From a Town Hall article, yesterday…
There have always been radicals on college campuses – tenure exists to protect professors from being fired for doing pretty much anything, from espousing the virtues of violence against the United States in the name of “justice,” to screwing a new co-ed every semester. It’s the key to what is happening now on campus with the attacks on Jews and anyone else who isn’t a terrorist sympathizer, and it’s what is going to get people killed. Democrats just hope the people killed are on “their side,” as they are more than willing to sacrifice a few young people for the “greater good.”
Full article, HERE.
Kinda mirrors my post from yesterday…
Nuff said.
Tenure often does not protect professors disagreeing with the Left.
Tenure only protects those who the administration of the school approve of.
Tenure was to protect freedom of thought, not criminality.
TOS/Dan/Ed- Points well made…
My full length opinion includes a lot of disorganized and perhaps unhinged ranting about theoretical purpose of several elements, actual result, and the question whether it makes sense to do something next.
The hiring process that results in tenure takes a long time, and provides ample opportunity to discriminate. Idea was that this would be good discriminating, against crooks, cranks, and people who would disgrace the field, university, or department.
Theorists who opposed certain trends in theory were discriminated against for decades. This resulted in several fields becoming overflowing with theoretical garbage.
Academics practicing critical theory have in many cases driven themselves well outside the sanity of the mainstream culture. This impairs some of the functions of what we use faculty and advanced degree holders for.
This is actually a pretty serious and important problem, and has been obviously so for years. But, exact descriptions and analyses have maybe been a topic of strong interest to few.
10/7/2023 was a late wake up call, but seems to be one that a lot of people are responding to.
And of course the madmen are desperate, insane, ghost dancing, and doubling down on the tactics that ‘worked’ for them before.
Relatively ‘good’ campuses can still be very bad places, and by trying to salvage expected future value from them, of not paying the political costs of serious medicine, various overseers may have made it impossible to save them. That may simply be the catastrophism that has infected my feeling on these issues for the past several years.
But, there is a public safety problem with the campuses recruiting for terrorism, sustaining it in information warfare, and having the formal legal system influence to manipulate judicial outcomes, and shield the terrorists from effective punishment.
A basic problem with much of my analysis is that exposure to these people has driven me a bit mad myself, and I make some similar strongly felt mistakes of assuming that theory must describe or control reality.
Things may be less bad then I understand, and more easily fixed with softer measures.
The problem of problems is big enough that there is more than enough opportunities to do good by looking at situations close to wherever you are.
Also, with minority majority districts, and minority ‘representives’ allegedly representing the ‘ethnicity’ but in practice politically reliable idiots aligned to a partisan interest, there was now a federal constituency for funding certain flavors of madness.
This is basically the funding source and motivation for entire academic fields.
Though, forex, climate science is a broader faction of mad politicians.
The scholars purport to be acting as agents for their theoretical ethnicity. The politicians purport to be acting as agents for their theoretical ethnicity.
BLM was basically the most pervasive and effective campaign of white supremacists terrorism in about forty years. Neither the ‘black’ politicians nor the ‘black’ scholars are honest agents of ‘blacks’. There is no black ‘community’. Communities and factional alignments are /not/ scaling to that aggregation, no matter if you talk the white flag, the black flag, the hispanic flag, the pink with purple polka dot flag, or the whatever.
All such groupings are split by perception factions.
When it comes to ‘white’ actions, the critical race theorists are all in on them causing multi-generational poverty among blacks, for decades to a hudnred years. But, if they really beleive that, and were not delusional with magical thinking about intentions and wishcasting, then they would refrain from doing the very same things with the same targets while flying the black flag.
They basically have nothing in common with blacks who do not want their own homes burned, nor with those whites who do not want to burn down black homes.
Doing that to fraud in Joe Biden is very much a ‘but for Wales’ consequence.
At the time, I was a bit vocal in condemning academcis for being very enthused about burning down poor neighborhoods, and for not doing that shit on their own campuses. It is possible that they have taken that sort of critique to heart, or that they simply have temporarily won in ‘office politics’, and can pull stuff now on some campuses.
Anyway, goals are not symmetric, so tactics need not be symmetric.