I remember how it was -- JR
Sunday, July 17, 2022
Woke Academic Gobbledygook Makes You Rich and Famous
This week, a professor went viral during congressional testimony regarding the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overruling Roe v. Wade. During her testimony, professor Khiara Bridges of Berkeley Law School refused to acknowledge any value at all in unborn children, instead stating, “I think that the person with the capacity for pregnancy has value and they should have the ability to control what happens.”
This prompted Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., to ask, “You’ve referred to people with a capacity for pregnancy. Would that be women?” Bridges immediately responded, “Many cis women have the capacity for pregnancy. Many cis women do not have the capacity for pregnancy. There are also trans men who are capable of pregnancy as well as nonbinary people who are capable of pregnancy.”
Hawley asked incredulously, “Your view, the core of this right is about what?” To which Bridges shot back, “I want to recognize that your line of questioning is transphobic, and it opens up trans people to violence.” She then blamed Hawley for the high suicidal ideation rate of those who identify as transgender, and lectured him, “We have a good time in my class. You should join.”
Hawley was of course correct that only women can have babies; women who believe they are men are still women. And the notion that suicidal ideation rates among LGBT people are the result predominantly of societal bigotry is completely evidence-free; suicidal ideation rates among LGBT people remain massively higher than among cisgender heterosexual people in San Francisco just as they would in Alabama.
The question that should trouble us, then, isn’t whether men have babies. They don’t. The question is why our most prestigious academic institutions now churn out privileged pseudo-intellectuals who spout utter nonsense at the drop of the hat, and do it with self-assured sententiousness.
The answer lies in the incentive structure in higher education. Our higher education system is designed to benefit claims of victimhood rooted in intersectional identity politics. That is the only way to explain just why Bridges, one of the most educationally privileged members of American society, makes a career complaining about the systemic evils of the United States. It takes enormous gall and equal ignorance to claim that bigotry lies behind the reality of sexual dichotomy; it takes just as much gall and ignorance to claim that a country that has afforded you the opportunity to achieve a degree from Spelman College, a JD from Columbia Law School, a Ph.D. from Columbia in anthropology, and a career in classical ballet is somehow a country shot through with systemic racism.
And yet that is precisely what Bridges does for a living. Her study specializes in “race, class, reproductive rights, and the intersection of the three.” Author of “Critical Race Theory: A Primer” and a self-described “critical race theorist,” Bridges believes in the “rejection of legal conventions” and advocates in favor of the ideas that “racism is a normal feature of American society (and not a deviation from an otherwise fair and just status quo)” and that “traditional liberal understandings of the problem of racism and how racism will be defeated” ought to be rejected.
This, too, is nonsense. But it is nonsense cherished by the elite institutions that churn out supposed academics like Bridges. Our system of academia is irrevocably broken. Academia was originally perceived as a place of merit-based higher learning, a place in which the best and brightest formulated the most important policies. Academia was the West’s intellectual oligarchy. But if the idea behind a merit-based academic elite used to rest in the actual merit of ideas and performance, that idea was left behind long ago. Now, the self-perpetuating academic elite is happy to maintain control by paying lip service to radicals like Bridges. All that matters, in true Foucault fashion, is power. That, presumably, is the reason why Bridges treats dissent as a form of violence — oligarchs usually do. Intellectual oligarchs are no different. And the biggest casualty is truth.
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Girl Punished for Her Addition to BLM Poster
A 7-year-old girl who deviated from the acceptable language allowed by school officials when describing Black Lives Matter was punished by her California school.
But parent Chelsea Boyle is fighting back after her daughter was disciplined for putting “any life” under the words “Black Lives Mater” in a drawing, according to Fox News.
RedState reported Monday that the issue began in 2021 when the parents of a friend of Boyle’s daughter saw the drawing and complained.
Boyle said Jesus Becerra, the principal of Viejo Elementary School in Mission Viejo, forced the girl, then in the first grade, to make a public apology.
To drive home the point that deviation from prescribed language about race is not allowed, the child was denied recess time.
Boyle, however, knew nothing of this until she heard about it from another parent in March, roughly a year after the incident.
“My immediate reaction is just … I feel like I got hit by a bus, but I didn’t understand it. And I thought, oh, you know, my daughter has just been discriminated against. And I didn’t even want to contact a lawyer, but I just didn’t know what had happened to us,” she said, according to RedState.
At that point, Boyle asked her daughter about the incident.
“And then when I talked to my daughter — I think she said it was so sad. … And I said, ‘Well, what did the principal say to you?’ and [she said], ‘I can’t draw pictures anymore. And I can’t write those words.’ And I said, ‘Why did you write [those words]?’
“I don’t teach [about] Black Lives Matter, All Lives Matter, [or] anything in my house because I think my children are too young [for politics]. My children see color as a color, as a description. I am trying to raise them the way the world should be, not the way it is. That’s how I’m trying to make my personal change.
