1+1 = 0

The latest exercise in “critical thinking” comes courtesy of “Professor” Rochelle Gutierrez at University of Illinois:

“On many levels, mathematics itself operates as Whiteness. Who gets credit for doing and developing mathematics, who is capable in mathematics, and who is seen as part of the mathematical community is generally viewed as White,” Gutierrez argued.
Gutierrez also worries that algebra and geometry perpetuate privilege, fretting that “curricula emphasizing terms like Pythagorean theorem and pi perpetuate a perception that mathematics was largely developed by Greeks and other Europeans.”
Math also helps actively perpetuate white privilege too, since the way our economy places a premium on math skills gives math a form of “unearned privilege” for math professors, who are disproportionately white.
“Are we really that smart just because we do mathematics?” she asks, further wondering why math professors get more research grants than “social studies or English” professors.

Okay, you can all stop laughing now.

Did I slip through some wormhole in the time/space continuum to end up somewhere around April 1, 2018?

You know, I recall how people reacted with stunned incredulity when Hitler’s Nazis referred to “Jewish” mathematics, “Jewish” physics or “Jewish” chemistry, because the terms are not only not apposite, they’re also fallacious. The Jewish Einstein coming up with the Theory of Relativity does not make that “Jewish” mathematics — a point with which I’m sure the worthy (ahem) Professor Gutierrez would agree, she being “woke” and, no doubt, sympathetic to the anti-fascist cult.

So why then, applying the same “White patriarchal” [sic] theory of logic to the argument, would the same not be true of her fallacious (and idiotic) position on the topic?

Warning note to all undergrads at U of I: if you’re scheduled to have this cretin Gutierrez teach one of your Math classes, you may want to change to another one. She’s nothing but a pseudo-intellectual poser masquerading as an academic.

Unless you too subscribe to her “woke” argument, in which case you deserve everything that happens to you in later life.

Is it too early for Scotch?

The Ugliest Schools In The World

As I paged through this article (actually entitled 16 Of The Most Beautiful Schools In The World ), I experienced a growing sense of horror: every single one was indescribably awful, terrible and soulless. In particular, the temporary structure at the Estonian school  looks to me like a modernistic version of an extermination-camp gas chamber, complete with Zyklon-B inlets:

I expected to find beauty: harmonious buildings set in gorgeous countrysides, or if in an urban locale, at least buildings which were designed to accommodate the pupils’ needs. One of the descriptions actually includes the words “square lines and hard angles”, and another, “jagged, playful exterior” — at a kindergarten(!) no less — and I ask: when the fuck did these design motifs become equated with beauty?

Every single one of the architects responsible for these revolting structures needs to be driven from the public square with whips, accompanied only by scornful cries from people who are sick to death of their ghastly pretensions. I’d start with the guy responsible for this ghastly edifice at Duke University:

This Etch-A-Sketch structure is set within a framework of exquisite, graceful Gothic buildings, and you know what it is? It’s a middle finger extended squarely at tradition — and for a conservative like myself, it embodies everything that’s wrong with academia (because ultimately, the college administration approved this revolting design).

If you want to know how civilization ends, this is as good an indicator as any I’ve ever seen.

Guidelines

So now we have this foolishness:

“Unacceptable costumes” listed on a University of St. Thomas diversity flier are “wearing Native American headdresses, dressing up as a ‘Mexican’ by wearing a sombrero, dressing as a ‘geisha,’ any form of blackface.”

“Cultural appropriation is defined as ‘the act of taking intellectual and cultural expressions from a culture that is not your own, without showing that you understand or respect the culture,’” explains a University of St. Thomas diversity memo to students.

“This can be as simple as wearing a Dashiki without knowledge or respect to West African culture, and as serious as wearing a fake Native American headdress without any regard of its sacredness,” adds the memo. “It generally incorporates a history of prejudice and discrimination by perpetuating long-standing stereotypes.”

At UC Santa Barbara, a social justice workshop set for Tuesday will delve into how Halloween costumes abuse “indigenous wear” and teach students how to “spot appropriation with the help of bell hooks’ essay ‘Eating the Other.’”

At a “Conversation Circle” at Princeton University this Sunday, students will “engage in a dialogue about the impact of cultural appropriation, Halloween, and why culture is not a costume.”

Oh FFS, I wish these priggish, self-righteous shitwits would just lighten up.

Sounds like an excuse for a nationwide “Clothing Optional” Halloween on campus… although feministicals will no doubt start squealing that swinging dicks create an atmosphere of terror for women or some such bullshit. What a bunch of wussies.

And let’s face it: there’s no fun in everyone dressing in fucking togas, which seems to be the only costume I can think of that’s safe to “appropriate” because all the Romans are dead. (No, modern-day Italians are not Romans except by proxy. Look it up.)

I am so glad I’m not a student anymore, because I would get into shit on at least a daily basis. I just wish that more students could do the same, but they’re the ones calling for all this sensitivity crap. Snotty snowflakes, all of ’em.

Poor Teachers

Teaching has always been one of those professions which is driven by passion or idealism — the desire to teach the young about a subject the teacher thinks is worthwhile for them to know — and as with all professions that can call on people with such idealism, the pay sucks. It’s just as true for professions like acting, advertising, music and the like: you’ve got a market which just begs to exploit its workers, hence the appearance of institutions like the Screen Actors Guild and teachers’ unions which negotiate things like pay scales and working hours.

