Generation Wuss and related crap
11-02-2016, 09:55 PM
#464
Boost Pope
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Wow.
I initially assumed that had to be a joke. Looked it up in the course catalog. It's real.
And since the course covers "significant queer and trans content" it also counts towards the university's Queer Studies minor.
That's a thing?
I am has a sad. But at the same time, I can't help but be curious. What the hell do you actually study in a Fat Studies course?
I initially assumed that had to be a joke. Looked it up in the course catalog. It's real.
And since the course covers "significant queer and trans content" it also counts towards the university's Queer Studies minor.
That's a thing?
I am has a sad. But at the same time, I can't help but be curious. What the hell do you actually study in a Fat Studies course?
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11-02-2016, 09:57 PM
#465
SADFab Destructive Testing Engineer
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It's funny, because it's a land grant school, and known for its ag programs. And engineering. But they are trying too hard to be a liberal arts school too.
To make up for it we have a digital pronogrophy class. (Not a joke either)
To make up for it we have a digital pronogrophy class. (Not a joke either)
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11-03-2016, 08:11 AM
#468
Boost Czar
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I took a graphic novel class for a literature credit -- it was one of my toughtest classes. I also took human sexuality and learned how disgusting people are.
Syracuse University is now providing free tampons in men’s bathrooms because… progress or whatever.
In a move that defies biology, the campus is setting up a $1,000 budget to provide 10 Tampax Tampons and 10 Maxithins pads in all women’s, men’s, and gender neutral bathrooms.
According to Keelan Erhard, a co-chair for the Syracuse Student Association:
...According to Erhard, phrases like “feminine” or “feminine hygiene” are not inclusive to transgenders, despite the fact that menstrual products are, by definition, designed for use by females.
In a move that defies biology, the campus is setting up a $1,000 budget to provide 10 Tampax Tampons and 10 Maxithins pads in all women’s, men’s, and gender neutral bathrooms.
According to Keelan Erhard, a co-chair for the Syracuse Student Association:
Both trans(gender) men and cis(gender) women menstruate. We should not try to gender menstrual products so that we are inclusive of everyone who uses them.
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11-03-2016, 12:33 PM
#470
Boost Pope
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We've always had those. It's just that when I was in college, they had names like Political Science, Macro/Microeconomics Survey, English Lit I & II, Principles of Sociology, General Biology, etc.
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11-03-2016, 02:09 PM
#471
Yeah, but you're smart and were taking humanities with at least some rigor.
I'm talking about what is passing for a college course/degree for those at the lighter end of Generation Wuss. Those kids are really getting ripped-off -- a lot of the humanity courses are just propaganda rather than thought-provoking.
I'm talking about what is passing for a college course/degree for those at the lighter end of Generation Wuss. Those kids are really getting ripped-off -- a lot of the humanity courses are just propaganda rather than thought-provoking.
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11-03-2016, 02:16 PM
#472
Boost Pope
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The Washington Post takes a stance on coddling SJWism.
Campus PC culture is so rampant that NYU is paying to silence me
I was asked to go on leave after a misunderstood Twitter experiment.
By Michael Rectenwald November 3 at 6:00 AM
Michael Rectenwald is an assistant clinical professor of Liberal Studies at New York University. He is the author of several books, including “Nineteenth-Century British Secularism: Science, Religion, and Literature.”
I’m not a conservative, or an alt-righter. I find Donald Trump repugnant. But over the last couple of weeks, I’ve become a campus pariah to some (and a hero, perhaps, to a few) in my nontenured NYU faculty job, thanks to the humorless, Social Justice Warrior-brand of campus culture run amok and a misunderstanding about a Twitter account. Enmeshed in a conspiracy — thinly disguised as sympathy — of my colleagues’ design, I’ve lost my academic freedom and I potentially stand to lose my appointment.
Last month, NYU’s senior vice president of student affairs, Marc Wais, sent an email to the campus community to announce that an on-campus appearance by right-wing Internet provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos had been canceled by the administration. I believe universities should debate bad ideas, not ban them, and I vocally opposed this development.
Around the same time, I created a Twitter account, @antipcnyuprof, complete with Nietzsche avatar and “Deplorable” screen name, as a thought experiment. It allowed me to tweet in the guise of an alt-righter while drawing out the predictable, censorious responses of so-called progressives, self-appointed thought police at NYU and elsewhere who have, in the name of maintaining a culture of civility on campus, policed their little corner of the Twittersphere. Beyond NYU, we just marked a Halloween where, with almost comic predictability, the politically correct campus thought police, like some dystopian pre-crime bureau, have prompted students to report on peers for wearing offensive Halloween attire.
