Some thoughts on Napolean, power, and modern academia.
Category Archives: Education
How To Ask A Question
This is a problem at space conferences, too. I’ve been guilty in the past myself, but have tried to improve.
Rabid Partisanship
Reducing it by reforming academia:
The liberalization of the American educational establishment has been a colossal failure. Liberals overtook the universities because (reasonably) they saw them as the way to shape a more progressive society in the long term. They insisted that they could set aside their own partisan beliefs and teach in ways that are fair to both sides. It is abundantly clear, however, that a progressive political mindset prevails in the American university system, especially at the elite levels. It’s more difficult for conservative professors to be hired or receive tenure, it’s more difficult for conservative students to speak up without fear of the consequences, and liberal students emerge from the universities with a terrifically superficial understanding of the conservative mindset — and American society is the poorer for it.
When you look at the three values that conservatives (according to Haidt) honor but liberals do not — loyalty, respect for authority, and sanctity — these are precisely the values that are flouted in the precincts of American academe. The result is a more impoverished moral imagination amongst students, a stubborn inability to understand the beliefs and the motives of conservatives, and thus the imputation of nefarious motives to those irrational conservatives who do not see things in the ways the illuminati do. If you don’t believe that this has contributed to the partisanship we’ve observed in recent years — particularly the exceedingly nasty way in which liberals in general have responded to the Tea Party movement, to social conservatives and generally to anyone who refers too much to moral sanctity and loyalty to American traditions and institutions, then I think you’re wearing exactly the kind of blinders Haidt talks about.
Haidt’s work is generating quite a stir.
Affirmative Action
…and radical politics. As he notes, let’s hope that SCOTUS slaps down this evil once and for all.
The SAT
I never took it, but here’s a guy who retook it at age 35. The analytic geometry question was easy for me, but I didn’t take the time to try to figure out the covered polygon. I assume I’d probably do pretty well on it, even now.
How did I get two degrees from Ann Arbor without taking the SAT? By spending the first two years at community college.
And boy, can I identify with this:
Because I work on a computer like normal human beings, I’d forgotten how painful it can be to write in longhand for long stretches of time. I know it’s not as bad as digging trenches in the Amazon, but still—it’s AGONY. Your neck gets sore from staring down. You get that weird dent in your middle finger and thumb from pressing the pencil too hard. Everything around you starts to smell like old pencil shavings. This is why I fucking hated blue-book exams in high school and college. It wasn’t that I had to study, or that I had to think on the fly. It was the hard LABOR of it all. Every time I finished a blue-book exam in school, I felt as if I had just moved a cord of firewood. Many times, I would hurry up and try and finish the essay early, just so that I could stop writing and rest. It’s amazing, when you think about it. You spend a whole semester studying for some test, and then you rush it because you just want five extra minutes to relax. That’s how my brain works. It’s not a perfect organ.
I am so fortunate that computers came along when they did. My writing volume would be a tiny fraction of what it is if I had to write long hand.
The Left’s Long-Time War On Women
I have some thoughts on the hypocrisy, projection and cynicism over at PJMedia.
[Update a while later]
At The Village Voice, some things never change:
Backpage accounts for about 70 percent of prostitution advertising among five Web sites that carry such ads in the United States, earning more than $22 million annually from prostitution ads, according to AIM Group, a media research and consulting company. It is now the premier Web site for human trafficking in the United States, according to the National Association of Attorneys General. And it’s not a fly-by-night operation. Backpage is owned by Village Voice Media, which also owns the estimable Village Voice newspaper.
Attorneys general from 48 states have written a joint letter to Village Voice Media, pleading with it to get out of the flesh trade. An online petition at Change.org has gathered 94,000 signatures asking Village Voice Media to stop taking prostitution advertising. Instead, the company has used The Village Voice to mock its critics. Alissa thought about using her real name for this article but decided not to for fear that Village Voice would retaliate.
How could she think such a thing of those beneficent, woman-loving leftists?
[Update late evening]
More of the Left’s respect for women.
[Update a few minutes later]
Sarah Hoyt: War is Hell.
[Bumped]
The Casual Bigotry
Grad School
…and the career lies.
I think this bubble is starting to pop.
The Beatings In The Not-So-Golden State Will Continue
…until morale improves. California tax revenues have plunged. And Sacramento’s solution? To increase tax rates, of course.
Anybody But Obama
Despite the hopes of the foolish, the Tea Party hasn’t gone away:
“When it comes to the presidential contest, I think the tea partiers will turn up in droves,” she told The Daily Caller.
“They aren’t rallying in the street anymore — I think they’ve been there, done that, so they appear to be quieter. But tea party chapters are still alive and vigorous, and they are just chomping at the bit to pull a lever in November.”
What’s more, says Foley, is that tea partiers will ultimately rally behind whomever the GOP nominee turns out to be.
“And frankly, I think many tea partiers are eager to pull the lever in favor of the Republican presidential nominee — whoever that turns out to be — simply because, from their perspective, that person’s policies will be clearly preferable to those of President Obama,” she said.
And then there’s this:
Foley is the rarest of species: a tea party supporter in liberal academia. A law professor at Florida International University and chair in constitutional litigation for the Institute of Justice, Foley says many of her liberal colleagues didn’t receive her pro-tea party book too well. (RELATED: Full coverage of the tea party movement)
“It’s more than a little ironic that some of the most close-minded folks I have ever met make their living as professors whose entire job is to engage in scholarly inquiry and convey that spirit of open-minded inquiry to their students,” she said. “It never ceases to amaze and disappoint me.”
I’m long past either amazement or disappointment. They can do neither any more.
[Update a few minutes later]
Here’s a review of Foley’s book, which explains the Tea Party to the idiots in the media.