The university: a place of rage and fear 115

A university is no longer a place of free speech where, among other scholars, and under the guidance of the erudite, you gain knowledge, learn to think, acquire skills through the training of your brain and in some disciplines your hands, so you can make a contribution to the world and be rewarded with the wherewithal to live a good life. No.

It is a place you pay a vast sum of money to attend in order to shiver and quake and weep, and gnash your teeth, and shriek at your instructors, and parade your weaknesses with pride and your color with arrogance or apology depending on what it is: white with apology, other with arrogance.

Is it worth paying that vast sum of money just to perform acts of desperate suffering, shrink away in specially protected corners, crow over others or be crowed over?

Well, maybe the crowing over others is good fun. But at such expense? Couldn’t you do it back home, now and then, for nothing?

When it comes to choosing illustrations of terror-and-grief performances and speech censorship at universities, we have an embarrassment of riches. But they are hardly needed. Everyone who watches TV and scans a newspaper on line has surely seen the screaming acts on campuses, the invasions of quiet libraries by noisy aggressive mobs, the wild attacks in lecture halls on persons non grata, and read about the revisions of the English language by which deranged administrators struggle to ameliorate the noisy sorrow of the “students”.

Here are a few items of university news cited by John Hawkins at Townhall:

“Vote Trump” Written In Chalk On The Sidewalks Of College Campuses

We’ve now reached the point where liberal students have become so sheltered that merely seeing support for a candidate that they don’t like sends them into a tizzy.

Just hours before four bombs ripped apart two transportation systems in Europe, Emory students were dealing with their own supposed terror situation. … Someone had the audacity to scribble “Trump 2016″, “Vote Trump”, and “Trump!!!” with a writing utensil preferred by toddlers. The erasable chalk around the campus, with a simple political message, was all it took for these easily offended people to completely lose it, suffering emotional unrest that officials were forced to deal with.

The campus publication, The Emory Wheel, actually took this “chalk situation” seriously, seemingly siding with the crybaby college students who demanded to know how someone could rape their “safe space” with a candidate’s last name. Rather than walking over the words, or simply wiping away the words instead of their tears, 40 students banded together to protest this sidewalk “terrorism” inside the administration building.

“I’m supposed to feel comfortable and safe here,” one female student said. “But this man is being supported by students on our campus and our administration shows that they, by their silence, support it [sic] as well … I don’t deserve to feel afraid at my school.”

Calling America “A Land of Opportunity”

The University of California sent a handout to faculty recently that includes a list of offensive statements. According to the handout, “America is the land of opportunity” will be banned from campus. … A University of California faculty leader-training handout instructed professors not to say that “America is the land of opportunity” because that’s a racist, sexist microaggression.

According to the handout, called Tool: Recognizing Microaggressions and the Messages they Send, the statement asserts that race and gender do not play a role in life successes — despite the fact that saying opportunities exist and saying that opportunities are more easily attainable for some people than others are not mutually exclusive assertions.

Other microaggressions listed on the document include asking, ‘Where are you from or where were you born?” (because it suggests that the person you’re asking is “not a true American”); asking a post-doctoral minority student whether he or she is lost in the halls of a chemistry building (because it “makes the assumption that the person is trying to break into one of the labs”); and having students fill out forms on which they have to check a box indicating whether they’re male or female.

The school will now ban the phrase, “America is the land of opportunity”.

The Word “Man” Being Too Much For Students At Princeton

The Princeton University HR department has largely wiped the word “man” from its vocabulary.

The relatively new policy in effect at the Ivy League institution spells out the directive in a four-page memo that aims to make the department more gender inclusive.

Instead of using “man”, employees are told to use words such as human beings, individuals or people.

The memo goes on to list a variety of occupations that typically include the word “man” in them and offers replacements: business person instead of businessman, firefighter instead of fireman, ancestors instead of forefathers, and so on.

In a statement to The College Fix, John Cramer, Princeton’s director of media relations, said the guidelines “reflect the university’s initiative of fostering an inclusive environment”.

Princeton’s LGBT Center also offers a guide on various gender pronouns for those who identify as “transgender, genderqueer, and other gender-variant”, suggesting “ze, zie and hir”, “they and theirs’, and “Ey, em, eir and emself”.  

The Name “Lynch”

Students are demanding that … Lebanon Valley College administrators remove or modify the name of the “Lynch Memorial Hall” — not because the man it was named after was a racist, but because these students cannot handle the word “lynch”.  Lynch, of course, is a term that means to put to death (as by hanging) by mob action without legal sanction.

The hall was named after Clyde A. Lynch, who served as president of the college during the Great Depression and raised more than $500,000 for the physical education building that bears his name.

Just a few urgent changes in the process of totally transforming the land of the free and the home of the brave into a country safe for crybullies and ignoramuses.

Posted under education, Race, Sex, United States by Jillian Becker on Saturday, August 20, 2016

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Ayers and Obama: ‘Education is revolution’ 322

The University of Illinois wanted to employ Jack the Ripper as Professor of Criminology and Ethics, and was disappointed to learn that he was not available for the post as he died some time ago. Just kidding. But take the case of  William Ayers. 

 William Ayers the terrorist (and proud of it) is a tenured professor of Education at the University of Illinois, and much more than that – as this Investor’s Business Daily article reports:

Ayers told [his friend] the great humanitarian Chavez: "Teaching invites transformations, it urges revolutions large and small. La educacion es revolucion." It is that form of socialist revolution that Ayers, and Obama, have worked to bring to America.

Ayers, now a tenured Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois, Chicago, works to educate teachers in socialist revolutionary ideology, urging that it be passed on to impressionable students.

As [Sol] Stern points out, "Ayers and his education school comrades are explicit about the need to indoctrinate public school children in the belief that America is a racist, militarist country and that the capitalist system is inherently unfair and oppressive."

If Ayers was just another nutty professor, we’d be lucky. But he wields great influence in academic circles and has had Obama’s ear. He’s the author or editor of 15 books. Chicago’s current mayor, Richard M. Daley, has employed Ayers as a teacher trainer for Chicago’s public schools and consulted him on the city’s education-reform plans.

Just last month, Ayers was elected vice-president for curriculum for the 25,000-member American Educational Research Association. AERA is the nation’s largest organization of education-school professors and researchers. 

Posted under Commentary by Jillian Becker on Wednesday, October 8, 2008

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