you for your part in helping us to offer this important event. I am deeply committed to increasing our school’s intellectual strength, spiritual vitality, and moral authority, and this training event will help with all three.

On another matter: It is certainly appropriate to use mass emails to share announcements or information that is helpful to the larger community, such as information about the REI training opportunity. It is inappropriate and unprofessional to use mass emails to make disparaging statements–including arguments ad hominem–in order to humiliate or undermine individual colleagues or groups of colleagues with whom we disagree. The use of mass emails to express racism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry is offensive and unacceptable, especially in a Christian institution.

As St. Paul wrote to the church in Corinth, regardless of how exquisite our gifts are, if we do not exercise them with love our words are just noise.

Sincerely,

Elaine A. Heath, Ph.D.
Dean
Professor of Missional and Pastoral Theology
Divinity School
Duke University

I didn’t have to read any further than this to know how it was going to end.

According to a source close to Griffiths, he has resigned, effective at the end of the 2017-18 academic year.

No word if he apologized or if he simply resigned under pressure. Either way, another manufactured crisis, another noble conservative scalp for the SJWs. And as for the saccharine cuckiness of the virtue-signaling Christians both in the comments and at Duke, well, even the devil himself would want to spit them out of his mouth.

Amen! I totally agree! There is lots of literature now on white color blindness as the new racism.

Racism in education

It’s really terrible how some teachers in Australia are failing to respect the cultural imperatives of their New Australian students.

Teachers at a primary school in Sydney, Australia have been threatened with beheading and other violence from young Islamic students, prompting one of them to quit her job. Students as young as those in Year 5, according to the Daily Telegraph, are making the violent threats and pressuring others to read the Koran at Punchbowl Public School in Sydney.

Documents given to the newspaper allege that three staff members have taken a leave of absence owing to stress, received counselling and been awarded compensation after bullying from Islamic students.

One female teacher reportedly quit her job after it got too much for her. She claims she quit after receiving death threats to her family from her year 5 and 6 students, with some saying they would behead her. The teacher also said she made numerous complaints back in 2014 about the extraordinary behavior in the class. For example, she said, she was abused by students after she stopped them from hanging a Syrian flag in the classroom.

In another example, she claimed she was pushed into a corner by students who began marching around her chanting the Koran.

Frankly, if the woman hadn’t quit, she should have been fired. What right does she have to tell these New Australians, who are every bit as Australian as those descended from British convicts and shipped off to colonial Australia, that they should not be hanging Syrian flags, threatening her family, and promising to behead her.

After all, those are just New Australian customs, every bit as Australian as kangaroos, koalas, and gay pride parades, and they should be respected accordingly.

SJW thugs injure professor

Violent anti-speech SJWs attack Charles Murray and Middlebury College professor:

Middlebury College Professor Allison Stanger was injured by protesters Thursday evening as she was escorting a controversial speaker from campus. She was treated at Porter Hospital and released.

Charles Murray, a political scientist who has been criticized for his views on race and intelligence, was invited to speak on campus by a student group. He was greeted late Thursday afternoon outside McCullough Student Center by hundreds of protesters, and inside Wilson Hall, students turned their backs to him when he got up to speak.

College officials led Murray to another location and a closed circuit broadcast showed him being interviewed by Stanger, the Russell J. Leng ’60 Professor of International Politics and Economics.

As Stanger, Murray and a college administrator left McCullough Student Center last evening following the event, they were “physically and violently confronted by a group of protestors,” according to Bill Burger, the college’s vice president for communications and marketing

Burger said college public safety officers managed to get Stanger and Murray into the administrator’s car.

“The protestors then violently set upon the car, rocking it, pounding on it, jumping on and try to prevent it from leaving campus,” he said. “At one point a large traffic sign was thrown in front of the car. Public Safety officers were able, finally, to clear the way to allow the vehicle to leave campus.

This almost makes me want to do a college speech tour, accompanied by dozens of armed, trained VFM. The Right needs to stop playing victim and start imposing its will. Remember, if they’re not calling you Hitler, you’re not even trying.

Betsy DeVos confirmed

As Reaper of Education. But two Republican women have defied the God-Emperor’s will and they will experience his wrath:

The Senate confirmed Betsy DeVos on Tuesday as education secretary, approving the embattled nominee only with the help of a historic tiebreaking vote from Vice President Mike Pence. The 51-to-50 vote elevates Ms. DeVos — a wealthy donor from Michigan who has devoted much of her life to expanding educational choice through charter schools and vouchers, but has limited experience with the public school system — to be steward of the nation’s schools.

Two Republicans voted against Ms. DeVos’s confirmation, a sign that some members of President Trump’s party are willing to go against him, possibly foreshadowing difficulty on some of the president’s more contentious legislative priorities.

It was the first time that a vice president has been summoned to the Capitol to break a tie on a cabinet nomination, according to the Senate historian. Taking the gavel as the vote deadlocked at 50-50, Mr. Pence, a former member of the House, declared his vote for Ms. DeVos before announcing that Mr. Trump’s nominee for education secretary had been confirmed.

The two Republicans who voted against the nominee, Senators Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, announced their opposition to her last week.

And by “possibly”, they meant “we desperately hope”.

Could be big

Or it could be trolling and therefore nothing. We’ll see. But I would LOVE to see the God-Emperor start defunding the universities regardless. Why not? They are converged. They’re no longer fit for purpose, they no longer perform their primary function, and they are the enemy.
One thing the Alt-Right understands that the cucks and cons never have. DO NOT FUND YOUR ENEMY.