Personally, liberal students scare the shit out of me. I know how to get conservative students to question their beliefs and confront awful truths, and I know that, should one of these conservative students make a facebook page calling me a communist or else seek to formally protest my liberal lies, the university would have my back. I would not get fired for pissing off a Republican, so long as I did so respectfully, and so long as it happened in the course of legitimate classroom instruction.
The same cannot be said of liberal students. All it takes is one slip—not even an outright challenging of their beliefs, but even momentarily exposing them to any uncomfortable thought or imagery—and that’s it, your classroom is triggering, you are insensitive, kids are bringing mattresses to your office hours and there’s a twitter petition out demanding you chop off your hand in repentance.
He keeps using that word “liberal.” I don’t think it means what he thinks it means.
Between the infantilizing of campus culture and the growing global harshness, something has to give and—hint, hint—it won’t be the real world. The worst thing about the current climate of PC stupidity and mandatory cocooning on campus isn’t the ugly repression it entails. The destruction of free speech and free debate in the institutions that ought to be the citadels of intellectual liberty is a terrible thing and a horrible betrayal of everything universities are supposed to be about. But there is yet a worse consequence: the catastrophic dumbing down and weakening of a younger generation that is becoming too fragile and precious to exist in the current world—much less to fight the real evils and dangers that are growing.
These are the great-grandchildren of The Greatest Generation, corrupted by that generation’s children in the academy and public schools. How we have fallen.
These little Junior Anti-Sex League members combine thuggishness and fragility in a particularly obnoxious way. They should be sent home until they are mature enough for college. And America. And no parent should pay tuition to a school that takes this sort of hysterical behavior seriously.
Higher ed (as well as public ed) is an effing mess.
Essex said that there seems to be a cultural shift and that scientific arguments have deteriorated. Individuals in society have moved away from “civilized dialogues in which people have a collegial attitude and work together to try to find the truth.” Essex characterized the pro-climate change philosophy as a form of sophistry, catering to popular opinion rather than being concerned with the truth.
California continues to lead the country, and by some measures even the world, in environmental quality and climate change initiatives. But public policy must evolve to leverage these environmental achievements into corresponding improvements in educational attainment and middle class job creation. With more than 18% of the nation’s poor, and less than 1%3 of global greenhouse gas emissions, California should also embrace the challenge of leading the world in the creation of middle class manufacturing jobs for the rapidly evolving clean and green technology that California’s laws mandate, California’s educational and technology sectors invent, and California’s venture capital investors bring to the global market.
Instead, California’s policies, and regulatory and legal costs and uncertainties, tend to divert thousands of middle class jobs even in emerging green industries (including those not requiring high school diplomas) to other locations, including the Tesla battery manufacturing facility, which moved to Nevada. The loss of projects that help achieve important environmental objectives, create high quality jobs, and comply with California’s strict environmental and public health protection mandates, continues to occur in part because well-funded special interest groups ranging from business competitors to labor unions file “environmental” lawsuits as leverage for achieving narrow political or pecuniary objectives rather than to protect the environment and public health. This study suggests that the state must work much harder to ensure that California’s landmark environmental laws are not misused or pursued in a manner that adversely affects other, equally important policy priorities for California’s large undereducated and underemployed population.
The idiotic carbon law is going to do huge harm to the economy and the middle class, while doing nothing about “climate change.”
[Monday-morning update]
A tale of four droughts. All true, but, as Paul Dietz notes in comments, the biggest problem is that there is no rational water market in the state.
As disgusting as their video was, they should sue. This is a very bad precedent.
[Update in the afternoon]
More: “…as for the people in the comments who say that libertarians like me, Eugene Volokh, and FIRE shouldn’t be defending these students: If you only defend speech you agree with, you’re not a free speech advocate, you’re just a partisan hack.”
This is what the past decades have wrought. The federal student loan program has been an unmitigated disaster for almost everyone, except (so far) the university administrators.