To all and sundry alike I explicate, as best I can, such things as the clash between the Taira and the Minamoto, the rise of the Kamakura shogunate, and the decline of the imperial house in twelfth-century Japan. Everyone is welcome in my classroom, but, whether directly or indirectly, I will not implicate myself in my students’ fetishes, whatever those might be. What they do on their own time is their business; I will not be a party to it. I am exercising my right here to say, “Enough is enough.” One grows used to being thought a snarling racist–after all, others’ opinions are not my affair–but one draws the line at assisting students in their private proclivities. That is a bridge too far, and one that I, at least, will not cross.
September 29, 2013
"I am not in graduate school to learn how to encourage poor souls in their sexual experimentation..."
"... nor am I receiving generous stipends of taxpayer monies from the good people of the Great State of Wisconsin to play along with fantasies or accommodate public cross-dressing."
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43 comments:
He'll be fired in 3...2...1
Jason Morgan is the hero of the week, and it's only Sunday.
I was more sympathetic to the grad student before I read that he had sent this directly to a bunch of media outlets.
I tend to be sympathetic because I've been to sessions like this with incompetent instructors. A truly deadly, dispiriting experience.
On the other hand, in the last session I was in we had a very good instructor - an intelligent and sensible young woman who gave practical advice and clearly explained the current federal laws. However, even she ran up against the internal contradictions of the current regime. She was going on about being aware of others point of view and trying to make people feel comfortable. One of our faculty members, a Muslim male, asked what he should do about a female student coming to office hours "inappropriately dressed." (I have a suspicion that I know the student he was talking about. What he considers inappropriate, I consider a ray of sunshine on an otherwise dreary day.) At any rate it was clear that keeping "everyone" comfortable wasn't as universal as it seemed. She didn't quite tell him to lie back and think of Mecca, but she came pretty close.
One is left wondering why the History Department is hiring people they admit are racists if they are spending good money to re-educate them in the name of Diversity.
Why not save money and not hire the racists in the first place?
Morgan has committed what amounts to as serious crime in the atmosphere of today's institutions of higher learning. He has exhibited good sense.
To all and sundry alike I explicate...
Why do so many collegiate conservatives try to sound like dime-store William F. Buckleys? They might get more support if they spoke and wrote in a different voice.
A nice hand grenade over the transom of political correctness at UW Madison. Bravo!
Back in Madison, friends ask if I'd met someone new and assumed I must have fallen in love.
But the reason I was so radiant was that I'd decided not to attend anymore diversity training.
Of course, none of this is a surprise. It's rampant, and has been evolving to this point for decades within our (re)education system.
It only makes it even more wonderful to consider that students and their parents shell out anywhere from $30K-$60K to receive this self-hating indoctrination. They are shoveled this shit by people who, in most cases, would not be hired to manage a shoe store, yet have Tenure in an "academic" environment which allows them a cushy spot in the academic lounge, working few hours (using TAs), submitting occasional papers on some social cause, and lecturing teenagers who mostly don't know any better than to sit in wonderment at their wise Sage.
30-40 years of this has allowed us to reach the point where most of today's graduates are idiots with credentials. Don't believe me? Fine. Talk to them. Talk history with them. Talk economics with them. It's f-ing scary.
I saw this 25 year ago, when running my own business. My new applicants suddenly could not fill out applications properly. Couldn't spell. Could not write complete sentences. It was an early indicator something was going wrong. It's gone well beyond that ever since.
Today I know multi-degreed young people who are convinced they are the smartest beings in the room. They all wanted to be Policy Wonks- deciding what's good and what's not good for the rest of us. Instead they find themselves in jobs they see as beneath them, hating all people who don't think like them, spouting words like "tolerance", "social justice", and of course, "racist".
If any of them had any knowledge of history, they'd immediately recognize the re-education camps of Mao or Pol Pot and refuse to spend another moment or dollar being indoctrinated.
I see and hear these students and I think: you should run....not walk, but run to your university and ask for your money back. This is a lost generation. It may be turned around, but it has to start by changing those ensconced in the universities. Sorry Professor, but it's the U that's sick.
Here here.
Well, this little budding Neo-Nazi can kiss his academic career good-bye, can't he?
Pointing out that diversity training is modeled after a Maoist self-criticism session, is he? Look, let's not go airing our dirty laundry in a way that strengthens the forces of reaction. We here at UW have a job to do as the vanguard of the downtrodden, so let's just get on with it.
Kudos, through, for "wine-dark sea". Even if Homer & Hesiod are dead white males.
How dare he tell the truth, much like Ted Cruz. The left will not tolerate this. I wish him well and lots of good luck.
He's a brave man.
It is highly unlikely that Jason Morgan will receive a PHD from the University of Wisconsin. The left is all for freedom of speech and academic freedom for themselves, they just don't like it when other people utilize speech to criticize them. His career is toast.
What he has described is the Marxist/neopagan mimetic process acting in full force to overwhelm the individual and indoctrinate them in the group think of the day. Although the neopagans claim that Christians are irrational and antiscientific, reason and evidence are totally absent at the indoctrination proceedings at the University of Wisconsin. As usual the left/neopagans/Marxists rely on ad hominem attacks, raw abuse of power and group pressure to cleanse the thinking of their targets.
Marxists/neopagans are full of moral fury at the crimes of others, but they themselves have no standard against which to measure their moral judgments. They are like a group of judges who preside over courts in a land without the rule of law in which the outcomes depend on the whims of the judges rather than objective evidence measured against an authoritative standard aka known as legitimate laws of the land.
Because they have no foundation for their moral outrage, the left functions much like an unaccountable lynch mob in which the behavior of the mob and the victims constantly change depending on the whims of the moment. The victims vary, but there are always enemies/victims since shared hatred is necessary to provide group cohesion and meaning into the lives of the left/neopagans.
Thank God my sons are in their 40s and missed this nonsense. My two youngest are girls and seem to have survived without damage. My grandson is a good little athlete and is only 8 so maybe things will correct before he has to face this.
No wonder UWM would prefer to drum-out conservatives like Morgan under the facade of "tolerance". Looks like he's had UWM's number for a while: $648,000,000.00
UW-Madison Slush Fund Fallout
Recently, a UW system-wide slush fund totaling 648 million dollars was brought to light. The university’s silence since this revelation has been deafening, but this morning (Thursday, April 25, 2013) Interim Chancellor David Ward finally commented on what would seem, to those of us who don’t happen to have 648 million dollars lying around, to be kind of a big deal.
When dealing with "public servants", it's always about the Benjamins.
The takeaway: Japanese history student commits career seppuku with internet shaped tanto.
Jason Morgan will get his Phd. from Madison. Even the Madison lefties would not dare drop him in this circumstance.
Moreover, he will be judged by experts in his field who, even if they disagree with his politics, have an interest in advancing their area of study, and will respect his (presumably) strong performance. No doubt there is a way to bring modern ideological wars into his field of study. Any stupidity will do to achieve that. But likely there is a residual respect for the scholarship in an area this remote from Modern America.
His bigger challenge will be getting a job. He just narrowed the scope of an already narrow path by a considerable margin.
Good luck, Jason. You are going to need it.
Or perhaps he could go to Japan, where most of the racists are not white.
"I was more sympathetic to the grad student before I read that he had sent this directly to a bunch of media outlets. "
Funny, this made me think more highly of him--as someone who knows how to fight back and will actually attempt to do so.
Bob_R: I was more sympathetic to the grad student before I read that he had sent this directly to a bunch of media outlets.
Yeah, 'cause just grumbling about it to the the like-minded, like the rest of us have been doing for years, has been so very effective in stopping and reversing this cancer.
somefeller: Why do so many collegiate conservatives try to sound like dime-store William F. Buckleys? They might get more support if they spoke and wrote in a different voice.
If only guys like this weren't offending your delicate rhetorical sensibilities, why, you'd be all over these Maoist shenanigans, wouldn't you?
Good for him.
Climate change skeptics have feelings too.
"I am not sure who selected the readings or crafted the itinerary for the diversity session, but, as they must have done so with the full sanction of the History Department, one can only conclude that the Department agrees with such wild accusations, and supports them."
This sounds like a University requirement done for legal reasons, not a departmental mandate.
Makes me really glad that I am not a UW faculty member anymore (I taught mechanical engineering at UW-Platteville for several years, back in the '80s.) The left, in the form of the faculty union was bad then, but I'm sure things are completely intolerable now. The long march through academia seems to be finished, and we are seeing its fruits daily now. For shame!!
Important will be the follow-up posts, the ones that tells us if he was hired for the second semester and if he graduated.
Regards — Cliff
Are tenured law school profs subjected to these kinds of accusations? How do tenured law school profs feel about race and gender re-education?
"I was more sympathetic to the grad student before I read that he had sent this directly to a bunch of media outlets. "
If he had not sent this to media outlets, he would be told that his TA job will be terminated if he does not take the re-education classes. He probably will be told that anyway.
What happens if you skip these things?
All that time spent getting a doctorate, and he'll leave without a shred of a chance of ever teaching at a public university. Bummer.
Sorry Ann but thanks to this article I just scratched off UW of the college tour list. Now how much WI and federal taxpayers money is wasted on this crap? No doubt quite a few truly deserving kids could get a full ride with what's wasted in this type of politically correct mandated nonsense.
The irony is that the second diversity class might actually have been useful. Most of us know how to be polite to people of a different race, religion, nationality, or gender. We may not know enough about people with different sexual orientations to avoid unintended insult. (I once accidently referred to "sexual preference" rather than "orientation" and was firmly corrected by a gay friend -- of course I did know the difference; it was a slip of the tongue.) So training to help us avoid giving unintended offense could be useful.
But after a first diversity class that apparently promoted anti-white racism, who could blame this young man for assuming the worst about the second?
The far left undoubtedly makes relations among people from different groups worse, not better.
I'll self-identify as he/him/his for this thread.
I enjoyed his style of writing. The flowery language makes it come off as calculated and not pretentious IMHO. The alternative would just be an angry spittle flying rant type reading.