“[H]er best friend is brown — not black, but brown — and she didn’t understand why she didn’t matter, why her friend didn’t matter. She has another friend that is Japanese; she doesn’t understand.”
Boyle said that the wording was not even a variant that has raised hackles with the woke community.
“It wasn’t ‘all lives matter,’ it was ‘any life.’ It was something she came up on her own. She just didn’t understand it. It was completely innocent, and that broke my heart,” the girl’s mother said.
Boyle asked the school for an apology. She did not even get a response.
Alexander Haberbush, her lawyer, said the school just dismissed her concerns, Fox News reported.
Haberbush said a lawsuit could be brought against the Capistrano Unified School District, but he and Boyle are “trying to give the school every opportunity to settle this amicably.”
But they have “not heard a word from the school,” he said.
“Their silence is unacceptable,” Haberbush said in a statement to Fox News, adding that the school’s action was “a flagrant violation of the First Amendment rights of a student placed in their care.”
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Australia: Crisis on campus as student discontent rises by degrees
University cost-cutting is driving dissatisfaction among students as staff shedding and the shift to online teaching compromise academic achievement.
Students paying to study a degree have little recourse if they’re unhappy with the calibre of their education. Car buyers have more consumer rights than the students who fork out tens of thousands of dollars in tuition fees to institutions that effectively make and adjudicate their own rules.
National Union of Students president Georgie Beatty laments that many universities have failed to reinstate the face-to-face lessons that were standard before the Covid-19 pandemic forced courses online.
“The quality of education has gotten to the stage where it’s considered completely acceptable for you to pay $3000 for a subject and have to sit in a Zoom class with 40 other kids,” Beatty told Inquirer.
“We’re hearing so many stories of academic quality going down across the board. But there is no quality control and no protection or complaints mechanism in place, so we have to deal with a crap education. We are helpless in the face of these mighty vice-chancellors.”
Australian car buyers have consumer rights entitling them to a repair, replacement or refund if a new car is faulty. But what can students do if the university degree they’re paying for falls short of the quality or experience that was promised?
Beatty is concerned that the federal government’s Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency has not held a meeting of its student advisory board since April last year. “TEQSA says they care about students but their student advisory board hasn’t met for nearly a year and a half,” she says.
“They’re meant to keep universities accountable but they’re not doing it.”
As the agency that registers higher education providers and approves their courses, TEQSA fobs off most student complaints. “If you are unhappy about aspects of your experience with a higher education provider, you should access the policies and procedures they have established to resolve complaints,” its website states.
University students lodged just more than half the 289 complaints with TEQSA last year. The biggest issues involved online course delivery during the pandemic, the inadequacy of universities’ complaints handling processes and a failure to follow published admission policies.
“TEQSA is not a complaints resolution body and typically does not have a role in addressing individual complainants’ requests or grievances,’’ a TEQSA spokesman told Inquirer.
“Academic quality and student wellbeing and safety continue to be compliance priorities for TEQSA, and we will take action where we consider there are systemic issues or failures. This action may include informal resolutions, warning letters, enforceable undertakings, conditions on registration, revocation of registration or civil or criminal sanctions.”
TEQSA’s latest compliance report reveals it finalised only one investigation and 43 compliance assessments last year while imposing conditions on 47 course providers and negotiating 19 voluntary undertakings. “The most common Covid-19 related concern was in relation to … teaching and courses, including quality of online delivery,” the report states. For half of those complaints, “we decided it was appropriate to bring the concern to the providers’ attention to inform their internal quality assurance and make improvements where appropriate”.
A four-year cycle of complaints at Central Queensland University relating to its sonography degree highlights the difficulties faced by students who were dismissed as “disgruntled”. CQU offers the nation’s only degree in sonography, costing students $8017 in the first year alone. It has 601 students in Brisbane, Mackay, Melbourne, Sydney and Perth who must complete 2000 hours of clinical placement during the four-year degree.
CQU began fielding gripes about the course in 2017, when 34 students signed a complaint sent to the university’s student ombudsman. However, it took three more years for CQU to acknowledge this as a formal complaint. In the meantime, one of the students complained about an assessment to the Queensland Ombudsman, which liaised with CQU and arranged for her to re-sit an exam in 2018.
Queensland’s Office of Fair Trading fielded a complaint from the same student last year, seeking a refund of her course fees. The OFT tried to conciliate. “Unfortunately, they weren’t willing to give you a refund,” an official wrote to the student. “The OFT cannot force a trader to give you a refund. Unfortunately, this means I am unable to assist you any further and your complaint will be closed.”
A former student complained to Fair Trading NSW that the course “has extremely high and unacceptable failure rates that show the service they provide is completely inadequate”. She was told university degrees were “not its jurisdiction”.
CQU waited until last year to launch an internal investigation, after what it described as a “spiral” in complaints from students ranging from fail rates and assessment issues to staff communication and industry placement problems.
The investigation was conducted by the school of health, medical and applied sciences, which CQU told Inquirer was “independent from the medical sonography academic team”.
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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