Is their a Leftist Agenda in Academia?

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A friend of mine insists that there is, but I'm not sure whether to believe it or not.

Academics have always encouraged criticism in a system that tries to hold the status quo, and naturally that tends to be a "left" thing to do.

You'll see this with scientists etc. too - they also tend to be left for similar reasons.

Is it a problem? No.

Wow. This is Noam Chomsky commenting on postmodernism. He didn't have a single nice thing to say about it.

Cambridge University examiners told it is sexist to use the word 'genius' to describe students
History faculty academic claims the department wants to use more 'transparent' language to help eradicate gender inequality

Cambridge University examiners have been warned against using words such as “flair”, “brilliance” and “genius” when assessing students’ work because they are associated with men, an academic has revealed.

Lucy Delap, a lecturer in British History at the top-ranking institution, said History tutors are discouraged from using the terms because they “carry assumptions of gender inequality”.

She told The Telegraph: “Some of those words, in particular genius, have a very long intellectual history where it has long been associated with qualities culturally assumed to be male.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/educa ... 87401.html

If conservatives want everyone to stop "vilifying" them, then they should stop claiming that poor people are "just stupid and lazy".

You reap what you sow.

I read books, beyond my years, in the public library and school book sales, from a very early age. I was hopeful of newish storefronts and a (then, analogue) radio college (more than one story tall) making my suburb into a sophisticated city scape. I enjoyed the technological promises, being made by secular humanists, that have since fallen to decay.

I read cynical, anti-abolitionist literature, and from monarchists, and, to my surprise --
College was not always a state market control. It was more akin to the Greek forum or public library, a free marketplace of ideas, where fringe science and religion were discussed contemporaneously, like in a world fair, or on the internet.

Maths, penmanship, and rote disciplines would have been taught in primary schools, or by tutors, or not at all. They still survived, in fair health.

Our agitprop is intended to demoralize. Courses name specific products, much along the lines of an info-mercial. This is corporatism. It wants you to be a needy cog in greater, overall machine. There is no social contract, including the dignity of labor and a rightful place to exist.

The mags, calling for labor rallies, were all owned by champagne socialists, in the Hamptons.It's patterned, purposeful, mundane, and it's leftist. I am proposing one of the least spectacular things, I could imagine. I feel that college is an investment, and the more-conniving bourgeoisie do not take risks, without legal guarantees. I am not steering you away from anything, per se. I am saying, do you you take it literally, or discuss it, in the abstract. Also, what are the guaranteed outcomes. In other words, is it part of a job offer or contract.

Yes, it is a leftist institution.

But, is leftism offering you anything concrete.

You do not have to concede to propaganda, personally. When asked, you can answer, according to this leftist or that leftist.

Good advertisement for silly-string here.

Also yeah - I know Antifa is not academia, still bizarre stuff and germane to the topic of leftism.

A banking interest or teacher tells you where to go or what to do. This is academia and business, telling you to wallow in your own crapulence -- never to be sharp and in-control.

Secure your own safespace, and show decorum. Stampeding animals have more organization than that.

Feminist geographers encourage colleagues not to cite research of white men

Two feminist geographers are encouraging their colleagues to be more mindful about citing the research of white males because doing so contributes to “the reproduction of white heteromasculinity of geographical thought and scholarship.”

Writing in “Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography,” Carrie Mott and Daniel Cockayne argue that considering an author’s gender, race or sexuality prior to citation can be an effective “feminist and anti-racist technology of resistance that demonstrates engagement with those authors and voices we want to carry forward.”

The authors point out that whether an academic’s research is cited by his peers has significant implications for promotion, tenure and influence. Therefore, to cite only white men “does a disservice to researchers and writers who are othered by white heteromasculinism.”

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/201 ... white-men/

Whether or not actual paper says what the article in your link claims, I don't know. The journal wants over $200 for full access to the paper, so it's contents will remain a mystery. However, remember that academics have to keep publishing papers to stay relevant and advance their career. The papers are part of their product line, and it costs money to do very in depth, ground breaking research, that most academics just don't have, so they churn mountains from molehills, make things horribly complex, and hope they can fly on pretentiousness.