Making complaints public before being fired makes it hard to fire the guy. Had he sent a private letter and not been renewed they would have found good cover for another reason to fire him and claimed this was coincidence.
He'll keep his job, but have to sit at the losers table in the lunchroom (as if prattling on about road construction methods during the Tokugawa Shogunate didn't already banish him there).
To quote Kate at Small Dead Animals:
What's the opposite of diversity? University!
"Why do so many collegiate conservatives try to sound like dime-store William F. Buckleys? "
Yeah, I noticed that. Otherwise, he's an excellent writer and clear thinker. He'd no doubt make a good history professor.
I'm not surprised at this, though. What's surprising is that a guy like this is still in the academy. I got through my political science Ph.D. program without all this ridiculous ideological indoctrination. I didn't experience it until I taught a class in Black Politics, where I was promptly warned by the students that I as "doing it wrong." Being a traditionalist and positivist, I wasn't down against the system enough, apparently. I also caught some black students cheating on the final exam (red handed), and when I turned them into the department their parents threatened a lawsuit. I was promptly thrown under the bus, with a reprimand about my "horrible teaching." I was finishing the program by then though, moving on to an adjunct position at Fresno State. Those were the first times I'd thought to myself that I wasn't going to make it in the academy.
In any case, I've got you linked up Ann, at "Jason Morgan, Ph.D. Student at University of Wisconsin, Rejects Diversity Indoctrination After Being Attacked as 'Racist'".
I just scratched off UW of the college tour list. Now how much WI and federal taxpayers money is wasted on this crap? No doubt quite a few truly deserving kids could get a full ride with what's wasted in this type of politically correct mandated nonsense.
As if this doesn't happen anywhere else.
What we were given, under the rubric of “diversity,” was an avalanche of insinuations, outright accusations, and suffocating political indoctrination (or, as some of the worksheets revealingly put it, “re-education”) entirely unbecoming a university of our stature.
Really? What did you expect?
This is my favorite bit:
For example, in one of the handouts that our facilitator asked us to read (“Detour-Spotting: for white anti-racists,” by joan olsson [sic]), we learned things like, “As white infants we were fed a pabulum of racist propaganda,” “…there was no escaping the daily racist propaganda,” and, perhaps most even-handed of all, “Racism continues in the name of all white people.”
In a just world, that "facilitator would be fired for being a racist pig. But there is no justice anywhere where the Left holds power.
Oh so people are good but states are great.
I am pretty sure that when I was taking classes in Human Resources Development—read that as Industrial Training—I read about studies in the private sector that had shown that so-called Diversity Training often increased group animosity among workers. Certain employers had discontinued or greatly changed their programs.
Prof. Althouse,
As a tenured faculty member at the very same educational institution, do you have a view on the matter?
Are junior faculty members in the Law School required to attend diversity training upon starting work?
As it happens I was a TA at UW the semester before the TA union negotiated the requirement that receiving a senior TA stipend required attending diversity training. I wish I could say I had refused to attend, but I got a RAship the next semester. It wasn't quite clear to me how it was the union's job to make it harder for me to make money, but that seems to par for the course.
Also, isn't the UW TA union dead? Killed by the requirement of yearly affirmative vote of the TAs, found in the big Wisconsin public unions law of a couple years ago. If so, who is forcing the UW to waste money on diversity training?
MadisonMan said...
One is left wondering why the History Department is hiring people they admit are racists if they are spending good money to re-educate them in the name of Diversity.
Why not save money and not hire the racists in the first place?
==================
Because the point is radical diversity trainers presume that ALL whites and presumably Koreans..are evil racists.
Thus you, Mad Man, like all whites, are either unhireable as racist steeped in the toxin of white privilege since infancy, or you must be blessed off by some fat black bitch with mediocre academic creditials that sits in judgement of you in "diversity training".
Were you properly apologetic about whites (and Koreans) being the wellspring of all evil and committed to atone for your misdeeds by making it up to noble black folk and add the queers...everday of your life??? Should you accept a stamp in your resume that you may be white but you "graduated" from diversity and LBGT training as suitable for jobs?
Its long past time to knock this bullshit off. Not just universities, but growingly, in government agencies and the corporate world. Since America is under Rule of Law(yers) at present, a lot of this is from fear of lawyers doing racial and homo rights lawsuits it creates a belief that if they subject their workforce to abuse by hardcore leftists and black racists and gay gestapo types telling them how they are required to think - the bosses did diligence and can defend against the lawyers money-grubbing better.
If you are over 65 you can attend classes at UW for free. And sometimes I think some of us should go to these classes and record the weirder ones and post them on a website because we are free, we aren't constrained by the need to get a job later on. I had no idea how bad things were till I saw a "class" someone recorded. The idea of paying hundreds of dollars for self-indulgent rants is sickening.
It would appear the diversity training people need a little diversity training themselves.
I question how this sort of experience is supposed to solve whatever problem UW-M has identified as needing a solution. People usually don't respond well to accusations, especially when they are general prejudices and not specific cases.
Douglas,
I too was curious about the opionion of the law professor. No response!
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