We carried over this precious chalice full of nonsense from its incredulous discoverer, Steven Hayward of PowerLine, with respectful awe.

These are the words of Sidonie A. Smith, Mary Fair Croushore Professor of the Humanities at the University of Michigan, author of a book titled Manifesto for the Humanities: Transforming Doctoral Education in Good Enough Times.

Writing this book, I came to see the new scholar subject as a performative of passionate singularity, hybrid materiality and networked relationality. This is one sense in which the humanities scholar that is becoming is possibly posthuman, and a posthumanist scholar. The locus of thinking, for the prosthetically extendable scholar joined along the currents of networked relationality, is an ensemble affair. It involves the scholar, the device, the algorithm, the code. It involves the design architecture of platform and tool, the experiential architecture of networks, and the economy of energy. It involves the cloud, the crowd and the “rooms”, bricks and mortar and virtual, in which scholarly thinking moves forward. Ultimately, thinking is a collaborative affair of multiple actors, human and nonhuman, virtual and material, elegantly orderly and unruly.

iOwnTheWorld reports:

Cheryl E. Matias is an “Assistant Professor & Motherscholar, Ph.D. in Race and Gender Studies in Education” (at the University of Colorado at Denver), who “Studies the Emotionality and Psychoanalytics of Whiteness”.

Her article, Why do you make me hate myself?: Re-Teaching Whiteness, Abuse, and Love in Urban Teacher Education, was published in Teaching Education this year.

In her article, Matias writes that teachers must address “normalized, oppressive Whiteness”, saying that a “colorblind” society cannot truly exist in the United States.

The study of race, racism, and exertions of Whiteness are rarely recognized as a substantive issue in teacher education and the teaching profession. … We cannot even begin to address symptoms, such as the racial achievement gap, if we do not address the underlying diseases of racism and Whiteness.

She teaches that “Whiteness” is a disease.

And here’s another sentence of hers to arouse your disbelief and scornful laughter:  “[Another academic] argued that white fragility plays an essential role in the maintenance of Whiteness and when unfettered, the consequences can be dire.”

What can that possibly mean? What exactly has been “fettered”? “White fragility”? How do you fetter fragility? Or the “maintenance of Whiteness”? How do you fetter maintenance? Or Whiteness itself? How do you fetter Whiteness?

You can read the whole nonsensical thing in pdf form by going here and passing a short exam set by Google.

But be warned. It is all gibberish, balderdash, blather, gobbledygook, tripe, hogwash, baloney, bilge, bunkum, twaddle and poppycock.

And it is all too typical of the gibberish etc. that is now being taught in American universities.