However, it's true that many fields of study have a male bias. This is not misogyny, but a product of cultures long past.

Take physical anthropology for example. Surely most of our non-human ancestors were not males. Surely the sex rations were roughly balanced, yet the artist depictions of them are almost always male, and the terms for them, "homo" is related to the Latin word for man, which is male, and "cavemen" is the general rather than "cavewoman", and phrases such as "The history of man", "primitive man", "modern man" abound. Even this newly discovered hominid Denisovan is called "Denisovan man".

Surely, you have seen this....



More often than this...



Or this...



If an alien were to come here and start investigating the evolution of human kind using our data, they might assume that females were a recent development.

Why are males so thoroughly over represented in the field of physical anthropology? Because until recently, most anthropologists were men, who grew up in what we would call a patriarchal society and would not reasonably think to draw a cavewoman or describe humanity in female terms.

It's not misogyny but rather being an innocent product of one's society. You will notice that most of the renderings of modern humans are also caucasian even though Asians comprise the largest single human "racial" demographic. Why not draw an Asian? Because most of the people who made the drawings were caucasian and likely grew up in predominantly caucasian societies.

More news from the Junior Totalitarian League:

Black Lives Matter Students Shut Down the ACLU's Campus Free Speech Event Because 'Liberalism Is White Supremacy'

Students affiliated with the Black Lives Matter movement crashed an event at the College of William & Mary, rushed the stage, and prevented the invited guest—the American Civil Liberties Union's Claire Gastañaga, a W & M alum—from speaking.

Ironically, Gastañaga had intended to speak on the subject, "Students and the First Amendment."

The disruption was livestreamed on BLM at W&M's Facebook page. Students took to the stage just a few moments after Gastañaga began her remarks. At first, she attempted to spin the demonstration as a welcome example of the kind of thing she had come to campus to discuss, commenting "Good, I like this," as they lined up and raised their signs. "I'm going to talk to you about knowing your rights, and protests and demonstrations, which this illustrates very well. Then I'm going to respond to questions from the moderators, and then questions from the audience."

It was the last remark she was able to make before protesters drowned her out with cries of, "ACLU, you protect Hitler, too." They also chanted, "the oppressed are not impressed," "shame, shame, shame, shame," ... "blood on your hands," "the revolution will not uphold the Constitution," and, uh, "liberalism is white supremacy."

http://reason.com/blog/2017/10/04/black ... ut-down-th

An instructor at the University of Pennsylvania:

Arguing a leftist agenda and arguing that academia (especially the humanities these days) is chock full of far-left loons seem to be two distinctly different claims. On a college-by-college basis there might be something to it, like the president of Evergreen using leftist groups as a whip to his own ends, but past a few other anomalies like Soros money or whatever else we'd have to see evidence that there's really some type of organization, at the head of the colleges around the US, trumpeting this from the top down.

I think the reality is closer to what Jonathan Haidt has been suggesting - ie. that when left-wing progressives became a majority in humanities departments of the major liberal arts schools they created a hostile work environment, conservatives increasingly left, they created an increasingly wild echo chamber, and the standards went straight down hill in that respect. That probably describes an organic system failure more than it describes an agenda.

Are all university instructors like this or is this just cherry picking one of the worst ones?

White inventor of ‘white fragility’ tells University of Texas: Whites must stop becoming teachers

Don’t clap for whites

AUSTIN, Texas – The white professor who quit her full-time position to tour the country, leading seminars on “white fragility,” asked for whites in the room to come forward.

About 15 people walked to the stage and each one read a quote from the projection screen that addressed their “internalized superiority,” “racial privilege” and other deficiencies as whites.

When they finished reading, the professor told the audience to “not clap” for the white people as they returned to their seats. She announced there would be no question-and-answer session.

http://www.thecollegefix.com/post/39048/