We’ve reached a point where anything can be taken out of context and labeled injurious: At a University of Kansas dorm, an RA advised against incorporating an image of Harambe, the gorilla, into a jungle-themed floor decoration because it was a “triggering” “masculine image.” As Erika Christakis (harangued for her own attempts last year to bring some sanity to Yale’s debate over Halloween costumes), eloquently explains, “Certain ideas are too dangerous” to talk about on campus. In other words, we’ve reached a point where students, faculty and administrators alike are increasingly inclined to suppress the free flow of ideas — the discourse that is a university’s very reason for being.
In recent semesters, I and other NYU faculty have been encouraged to structure class discussions as safe spaces. This fall, that encouragement veered toward coercion when the university implemented a bias reporting hotline, by which students can anonymously report professors and classmates for any number of viewpoint transgressions related to race, gender and orientation, real or perceived, in the course of academic discussion. And it was suggested that the bias line phone number and email address be added to all syllabi. Which would help turn every classroom encounter into a potential infraction and figures students as Soviet-style monitors of ideological conformity. I refused.
And to do my part to push back, I’ve spoken out. I posted an article on Facebook (without comment), about a University of Michigan student who, when offered his choice of pronouns by which the university would officially identify him — including gender-neutral “ze” — cleverly chose “His Majesty” as a way of sending up the absurdity of the exercise. My post was meant only to upend the politically correct conventional wisdom, and have a laugh at the university administration. But it was met with fierce backlash from a number of transgender individuals, then (perhaps no longer) among my friends, as totally beyond the pale.
I also created the Twitter account. My aim was to expose the ferocity with which noncomplying views expressed on social media by an anonymous academic would be attacked. And I was proved right. There was no attempt at constructive dialogue, offering of rational counterargument or even acknowledgment of the possibility of the existence of a legitimate point of view outside of progressive orthodoxy. It showed that this debate isn’t about promoting an environment of inclusivity and diversity, but about punishing transgressors. I welcome rebuttals — particularly from anyone who took exception to my Facebook post. But I take issue with the implication that I personally harmed or betrayed anyone simply by posting a controversial news item.
The whole episode makes me reluctantly agree with Trump’s assertion that political correctness “has transformed our institutions of higher education from ones that fostered spirited debate to a place of extreme censorship.”
I threw in the picture of Nietzsche because if he were alive today and on the campus circuit, surely his bookings would be regularly canceled due to his belief in the Übermensch. No matter what you think of Nietzsche, such an abridgment would represent a cultural and historical impoverishment. But that message seemed to be lost on many of my colleagues.
The result was an outcry from a few students and others, on campus; an inquiry by a student reporter that finally drew me out; and then my interview in the student newspaper. The “Q&A with a Deplorable NYU Professor” drew a public response from my colleagues, writing under the Orwellian appellation, “Liberal Studies Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Working Group,” and drawing this Orwellian conclusion:
Two days after the interview and the same day as the response, I was summoned by my dean, via email, to meet that afternoon. I accepted, and when we spoke in person, to my surprise, he stated (for my ears only) that the meeting had nothing to do with the interview or the Twitter account. Rather, he said (after a representative of NYU human resources joined our conversation), certain unidentified members of the staff or faculty had expressed concern for my well-being. Suffice it to say that I was strongly encouraged to take a paid leave of absence and that, according to the administration, it had nothing to do with my recent media posture. That’s not exactly how I see it.
Are my silence and conformity worth so much to the administration that they’re willing to pay me to take a timeout, rather than engage on this topic? Don’t get me wrong, I’ll take a break and cash the checks. But I didn’t present this challenge to the campus community because I wanted a paid vacation. As an academic, I’m invested in the free exchange of ideas, and I can’t sit by while we drift further and further toward intellectual confinement.
And I won’t let students take all the heat. Any number of articles blame millennials for being sensitive, coddled and illiberal. But they’ve been enabled by faculty and staff who know better, but see political correctness as a means of asserting administrative control.
Especially in my program, faculty, while mostly full-time and having the modicum of security that long-term, endlessly renewable contracts afford, are especially vulnerable to administrative desiderata. And our administrators have numerous mechanisms for “observing” us, including course evaluations, but also intermittent “peer observations” and a massive cadre of advisers to whom students can issue complaints about anything.
