So, if you have taken classes in the social sciences and humanities, we challenge you: Count the readings authored by white males and those authored by the majority of humanity. Then ask yourself: Are your identities and the identities of people you love reflected on these syllabi? Whose perspectives and life experiences are excluded? Is it really worth it to accumulate debt for such an epistemically poor education?I got there via Instapundit, who wrote:
U.C. Berkeley Students Complain About Having To Read Aristotle, Plato, Hobbes, Locke, Hegel, Marx, Weber and Foucault. In course on classic social theory. And if that makes it hard for you to focus on the course material, cupcakes, you don’t belong in college"And I must add 2 things:
1. What a bad line drawing at the first link. I especially love the flatness of the disapprobation on the face of this lady:
2. What's this comfortably left-wing enclave known as Berkeley coming to when a professor can't get to the end of a lecture on Marx without tripping up trying to joke his way out of a challenge about the exclusion of underincluded identities?
For example, when lecturing on Marx’s idea of the “natural division of labor between men and women,” the professor attributed some intellectual merit to this idea because men and women are biologically distinct from each other, because women give birth while men do not. One student asked, “What about trans* people?” to which the professor retorted, “There will always be exceptions.” Then, laughing, the professor teased, “We may all be transgender in the future.” Although one might be tempted to dismiss these remarks as a harmless attempt at humor, mocking trans* people and calling them “exceptions” is unacceptable.
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I read the screed. If I were a CA taxpayer, I would sue to get my money back. She's either in the 2-year old anal phase or clueless. Reading comprehension isn't her strong suit. Humans haven't changed and they're studying the human condition. It doesn't matter what color you are, there are certain truths we hold self-evident.
The lesson is that federally funded student loans ought to be abolished for colleges and universities. let those who want to go to these institutions fund their tuitions themselves.
If there must be federal funding at the post high school level then let it be for vocational training with the trade schools incurring part of the repayment risk.
I'm still amused that the students and townsfolk haven't demanded the town change its name. Then, again, the Bishop of Cloyne generated much nonsense in his writings.
"Is it really worth it to accumulate debt for such an epistemically poor education?"
You're not going to pay it back anyway, so what do you care?
"mocking trans* people and calling them “exceptions” is unacceptable."
They are obviously the exceptions.
I think that's an excellent drawing. Catches her character to a "t".
kzookitty
"Occupy the syllabus" is Totally Gay.
I am Laslo.
Better that he denied that trans people are an exception. They are not, after all.
I read the article. The funniest part was the trans bit. Um, are we really planning to, as a society, channel monty python on this? If you haven't got a womb, you can't have babies. Sorry.
As for the class, when I took it it was called 'western civ'. Which at least was truth in advertising.
Drivel like this makes Scott Walker's lack of a college degree look like a positive, not a negative. Is this what passes for modern American education?
Get back to me the next time a trans "woman" (or "whoa-man!") gives birth.
Having gone to the University of California, I'm not surprised. The average Social Science Student is 3 SD to the Left of Che and aggrieved about nearly everything, all the time.
imagine, studying classical social theory and thinking that it isn't about dead white males.
next will be classical music theory with Beethoven, Bach and Brahms, three more dead white men...
or classical science theory. w/o Archimedes, Galileo, and Newton...
When I read the headline of this post I thought, fleetingly, that someone was finally going to talk about the dilution of course content by post-modernist SJW nonsense. Stupid brain.
There's nothing wrong with Berkley. In fact, I think we should surround the whole place with barbed wire fences, and not let anyone else in or out, to protect its perfection. A sort of quarantine. Wouldn't want to infect them with our terrible retrograde ideas on transwomyn.
Marx's transphobia is well documented, and what can one say about Aristotle's omission of a critique of the enslavement of black people, or Native American genocide?
Is there a course on "Modern Social Theory"? (How is Foucault "classic, though?)
But why wouldn't topical pieces by Confucius, Frederick Douglas, Gandhi, Mary Wollstonecraft, or Susan B.Anthony fit in a "classic" syllabus?
"What a bad line drawing at the first link."
My first thought was that it was a fan drawing of a character from 'Lord of the Rings'.