The people who sit at the bottom end of the totem pole are the part-timers: the people who don’t work enough to qualify for industry benefits, or who are kept outside the part of the hierarchy which does. Part-time creative types (as explored here) employed by ad agencies are little more than hired guns, used for a particular project and then fired when the thing ends.

What happened in tertiary education was that the academe created one way to protect its long-serving or more meritorious teachers: tenure, or the reward for a person who could continue to work at their subject (with research and/or teaching) with a certain degree of job security. It’s the dictionary definition of a guild, by the way.

I remember talking to several of my erstwhile professors when I was still a student and thinking about life after graduation, and while all of them encouraged me to go further with post-grad study (a couple still pester me to do so, incidentally), they were also all very circumspect in telling me that my job prospects would be good (because of my scholarship), but my actual employment was likely to be shaky. Even with a PhD., the best I could hope for was adjunct-professorship, which did not excite me for obvious reasons. (Then Life intervened and I had to quit any thoughts of doing that anyway.)

So this article (via Insty) evoked from me a wry smile, because it epitomizes for me not the plight of the adjunct professor who’s been forced to become a call-girl, but just emblematic of the teaching profession in general.

There is nothing she would rather do than teach. But after supplementing her career with tutoring and proofreading, the university lecturer decided to go to remarkable lengths to make her career financially viable.
She first opted for her side gig during a particularly rough patch, several years ago, when her course load was suddenly cut in half and her income plunged, putting her on the brink of eviction. “In my mind I was like, I’ve had one-night stands, how bad can it be?” she said. “And it wasn’t that bad.”

Sex work is one of the more unusual ways that adjuncts have avoided living in poverty, and perhaps even homelessness.

I used to know two women, one a schoolteacher, the other a theater actress, who had to resort to this activity because they just couldn’t make ends meet on their pittance of a salary. And I’ve talked before about how I feel about prostitution — or rather, the change in my attitude towards it over time. And ironically, female adjuncts have it easier because the prostitution market favors women over men. Men deliver pizzas, women sell their bodies.

Glenn thinks that this phenomenon means that the Ivy League should be abolished. I differ somewhat in that I fail to see why academics should be treated differently from any other profession — in other words, if adjunct professors as a group are being ill-treated by their employers, they should form a union just as movie actors did back in the 1930s. There’s nothing sacred about the academe, after all: it’s a profession like any other; and its purported lofty idealism doesn’t make it any more special — especially when the institution treats its lower-tier workers so badly that they have to fuck strangers for money just to make ends meet.

So they’ve started to talk about unionizing, with a predictable response from the academe, which has ironically proven itself to be little different from the Gilded Age robber barons they would normally excoriate. In other words, the education establishment is no different from any other commercial institution, which kind of undermines the whole “sacred mission of educating” nonsense they’ve been spouting for decades.

And if they’re going to behave like corporations, perhaps — no, not perhaps — we should start treating them like one. On current performance, therefore, their results are pathetic: high dropout rates, ill-educated graduates, no ROI on university degrees, over-reliance on government funding, overpaid senior executives and authoritarian management. And let’s not forget our original thesis: junior staff needing to resort to prostitution to supplement their inadequate wages.

John D. Rockefeller would have fired the lot, if they’d run one of his companies in this way.

College Degrees Not Worth Much

…says this study (found via Insty).

Americans are losing faith in the value of a college degree, with majorities of young adults, men and rural residents saying college isn’t worth the cost, a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News survey shows.

No kidding. With all the PC bullshit happening on college campuses these days, not to mention crap courses like “Feminist Basket Weaving”, it’s not surprising. One finding that got my attention, however, is this one:

Some Americans believe learning a trade offers more security than going to college.

Well, yeah. Depending on the trade, it almost always did, especially when weighed against courses in the Humanities and the debt incurred by getting said degrees. (It’s not true when measured against a degree in, say, electrical engineering, of course.)

Then again, most people are more qualified to learn a trade than they are to attend college in the first place.

And the first warning sign was that government (of the Democrat / Labour Party persuasion) stated that a college degree was desirable for all young people, and put policies into place to support that idiotic idea. Billions of dollars of student debt, high unemployment rates among Millennials, lowered academic standards and staggeringly-high college tuition fees followed swiftly, to the surprise of no one except those government tools.

As seen on these pages but a couple days back, I’ve always advised young people to get a trade first, then go to college — especially if you’re not quite sure what degree you want to get — because as a fallback, a trade like carpentry or plumbing sure as hell beats begging for that barrista job at a coffee shop. And if your goal in life is to own your own business (which it should be), a trade beats the hell out of an MBA as a foundation thereof.

So yeah, it’s not surprising that the value of a college degree is being called to question. Reality will do that to ya.

Weeping Willows

Oh FFS:

“Fordham University has launched an investigation after students were reduced to tears by the screening of a PragerU video during a Resident Assistant (RA) training on sexual assault.”

I’d excerpt more, but I’m pretty sure some of you will be wanting to eat breakfast, and I’d hate to spoil your appetite.

Bloody snowflakes. I wonder how they’d have responded to newsreel footage of Jews being slaughtered at Babi-Yar. Probably with cheers, come to think of it.

And here I thought Fordham was a Jesuit school, whose emphasis is that “Jesuit education prepares men and women to go out into the world.” If grown women can be reduced to tears by a factual exposition of a contrary opinion, I would suggest that Fordham is failing in its mission. Feel free to read this little piece as a companion to the first link, and judge for yourself by how much.