Meanwhile, in terms of overthrowing oppression, such mechanisms will do nothing. They will fail because they attempt to reduce racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia and other forms of oppression to a matter of attitudes and moral aberrations. Simultaneously, they obscure the structural bases of such forms of oppression and the ways they’re reproduced systemically by the social order — including in universities, which also take punitive measures against those aberrant individuals. But addressing racism isn’t merely about correcting the deviant ideas of individuals. Once discovered, outed and punished, academia absolves itself of responsibility, having done its part in combating oppression; case closed.
That’s no way to fight oppression.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/poste...to-silence-me/
Campus PC culture is so rampant that NYU is paying to silence me
I was asked to go on leave after a misunderstood Twitter experiment.
By Michael Rectenwald November 3 at 6:00 AM
Michael Rectenwald is an assistant clinical professor of Liberal Studies at New York University. He is the author of several books, including “Nineteenth-Century British Secularism: Science, Religion, and Literature.”
I’m not a conservative, or an alt-righter. I find Donald Trump repugnant. But over the last couple of weeks, I’ve become a campus pariah to some (and a hero, perhaps, to a few) in my nontenured NYU faculty job, thanks to the humorless, Social Justice Warrior-brand of campus culture run amok and a misunderstanding about a Twitter account. Enmeshed in a conspiracy — thinly disguised as sympathy — of my colleagues’ design, I’ve lost my academic freedom and I potentially stand to lose my appointment.
Last month, NYU’s senior vice president of student affairs, Marc Wais, sent an email to the campus community to announce that an on-campus appearance by right-wing Internet provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos had been canceled by the administration. I believe universities should debate bad ideas, not ban them, and I vocally opposed this development.
Around the same time, I created a Twitter account, @antipcnyuprof, complete with Nietzsche avatar and “Deplorable” screen name, as a thought experiment. It allowed me to tweet in the guise of an alt-righter while drawing out the predictable, censorious responses of so-called progressives, self-appointed thought police at NYU and elsewhere who have, in the name of maintaining a culture of civility on campus, policed their little corner of the Twittersphere. Beyond NYU, we just marked a Halloween where, with almost comic predictability, the politically correct campus thought police, like some dystopian pre-crime bureau, have prompted students to report on peers for wearing offensive Halloween attire.
We’ve reached a point where anything can be taken out of context and labeled injurious: At a University of Kansas dorm, an RA advised against incorporating an image of Harambe, the gorilla, into a jungle-themed floor decoration because it was a “triggering” “masculine image.” As Erika Christakis (harangued for her own attempts last year to bring some sanity to Yale’s debate over Halloween costumes), eloquently explains, “Certain ideas are too dangerous” to talk about on campus. In other words, we’ve reached a point where students, faculty and administrators alike are increasingly inclined to suppress the free flow of ideas — the discourse that is a university’s very reason for being.
In recent semesters, I and other NYU faculty have been encouraged to structure class discussions as safe spaces. This fall, that encouragement veered toward coercion when the university implemented a bias reporting hotline, by which students can anonymously report professors and classmates for any number of viewpoint transgressions related to race, gender and orientation, real or perceived, in the course of academic discussion. And it was suggested that the bias line phone number and email address be added to all syllabi. Which would help turn every classroom encounter into a potential infraction and figures students as Soviet-style monitors of ideological conformity. I refused.
And to do my part to push back, I’ve spoken out. I posted an article on Facebook (without comment), about a University of Michigan student who, when offered his choice of pronouns by which the university would officially identify him — including gender-neutral “ze” — cleverly chose “His Majesty” as a way of sending up the absurdity of the exercise. My post was meant only to upend the politically correct conventional wisdom, and have a laugh at the university administration. But it was met with fierce backlash from a number of transgender individuals, then (perhaps no longer) among my friends, as totally beyond the pale.
I also created the Twitter account. My aim was to expose the ferocity with which noncomplying views expressed on social media by an anonymous academic would be attacked. And I was proved right. There was no attempt at constructive dialogue, offering of rational counterargument or even acknowledgment of the possibility of the existence of a legitimate point of view outside of progressive orthodoxy. It showed that this debate isn’t about promoting an environment of inclusivity and diversity, but about punishing transgressors. I welcome rebuttals — particularly from anyone who took exception to my Facebook post. But I take issue with the implication that I personally harmed or betrayed anyone simply by posting a controversial news item.
