I'm a conflict historian. I've thought about a PhD in historical anthropology but you know what, not worth it in a world where literal children can get a professor punished-by-process for speaking in class about violence and dimorphic human biology with the Pioneer Plaque on the screen behind them. I know. This happened.
They scream like they have been told, for the first time and far too late in life, that Santa is not real. They have incredible power with their hurt feelings, like infants with nervous first time mothers. Everything we know about child and human development is subject to blank slate Lysenkoism. If we don't hold a debate on all this soon, they will eventually get to the ag department, and there will be hell to pay.
anne's system shifts power from the student to the institution, which now has the power to gatekeep students based on idiosyncratic determinations of the oppression hierarchy among subpopulations. Individual performance is qualified by group membership as determined by administrators and committee chairs. This is a never ending subjective marxist wormhole. It supplants objective benchmarks with moral judgments from self-appointed commissars of higher education.
It is arrogant to assume that her opinions on candidate "deservedness" are better than the current measures of performance.
Anne: Yeah, the performative BS is bad, but there's some good ideas in there.
Lee: The performative BS is so bad that it ruins everything.
I agree with both of you, with the caveat that the performing is being done by the people, not the ideas.
What if there were a DEI program where focusing on others was off-limits? Where there were no right or wrong answers, and everyone only talked about themselves and what they thought about the ideas presented and how they personally related to them?
Applause. Sharing.
I'm a conflict historian. I've thought about a PhD in historical anthropology but you know what, not worth it in a world where literal children can get a professor punished-by-process for speaking in class about violence and dimorphic human biology with the Pioneer Plaque on the screen behind them. I know. This happened.
They scream like they have been told, for the first time and far too late in life, that Santa is not real. They have incredible power with their hurt feelings, like infants with nervous first time mothers. Everything we know about child and human development is subject to blank slate Lysenkoism. If we don't hold a debate on all this soon, they will eventually get to the ag department, and there will be hell to pay.
anne's system shifts power from the student to the institution, which now has the power to gatekeep students based on idiosyncratic determinations of the oppression hierarchy among subpopulations. Individual performance is qualified by group membership as determined by administrators and committee chairs. This is a never ending subjective marxist wormhole. It supplants objective benchmarks with moral judgments from self-appointed commissars of higher education.
It is arrogant to assume that her opinions on candidate "deservedness" are better than the current measures of performance.
Anne: Yeah, the performative BS is bad, but there's some good ideas in there.
Lee: The performative BS is so bad that it ruins everything.
I agree with both of you, with the caveat that the performing is being done by the people, not the ideas.
What if there were a DEI program where focusing on others was off-limits? Where there were no right or wrong answers, and everyone only talked about themselves and what they thought about the ideas presented and how they personally related to them?