The width of the ink stroke is fairly unyielding when drawing with pen. People often start their drawing without consideration of this.
The smallest artistic element that you need to have clarity and detail determines how large you need to make the drawing to 'fit': if you start with a small drawing of a head there isn't enough spatial room to draw a pleasing eye, for instance -- to keep it from becoming a clotted mess you need to become more cartoon-like to keep the negative space open (see the 'Hunchback of Notre Dame' eye on the left of the drawing).
A good artist can insinuate much with a simple stroke, but the emphasis is on 'good' artist; otherwise, see the drawing's nose, for instance.
That said, there is a certain dour frumpiness about the drawing that might very well capture the subject. Maybe a 'Lord of the Rings'-style sword would help.
I am Laslo.
Are your identities and the identities of people you love reflected on these syllabi?
I got a Philosophy BA.
It turns out that the value of "humanities" has absolutely f-all to do with the "identities" of the reader and their loved ones vs. the "identities" of the authors.
This person is emblematic of why the humanities are considered worthless anymore - because when operated under the guise of "identity" matching they are worthless.
Because employment tests have been abolished due to the legal liability they place on corporations, a bachelor's degree has been elevated to a default criteria. This has served to increase the demand for bachelor's degrees. Coupled with the increase in government money via loans and grants the demand has increased further. The result has been an increase in cost/price (as capacity is constrained in the short-term) and a decrease in quality.
Government subsidies are a drug that should only be used in the very short-term and not long-term due to the dependency and addiction that results.
There's nothing wrong with questioning whether certain accepted writers/philosophers are relevant and should be replaced with other writers/philosophers, regardless of the race or era of those subjects. Educational focus is always changing, and we should always be questioning and trying to improve our courses of study.
But a lot of this smacks of "why study dead white men when we can study dead people of color?" which is the same old racist crap, no different from the Nazis deciding that certain writers or artists were insufficiently Aryan for German students. Injecting race where it doesn't belong makes you racist, full stop.
Because men are from Mars, women from Venus, whites from Pluto, blacks from Mercury, etc. The loss of individual dignity in diversity dysfunction is extraordinary. I wonder what it will take for psychiatrists to diagnosis this sociopathic orientation. It's not just white supremacists that debase human life. Quite the choice.
I haven't checked with Berkeley lately, so I wonder if "Life of Brian" is still socially acceptable.
We can laugh at these people, but their ilk are likely to show up in Law and HR departments, and the consultants they hire, and before long you will have judges ruling in line with their prejudices (see recent events). Alan Bloom was right, and more right every day.
The US is in an inevitable and irrecoverable downward trend in every respect. One day, and by then it will be in some senses a relief when it happens, it will be overrun by vigorous barbarians.
While we're at it, what about math? Why do those students have to study trigonometry, given that Pythagoras, Hipparchus, Ptolemy, and Euler are dead white males? Ditto calculus, based on the work of dead white male Isaac Newton. How can liberals prove that 2+2 = 5 when the dead hand of long-deceased white males lies atop math?
Marx did not recognize Trans people. That would have been a better retort.
Big Mike said...
While we're at it, what about math?
But, But, what about Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper :)
I really hope that one day all these great "left-wing enclaves" of higher education collapse under the weight of their own flatulence. They appear to be nothing but tax money singularities producing nothing but over sensitive, unemployable permanent adolescents.
It would be funny, except these loonies control too much of society and they will require, by force of law, that we live in their looney fantasy world where men are women and women are Marine infantry officers.
Marx is dead and may not be read.
Marx is dead and may not be read.
He may be just another dead white guy, but he cheated on his wife with their wage-enslaved maid.
There is that.
Am I the only one who looked for a footnote after reading "trans*"? How do you pronounce the asterisk in trans*? My guess is with the schwa sound: trans-uh.
I just noticed "LGBTQ*" also has an asterisk. It's probably pronounced "ell-gee-BEE-tee-kwuh." Accent on the "bee."
I must have missed their listing of classists that would give diversity.
A response to the article:
Berkeley Students OUTRAGED They Have to Read the Classics, but Nothing from Transgenders
Just wait until these guys do actually try to read the "classics" of the post-Marxist world & they discover that those guys are full of prejudices against one or another of their beloved "oppressed groups".