The whole episode makes me reluctantly agree with Trump’s assertion that political correctness “has transformed our institutions of higher education from ones that fostered spirited debate to a place of extreme censorship.”
I threw in the picture of Nietzsche because if he were alive today and on the campus circuit, surely his bookings would be regularly canceled due to his belief in the Übermensch. No matter what you think of Nietzsche, such an abridgment would represent a cultural and historical impoverishment. But that message seemed to be lost on many of my colleagues.
The result was an outcry from a few students and others, on campus; an inquiry by a student reporter that finally drew me out; and then my interview in the student newspaper. The “Q&A with a Deplorable NYU Professor” drew a public response from my colleagues, writing under the Orwellian appellation, “Liberal Studies Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Working Group,” and drawing this Orwellian conclusion:
“We fully support Professor Rectenwald’s right to speak his mind and we welcome civil discourse on the issues that concern him. But as long as he airs his views with so little appeal to evidence and civility, we must find him guilty of illogic and incivility in a community that predicates its work in great part on rational thought and the civil exchange of ideas. The cause of Professor Rectenwald’s guilt is certainly not, in our view, his identity as a cis, white, straight male. The cause of his guilt is the content and structure of his thinking.”
Thanks?Two days after the interview and the same day as the response, I was summoned by my dean, via email, to meet that afternoon. I accepted, and when we spoke in person, to my surprise, he stated (for my ears only) that the meeting had nothing to do with the interview or the Twitter account. Rather, he said (after a representative of NYU human resources joined our conversation), certain unidentified members of the staff or faculty had expressed concern for my well-being. Suffice it to say that I was strongly encouraged to take a paid leave of absence and that, according to the administration, it had nothing to do with my recent media posture. That’s not exactly how I see it.
Are my silence and conformity worth so much to the administration that they’re willing to pay me to take a timeout, rather than engage on this topic? Don’t get me wrong, I’ll take a break and cash the checks. But I didn’t present this challenge to the campus community because I wanted a paid vacation. As an academic, I’m invested in the free exchange of ideas, and I can’t sit by while we drift further and further toward intellectual confinement.
And I won’t let students take all the heat. Any number of articles blame millennials for being sensitive, coddled and illiberal. But they’ve been enabled by faculty and staff who know better, but see political correctness as a means of asserting administrative control.
Especially in my program, faculty, while mostly full-time and having the modicum of security that long-term, endlessly renewable contracts afford, are especially vulnerable to administrative desiderata. And our administrators have numerous mechanisms for “observing” us, including course evaluations, but also intermittent “peer observations” and a massive cadre of advisers to whom students can issue complaints about anything.
Meanwhile, in terms of overthrowing oppression, such mechanisms will do nothing. They will fail because they attempt to reduce racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia and other forms of oppression to a matter of attitudes and moral aberrations. Simultaneously, they obscure the structural bases of such forms of oppression and the ways they’re reproduced systemically by the social order — including in universities, which also take punitive measures against those aberrant individuals. But addressing racism isn’t merely about correcting the deviant ideas of individuals. Once discovered, outed and punished, academia absolves itself of responsibility, having done its part in combating oppression; case closed.
That’s no way to fight oppression.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/poste...to-silence-me/
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11-09-2016, 04:28 PM
#476
Boost Czar
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Berkely HS, nuff said.
Berkeley High Students Stage Walkout To Protest Trump Win « CBS San Francisco
Berkeley High Students Stage Walkout To Protest Trump Win « CBS San Francisco
Thousands of students walked out of several East Bay high schools Wednesday, protesting Republican Donald Trump’s presidential election victory.
Students at Berkeley High, Bishop O’Dowd, Albany High and Oakland Tech all staged walkouts. Meanwhile, several hundred students staged a noontime rally at San Jose’s Lincoln High School and El Ceritto police sent out an alert at 1 p.m. asking drivers to be careful because walkouts were underway at several Contra Costa County schools.
...
Students at Berkeley High, Bishop O’Dowd, Albany High and Oakland Tech all staged walkouts. Meanwhile, several hundred students staged a noontime rally at San Jose’s Lincoln High School and El Ceritto police sent out an alert at 1 p.m. asking drivers to be careful because walkouts were underway at several Contra Costa County schools.
...
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