Tag: education

BEST TIMELINE EVER

mary beard @wmarybeard
I’m afraid I dont think that academic debate is about ‘fights’ or freaking out. It’s about debate: one thing I hope I have learned in 40 yrs
Supreme Dark Lord‏ @voxday
But you don’t debate, Mary. You run crying to the media, whining that someone hit a poor wittle girl by criticizing your erroneous ideas.
mary beard‏ @wmarybeard
just for info, i never ‘ran to the media’ or even approached them. They have eyes for what goes on on Twitter! Now i’m back to writing
NassimNicholasTaleb‏@nntaleb
NOTHING academic in calling pple “misogynists” for dissenting, using Lewinski/Rowling & misrepresenting debate
mary beard‏ @wmarybeard  2h2 hours ago
oh come on. I never ‘used’ anyone; if they supported me, it was because they saw exactly what was going on. I dont recall using ‘misogyny’.
NassimNicholasTaleb‏@nntaleb
This should refresh your memory. For a “historian”, you keep being caught with misrepresentations.

NassimNicholasTaleb@nntaleb  1h1 hour ago
Mary Beard retweets n accusations of “misogyny” & articles in press & claims she never accused me of “misogyny” Historians shdn’t Fabricate!
Supreme Dark Lord‏ @voxday
It could have been worse. Just wait until she writes the inevitable book about the incident.

NassimNicholasTaleb‏@nntaleb
Bad picture.  Use these.
Supreme Dark Lord‏ @voxday
The second edition of Mary Beard’s heart-rending case for scholarship sans criticism.

I think the goatee and the confident leaning back really pulls the whole thing together, don’t you? I can honestly say I never expected to have one of my intellectual heroes critiquing and polishing my meme magic. It’s almost as astonishing as the time Umberto Eco invited me to join him on a visit to a monastery. So, to find out that Taleb is now reading SJWAL is just the icing on the cake.
NassimNicholasTaleb@nntaleb
Lesson I leared from UK thoughtnazis. Appease/correct them w/”I am not saying…”; they destroy you. Be aggressive, disrespect: they freakout
A. Epiphanes 4th‏ @A_Epiphanes4
I can’t help but to think of @voxday rule #1: do not apologize!
NassimNicholasTaleb@nntaleb
This morning, at page ~ 45 of his book.

Affirmative Action is protection money

An astute article by Robert Weissberg points out the true purpose of affirmative action, while illustrating why it can’t survive much longer:

When confronting a sizable, potentially disruptive population unable or unwilling to assimilate, a perfect solution is beyond reach. Choices are only among the lesser of evils and, to repeat, under current conditions, race-driven affirmative action is conceivably the best of the worst. A hard-headed realist would draw a parallel with how big city merchants survive by paying off the police, building and food inspectors, and the Mafia. Racial preferences are just one more item on the cost-of-doing business list–the Danegeld.
In effect, racial preferences in elite higher education (and beneficiaries includes students, professors and the diversity-managing administrators) separates the top 10% measured in cognitive ability from their more violent down market racial compatriots. While this manufactured caste-like arrangement hardly guarantees racial peace (as the black-on-white crime rate, demonstrates) but it pretty much dampens the possibility of more collective, well-organized related upheavals, the types of disturbances that truly terrify the white establishment. Better to have the handsomely paid Cornel West pontificating about white racism at Princeton where he is a full professor than fulminating at some Ghetto street corner. This status driven divide just reflects human nature. Why would a black Yalie on Wall Street socialize with the bro’s left behind in the Hood? This is the strategy of preventing a large-scale, organized rebellion by decapitating its potential leadership. Violence is now just Chicago or Baltimore-style gang-banger intra-racial mayhem or various lone-wolf criminal attacks on whites.
Co-optation is a staple in the political management repertoire. The Soviet Union adsorbed what they called the “leading edge” into the Party (anyone exceptionally accomplished, from chess grandmasters or world-class athletes) to widen the divide the dominant elite, i.e., the Party, and hoi polloi. Election systems can be organized to guarantee a modicum of power to a handful of potential disruptors and with this position comes ample material benefits (think Maxine Waters). Monarchies have similarly managed potential strife by bestowing honors and titles on commoners. It is no accident that many radicals are routinely accused of “selling out” by their former colleagues in arms. In most instances the accusation is true, and this is by design.

As John Derbyshire has noted, the USA is running out of young whites and Asians to sacrifice on the altar of Diversity. Average IQ is declining rapidly, and the value of the fake degrees being used to cut off the black populace from its natural leaders are falling even faster.
But then, this was always going to end one way, as Kipling warned us.
We never pay anyone Dane-geld,
No matter how trifling the cost;
For the end of that game is oppression and shame,
And the nation that pays it is lost!

College graduates are stupid

It’s not your imagination. The Audacious Epigone explains:

The mean IQ scores, converted from GSS wordsum results, assuming a national average of 98 and a standard deviation of 15, of those who attended college for at least four years by the decade they graduated in* (n = 5,124, though n for 2010s is only 49 and should be seen as merely suggestive–the trend is clear regardless):

Graduated IQ
1960s 112.3
1970s 109.1
1980s 106.0
1990s 103.9
2000s 102.9
2010s 100.0

The change in the intelligence of the average college graduate over the last fifty years approaches the IQ gap separating whites and blacks.

College for everyone has been an unmitigated intellectual, academic, cultural, and economic disaster.

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.