Do you really think Frantz Fanon gave a tinker's damn about buttboys & carper-munchers? Puh-leese!
The balkanization of identity group ideologies is simply unavoidable, and it kneecaps their efforts from the get-go. The Marxists were all too aware of this trait among their members, and it was why the Communist Parties maintained such strict ideological discipline. You get a bunch of Lefties going at it about whose suffering counts more, and that topic will suck up all the oxygen in the room.
Free community college will soon be followed with mandatory community college. This will not make the youth of America smarter, but it will provide teaching jobs for those who have post graduate degrees in this crap......I think some effort should be made to include Celts in the study of pre Socratic philosophers.
We are calling for an occupation of syllabi in the social sciences and humanities.
What do you mean "we" Kemosabe?
"Although one might be tempted to dismiss these remarks as a harmless attempt at humor, mocking trans* people and calling them “exceptions” is unacceptable."
The author considers them exceptions - can't be mocked - and there's no evidence of any "mocking".
"In the 2013 campus climate survey, 26 percent of respondents reported that they had personally experienced exclusionary, intimidating, offensive and/or hostile conduct. [and, of course, everything is worse for the Special People, by an amount that was too horrible to print]"
Only 26%? I would've guessed closer to 100%.
Poor helpless liberals can't read anything that's not assigned to them by an authority figure.
Heee the feminist boomers raised shrew offspring.
Didn't Fonzi jump that shark a looonnnng time ago?
I mean, when the Vagina Monologues is "transphobic" how big of a leap is it that having a visit from the monthly friend during a sporting event is transphobic?
I too think the line drawing is excellent, if not commercial.
"mocking trans* people and calling them 'exceptions' is unacceptable."
I'll be sure to remember that!
"Berkeley Students OUTRAGED They Have to Read the Classics, but Nothing from Transgenders"
have the transgendered written anything of note?
Big Mike,
Math will be acceptable as a course of study only when all developments by DWMs have been removed and MOCs (mathematicians of color) have developed a new, inclusive mathematics.
We must also NOW! shut down all electronic devices until IOCs (inventors of color) have done the necessary inventing.
We would do all of ourselves a favor if we got away from this stupidity.
Let's not have male and female as words we feel, but rather as objective reality.
Can we agree that:
Male = Has the Y chromosome
Female = Does not have the Y chromosome
Seems pretty simple.
Objective reality vs feelings, folks.
If your identity is so fragile that mere lack of representation harms it, why is it worth anything anyway?
How can liberals prove that 2+2 = 5
The answer to that is that they don't care. In fact, it is probably inconvenient to the average progressive that 2+2=4. That is because much of their faulty progressive logic is based on economic mathematical fallacies. (Plus a lot of other bad math, like the 1/5 of co-eds get sexually assaulted). I would go far as to suggest that one of the big reasons that we are into year seven of the Obama Recession is just this - wishful thinking economics.
If you are learning humanities, you learn about the greats who produced works of art that are historically relevant. You shouldnt' go there to validate your unique existence.
If there were a transgendered class in the Humanities what would it cover?
The movie the Matrix? Various transgendered porn stars? Chastity Bono on dancing with the stars?
"If there must be federal funding at the post high school level then let it be for vocational training with the trade schools incurring part of the repayment risk."
I am for student loans for science and engineering. They should be modest and not pay the whole cost. All the present day regime does is pay colleges to increase overhead.
"Female = Does not have the Y chromosome"
With the exception of the East German track and field team but they are not around anymore.
I'm so sick of these idiots.
Honestly, if you lined up any and all signatories to this letter against a wall, I'd show no reluctance in pulling the trigger.
When can we get back to a country, an America, where we're not hyper-sensitive, hyper-offended, and hyper-PC?
Is it too late? If putting these whiny shit-eating eggheads against the wall, televising it, and then telling the rest of the whiny, shit-eating eggheads that they better grow a pair or get back in the kitchen, would save America and pull us back from the brink of being a nation filled with "men without chests", I'd do it in a heartbeat.
