Is their a Leftist Agenda in Academia?

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That professor could have been providing education to minority and disadvantaged students, thereby shrinking the privilege gap. Instead she's doing this.

By the same token, if whites stopped becoming teachers, there'd be a major teacher shortage, further disadvantaging minority kids.

Not that anyone is going to listen to her, she has no authority over teachers.

I guess since she resigned as a professor that means academia is now a little bit less left wing.

The moral of the story seems like it's pretty simple - we, on both sides and in the center need to hold the counterproductive idiots of our group's feet to the fire. Otherwise what we all have gets worse regardless of whose scoring the points.

We're in an awkward position in general because on one side you do have idiots, of all stripes, trying to market one thing or another that doesn't line up with reality but does scratch a neurological itch for them and people like them. It's probably always been like this. The result seemed to be that some dominant structure, whether church or government, rose to organize it all and both include and exclude opinions around certain parameters. One of the challenges with what Styx666 often calls the 'legacy media' is that they were just a mouthpiece for the government and while that could rally a lot of patriotrism and tribal inspiration it was increasingly toward obsolete purposes - especially considering the age of atomic weapons and the like or post cold war era scenarios where war would eventually come down to people flying drones off to pick off enemies at a distance.

It seems like we need a much more complex vetting process for ideas and it has to be something that everyone trusts the integrity of. Leaving the marketplace of ideas wide open seems like it's the default option for those who don't believe a safer option has been proposed yet but I think it's just a matter of time before we figure this one out. We have to because with the availability of information these days more people can be rational actors, we need them to be because they'll each have increasing technical leverage over society and a lot more of the worlds welfare to be responsible for (or to say perhaps that we'll be about as strong as our weakest links). If we keep people uninformed, detached, and let the government think for it - even with the best of bureaucratic intention (wow is that a pill to swallow) the best ideas will always have to be farmed out and it seems like 8 billion lightbulbs, glowing with varying intensity, glow brighter than just a few of varying intensity.

I think the idea is we may have to pursue something like a philosophy of knowledge, innovation, etc., see what it tells us that we need to stabilize our societies, what's needed in childhood development to populate the world with the adults tomorrow needs - both ethically and intellectually, etc..

Legacy media is the least of our problems. Just look at all the idiots on the internet.

Closeted racists can be openly racist on the internet.

There's so much confirmation bias on the internet because the internet.

The internet contains a massive amount of information and most of it's untrue. The crazies can prove anything using Internet sources. 

In 1917 every school child new the Earth is round. In 2017 flatearthers are becoming more common. Such idiocy can only propagate through the Internet. 

No s---, the legacy media's barely keeping relevance.

It sounds like you don't want New Channel 4Chan to replace it - that's good perhaps.

So the point is having an apparatus for sorting truth, bringing it to the top, and only resorting to assembling that truth into narratives when and if it's absolutely necessary. Until we figure that out the internet will be the unchained guerrilla in the room.

The trouble with the internet is debates soon descend into epistemology.

That's par for the course with Foucault and Derrida. They sound college educated.

A Cornell law professor writes in USA Today about being smeared for his defense of free speech:

My pro-free speech views made me the target of a smear campaign at Vassar College

My lecture against squeezing out free speech from colleges got me smeared. The students who smeared me got a safe space complete with coloring books and markers.

It will come no surprise that campuses face a free-speech crisis at many levels.

From speech codes to kangaroo campus courts to lack of faculty political diversity, non-progressive voices are being pushed off campus.

But there is an aspect of the free speech problem that gets most of the headlines because of the viral videos.

From UC Berkeley in the west to Middlebury College in the northeast, and at dozens of colleges and universities in between, we have seen speakers disrupted, shouted-down, shut-down and threatened. Almost all such speakers were right of center, and almost all of the perpetrators were progressive students.

At Cornell University, where I teach at the law school, former Senator and presidential candidate Rick Santorum was heckled and Tea Party activist Michael Johns was forced to hold his appearance at a secret location due to threats of disruption.

I have watched these anti-free speech mobs from a distance, and from a news perspective. At my website, Legal Insurrection, I’ve written about many dozens of such incidents which started with attacks on Israeli and pro-Israeli speakers going back almost a decade and now have migrated into the mainstream.

I have given many lectures on campuses, mostly focusing on opposing the academic boycott of Israel and on the subject of anti-Semitism.

But I’m not a household name. And I’m not particularly controversial, although I do stick out at Cornell as one of only a small number of openly politically conservative faculty members.

So despite my campus speeches and conservative politics, I never really thought the anti-free speech mob would come for me. Until they did, at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/ ... 820815001/

Wow this is interesting. I always figured Mark Blyth was pretty far left in most ways but made sense on economics. I'm starting to think he'd get on well with Bret and Eric Weinstein on the sociology.

Harvard Faces DOJ Probe Over Affirmative-Action Policies
Justice Department accuses university of failing to cooperate in investigation of whether its admission policies discriminate against Asian-Americans

The U.S. Department of Justice has opened an investigation into the use of race in Harvard University’s admissions practices and has accused the university of failing to cooperate with the probe, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

The Justice Department is investigating complaints that formed the basis of a federal civil lawsuit filed in 2014 in Boston, according to the documents. That suit alleges Harvard intentionally discriminates against Asian-Americans by limiting the number of Asian students who are admitted.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/harvard-fa ... mail_share

Democrats have a long history of not wanting the wrong kind of people at their lunch counters.*

Campus coffee shop evicts College Republicans from 'safe space'

Members of the Fordham University College Republicans were asked to leave an on-campus coffee shop because their MAGA hats apparently violated the shop’s “safe space policy.”

The self-identified president of the student club that runs the shop told the CR members that she was "protecting my customers," explaining that "you are wearing hats that completely violate safe space policy." ...

“You are threatening the integrity of our club. This is a community standard—you are wearing hats that completely violate safe space policy,” she said. “You have to take it off or you have to go.”

One of the students then asked the president to explain what she thinks the MAGA hat stands for, to which she replied, shouting: “Fascism, Nazis! You have three minutes.”

https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=10251


*"Lunch counters" is a historical reference, for the young folks here. Typical old Democrat lunch counter: