The Woke Eating their Own, Latest Edition

The Woke are eating their own, which was entirely predictable based on Ryan Grimm's June 2022 article.

According to this thread, Dr. Lee told FAIR she was accused of "whitesplaining" as she tried to set a meeting agenda, and she was told that she was perpetuating "white supremacy" by valuing punctuality & engaging in strategic planning.

Continue ReadingThe Woke Eating their Own, Latest Edition

FIRE’s Model Legislation

FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) has proposed model legislation to take on the ever-growing DEI Bureaucracies of Universities, a critically important move for defending academic freedom. In my opinion, aggressive legislation of this sort is necessary, given the way that DEI departments are destroying our universities. Lawrence Krauss recently detailed many of the DEI abuses in his video, "Is Woke Science the Only Science Allowed in Academia?"

Excerpts from the FIRE article:

When colleges act more like giant corporations and less like educational institutions, student and faculty rights suffer. Newly hired bureaucrats need to justify their paychecks, after all — so controversial, dissenting, or simply unpopular voices become targets. “Surely massive administrative bureaucracies of student life must be maintained,” wrote FIRE co-founder Harvey Silverglate in 2011, “if universities are going to enforce the increasingly ubiquitous — in academia —‘right’ not to be offended.”

In recent years, campus administrative growth has focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. Whatever the intentions, the imposition of DEI bureaucracy upon the academy has too often come at the expense of academic freedom and freedom of expression. DEI administrators have been responsible for repeated campus rights abuses. ...

DEI efforts have threatened student and faculty rights in other ways, too. Most significantly, colleges and universities now routinely require students and faculty to pledge their allegiance to a politicized understanding of “diversity” as a condition of consideration for admission, hiring, or promotion. FIRE has repeatedly come to the defense of faculty who have been pressured into proving their fealty to a specific conception of DEI as the price of serious consideration or continued employment. And we’ve heard concerns about the chilling, coercive effect of mandatory diversity statements from hundreds more.

Providing the “wrong” answer dooms applications and candidacies. At the University of California, Santa Cruz, for example, DEI statements are used as an initial screening tool for applicants, with one public report indicating that 45% of applicants across various searches were eliminated in a first round of DEI statement screening. (That number may be comparatively low. During one department’s hiring process at the University of California, Berkeley, reviewing diversity statements prior to the rest of a candidate’s application eliminated 78% of applicants.)

So today, FIRE is introducing model legislation that prohibits the use of political litmus tests in college admissions, hiring, and promotion decisions. Legislation is strong medicine, but our work demonstrates the seriousness of the threat. While the current threat involves coercion to support DEI ideology, efforts to coerce opposition to DEI ideology would be just as objectionable. Attempts to require fealty to any given ideology or political commitment — whether “patriotism” or “social justice” — must be likewise rejected.

To that end, because we are cognizant of the endless swing of the partisan pendulum, FIRE’s legislative approach bans all loyalty oaths and litmus tests, without regard to viewpoint or ideology. In an effort to avoid exchanging one set of constitutional problems for another, our model legislation prohibits demanding support for or opposition to a particular political or ideological view. We believe this approach is constitutionally sound and most broadly protective of student and faculty rights, both now and in the future.

FIRE strongly believes that loyalty oaths and political litmus tests have no place in our nation’s public universities. Given the pernicious threat to freedom of conscience and academic freedom we have seen on campus after campus over the past several years, legislative remedies are worthy of thoughtful consideration. We look forward to further discussion with both supporters and critics about how best to ensure that our nation’s public colleges and universities remain the havens for intellectual freedom they must be.

Model Legislation can be read at the linked article. Here are a few excerpts from the Model Legislation:

A. No public institution of higher education shall condition admission or benefits to an applicant for admission, or hiring, reappointment, or promotion to a faculty member, on the applicant’s or faculty member’s pledging allegiance to or making a statement of personal support for or opposition to any political ideology or movement, including a pledge or statement regarding diversity, equity, inclusion, patriotism, or related topics, nor shall any institution request or require any such pledge or statement from an applicant or faculty member.

B. If a public institution of higher education receives a pledge or statement describing a commitment to any particular political ideology or movement, including a pledge or statement regarding diversity, equity, inclusion, patriotism, or related topics, it may not grant or deny admission or benefits to a student, or hiring, reappointment, or promotion to a faculty member, on the basis of the viewpoints expressed in the pledge or statement.

[More . . . ]

Continue ReadingFIRE’s Model Legislation

We Have Ended the War on Obesity. We Are Declaring Ourselves Healthy Fat and Moving On

Dr. Vinay Prasad reports on the insanity. Here is is in a nutshell (this is my mini-summary):

Mount Sinai School of Medicine: Striving for a healthy weight is racist. NYT: Stop worrying about losing weight. This is part of the new American ethos: This bad thing that is happening to you is not your fault. In fact, nothing is your fault. And there is no need to work hard to achieve anything.

Continue ReadingWe Have Ended the War on Obesity. We Are Declaring Ourselves Healthy Fat and Moving On

What it Means to be “Woke”

The term "woke" refers to something real. It is important to get clear on what that thing is because we are in the throes of a powerful social movement that is working very hard to evade criticism by refusing to allow us to utter its name.

I have used "woke" for the past few years and I'm not giving up on this perfectly adequate term. There are other almost synonymous terms such as "social justice movement," but nothing quite captures Wokeness like Woke. I'm sticking with "woke," even though the Woke now accuse those who use this term of being insulting or bigoted. The "woke" will be insulted no matter how far down we go down the line of cascading euphemisms, however. This succession is sometimes referred to as a "euphemism treadmill."  Another example of the euphemism treadmill can be found with the history of the word "retarded."  At its core, "retarded" means slow thinking.

Many people have used the term "retarded" to describe a real life phenomenon that can be plainly seen in some people, unfortunately. Others have used it as an explicative and a pejorative, to hurt someone's feelings, often directing this insult at people who are not diagnosably slow in their ability to think.  The fact that the word "retarded" can be used to both describe a real phenomenon and as an insult has resulted in the concoction of a comically long list of synonyms. Every time a new euphemism is invented, someone uses the newly created euphemism as an insult and then people go back to the blackboard to create a new synonym for slow thinking.  

[More . . . ]

Continue ReadingWhat it Means to be “Woke”

Jonathan Haidt’s Recently Expressed Doom and Gloom

Excerpt from The Australian --

"'I am now very pessimistic,' Haidt said. 'I think there is a very good chance American democracy will fail, that in the next 30 years we will have a catastrophic failure of our democracy.'"

Why would Jonathan Haidt be so full of doom and Gloom. Maybe because of the dozens of cases of Woke malfeasance in the science departments of universities, as described by Lawrence Krauss:

Continue ReadingJonathan Haidt’s Recently Expressed Doom and Gloom