Otherwise, I'd rather keep them alive, I guess, so when the collapse happens, I might be able to force a gaggle of these pansies into servitude by the barrel of my gun. My wife would appreciate the help cleaning, and if the harvest comes back bad, they can draw straws for dinner. To be dinner.
The Drawing: That's no lady, that's John Lennon.
On the plus side, reading whiny screeds like theirs makes me feel like superman. I could probably bench press both of them easily, despite the wafting smell of patchouli invading my nostrils and breaking my concentration.
I could also program a computer to run their pathetic lives for them, since they're going to someday need lots of help with that.
eric said...
***
Can we agree that:
Male = Has the Y chromosome
Female = Does not have the Y chromosome
I always thought so, but, apparently not.
It's the old Ayn Rand A=A.
Again, apparently not.
You can be whatever you think you are (except, of course, not).
I insist on the right to mercilessly mock surgical transvestites. And so should everyone else unless they prefer to chop off their penis, and then they should suffer the ridicule rightly administered to them.
eric said...
Can we agree that:
Male = Has the Y chromosome
Female = Does not have the Y chromosome
It's not that easy. Some Y chomosomed people are not properly developed (androgen insensitivity syndrome) and instead develop as women, for the most part. It's not their fault and they deserve to be well treated.
Surgical transvestites, though, deserve mockery and derision.
"What's this comfortably left-wing enclave known as Berkeley coming to when a professor can't get to the end of a lecture on Marx without tripping up trying to joke his way out of a challenge about the exclusion of underincluded identities?"
It's coming to what Progressives want it to come to.
Return to barbarism?
Good.
They're going first.
The comments on the Berkeley article are awesome. Lotta conservatives making valid, salient points, and a lot of liberals being idiots. One comment by Felix from yesterday caught my eye:
"Maybe white men really are just better than everyone else -- smarter, braver, more adventurous, more courageous, more successful in their attempts to defend themselves and conquer others, more successful at passing their genes down to descendants. Maybe the reason we live in a world created by them and their influence is dominant is because they actually are superior."
Yup. Go ahead, ARM Garage or anyone else, call me a racist. Don't care. I know what history says. And this guy hits the nail on the head.
Skyler wrote:
It's not that easy. Some Y chomosomed people are not properly developed (androgen insensitivity syndrome) and instead develop as women, for the most part. It's not their fault and they deserve to be well treated.
don't we still call those with AIS males, despite them having some female characteristics? They'd be males with a syndrome.
"They'd be males with a syndrome."
Correct.
One would assume that oppressed groups generally produce fewer works as they'd generally have less access to education, support, money, and free time.
I think we've reached peak crazy. This stuff is getting mocked everywhere. See Sad Puppies 3 for the SciFi community, GamerGate for the gamers, and this brilliant satire: C+=
Sample: 1.The language is to be strictly interpreted using feminist theory. Compilation privileges a single processor architecture over all others, which is deeply problematic. We cannot FORCE a cpu to conform to any architecture but rather let it self identify.
"Furthermore, the classroom environment felt so hostile to women, people of color, queer folks and other marginalized subjects that it was difficult for us to focus on the course material."
------------
That sentence was painful to read. I would suggest that students that find such things so difficult they can't even manage to summon up enough focus
to get through the material spend some time in the real world, growing up a bit, before they attempt such intellectual pursuits.
Kyzernick said...
Go ahead, ARM Garage or anyone else, call me a racist. Don't care. I know what history says.
You're a racist.
"Given the high heritabilities of behavioral traits and the lack of clear environmental mediators, differences in “culture” (especially within a given time period) are largely due to genetic differences between people. That is, differences between all human groups (races, ethnicities, social classes, or whatever) are all to some degree due to genetics, and perhaps mostly or almost entirely so."
What's this comfortably left-wing enclave known as Berkeley coming to when a professor can't get to the end of a lecture on Marx without tripping up trying to joke his way out of a challenge about the exclusion of underincluded identities?
Ace had an excellent piece on almost exactly the answer to this question.
http://ace.mu.nu/
The title of the piece (second from the top currently) is "Liberal Jonathan Chait Pens Microgressive Triggering Attack on "Political Correctness""
How can liberals prove that 2+2 = 5
Expecting them to prove anything about what they believe is just asking too much. And it's probably racist, sexists, etc.
I'll bet just about every non-white, non-male, non-straight person who authors a potential reading is WEIRD.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology#Systemic_bias
Ok, Ferna, I'll bite.
What's a good way to, at a glance, discern someone who is genetically closer to you than not?
When you self-victimize, it makes less work for the white man. The white man can now effortlessly marginalize everyone else. Since the white man cannot help but victimize everyone around him I'm waiting for the "victims" to offer segregation as the only solution, without irony.
Margaret (Meg) Perret is an undergrad at UC Berkeley. Her academic interests include CAS [Communication Arts and Sciences?], bioethics, ecofeminism, and science and technology studies.
For example: "Towards A Decolonial Scientific Practice: Towards A Multispecies, Postcolonial Scientific Practice."
You'll stop laughing when gender equity activists occupy the heights of authority over the teaching and practice of science and technology. When they become gatekeepers, deciding admission quotas, and attain positions from which they may determine what may be discussed and what conclusions may be considered.
It's not about science or technology or even about race, sex or gender. It's about raw political power.
"The question is which is to be master—that is all."
Cynicus, I'm waiting for that too.
The really crappy members of minorities tend to self-segregate anyway, so we'd just be removing the "de facto" part and making it official.
A hundred foot wall around south side Chicago would suffice.
Then fill it with lava.
Taking on student debt to study philosophers strikes me as insane.
You should only borrow money to study things that will increase your ability to *make* money.
If I could draw that good, I would draw all the time.
@Peter,
I had to google to find the link you were referring to. Here's the link.
Remember stuff like this when some clown goes rambling on about how "anti-science" the right is. I'm always amazed that people who think that science actually refers to knowledge about objects "out there", i.e. outside of human consciousness or discourse, can think that post-modernism isn't at its very foundations, anti-science.
But, But, what about Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper :)
Computer Science Department, not Math.
Freeman Hunt said, "One would assume that oppressed groups generally produce fewer works as they'd generally have less access to education, support, money, and free time."
You might make that assumption, and you would be correct to some degree. But there are other factors as well. White men have were not given all of these benefits; to a large extent, they created them. Why have others not done so as well?
Has anyone really prevented the blacks in Africa from ever putting together a seagoing ship? Building a multistory building? How much education do you think the Vikings had? The folks who built the great cathedrals?
What has stopped the muzzie nations from making great contributions (other than izlam itself)?
It is the people who do things, not the gifts given to them. Those with no motivation do nothing; those will much motivation create and give to others.
What does epistemically add to that sentence? Isn't education what remains after you have forgotten what you learned in school?
Evidently, the students who wrote the piece are unaware that Aristotle and Plato were Greek.
Back in the day, when we read Hegel's Philosophy of History, there was a Japanese American guy, who I'll call "E", in the class. Hegel, when he breaks up the epochs of history, starts with the "Oriental" epoch, where only one individual (the Emperor) is conscious of his freedom. We, in the modern, "Germanic" epoch, are conscious that we ALL are free.
We'd sit around the table joking with E, "E, how many are free?"
"One", he'd say emphatically, "One is free."
We'd shake our heads and say "No, E, ALL are free. So, now, how many are free?"
"One is free..."
And we'd all howl with laughter.
Now, if E. was ever offended by this, he sure hid it well, because he was a sumo-mountain of a man, who could, & did, bodily pick up & throw another male student into a snowbank when crossed.
It doesn't matter what color you are, there are certain truths we hold self-evident
But this is the whole problem. There aren't any self-evident truths in our society anymore. Many, if not most, on the Left would even deny that such a thing even exists.
The course description is classical social theory. I don't think they'd have far to look for radical social theory at Berkeley. Probably can't swing a dead cat without hitting some radical theory or another.
College degrees are largely worthless and the college experience is currently moving more in the direction of a 5-6 year cruise ship vacation. More people are getting performing arts degrees than Math, Chemistry, Physics and Engineering combined.
Just another part of our society being destroyed by government intervention.
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