Right Wing Nation

Dedicated to one of the readers of this blog (you know who you are)

Nearly everyone now knows that academics are mostly leftists. What they don’t know is how nutty many of them are — and I intend to correct that.

Everything here is true. The names have been changed to protect the stupid.

Marta is a UACJOB (University-Affiliated Creature with Jell-O for Brains, pronounced “wackjob”). Marta is in her fifties, about 5′3″, between 200 and 250 pounds, and believes that it is her feminist duty to fight oppression (looskism, you know, or would that be sizeism?) by wearing spandex to work. As little spandex as she can wear without breaking the law.

Marta, like so many UACJOBs, is a “free spirit” (did I mention that she gets an additional proxy vote because she’s a lesbian?) Marta has made many contributions to the diverse university community, so many that I can only here relate a few.

First, though, a short conversation so you can journey into the strange irreal world of the UACJOB mind.

Marta: “I’m going to ask my gym teacher why she oppressed me!”

Me: “How?”

Marta: “She made us wear those gym uniforms! They were uncomfortable! Men designed them to oppress women!”

(Okay, I should have misspelled “women” here, but I can’t bring myself to sink to the depths of PC illiteracy.)

Another UACJOB is Gerri. Gerri was the director of one of those postmodernist hyphenated “studies” programs ( you know, like Three-headed Transgendered Conjoined Twins of Color Studies). Gerri attracted attention when she declared on a faculty mailing list that, “All white men are rapists!”

What’s really illustrative of the UACJOB mindset, however, is not Gerri’s idiocy, but the reaction she got. Other UACJOB faculty wondered why only all white men were rapists; they did not, apparently, feel there was anything out of line with the men=rapists part.

Her response? If she accused black, er, African-American men of being rapists, it would invite hate speech, and anyway, it would be “insensitive” to African-American culture.

Then there’s Tina, another UACJOB, education faculty. She has a large Castro poster on her office door. Her doctoral seminar (did you catch those last two words?) consists of numerous activities, such as writing a paragraph describing how you feel about your name and sharing your feeling with your group. Your group then tells you, one at a time, how they feel about the way you feel about your name, and finally, you tell the group how you feel about how they feel about how you feel about your name. You then choose the color of marker that best describes your feelings about your name now that your feelings have been enriched by the feelings about your feelings from your group, and write your name on a card you place in front of you. This proceeds around the group until everybody has a nice colored name card.

She also has an activity where everybody talks about why America is an evil, genocidal, imperialist nation. This is one of her favorites.

So why write about these UACJOBs? Well, it’s all very well to focus on Ward Churchill, but you don’t really get an accurate picture of these peoples’ utter insanity, and what utter crap they come up with. And though students are exposed to this in the classroom, UACJOBs often restrain themselves to some extent, so even students don’t realize what nutcases these people are.

I’m going to try to correct that.

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If you want to see UACJOBs revel in their breathtaking stupidity–shamelessly–join an academic mailing list. You will be astounded that these people were allowed to graduate from high school, much less get a PhD, and then were given tenure.

Remember Gerri, director of Three-headed Transgendered Conjoined Twins of Color Studies? That’s right, the one who said “all white men are rapists!” (this was on a mailing list) and when asked why white men specifically (yes, on the mailing list), said that it would smear other cultures if she said “all non-white/black/take your pick as long as it’s not white men are rapists!” (also on a mailing list).

You did catch the director part, right? Let that sink in. Somebody, as in somebodies plural, thought she would be a great person for that job (and it’s scary enough that somebody would hire her for anything but sweeping the floors).

Well, Gerri is on this mailing list. She’s one of the majority who talk about how they can’t calculate a 15% tip or record a television program on a VCR, but know everything there is to know about the economy (”Bush is destroying the economy! No more tax cuts! Save the disenfranchised! Workers’ Rights NOW!”)

I’d love to see her, or any of this crew, in an economics class. Really.

About a month ago, Gerri wrote to the mailing list that she was really disturbed that perhaps her TIAA-CREF contributions were going to fund evil three-headed-lesbian-murdering anti-rainforest Republican-contributing corporations.

The discussion that followed lasted for over a week, but can be distilled as follows:

“You can change how your money is allocated on the website.”

“I’ve never figured out how to do that.”

“Anyway, how do you know which aren’t destroying Mother Gaia?”

“There’s a green portfolio, but I don’t trust them.”

“What do I do?”

“You could withdraw your money and put it in a savings account.”

“No, banks are part of the military industrial complex!”

“Maybe I’d better withdraw my money and keep it in my underwear drawer.”

Okay, being a business geek, I fired up Excel, found some current interest rates, calculated the ROI on 100K over 20 years (that’s about how long Gerri’s got to torment anyone with a brain before she retires) for TIAA-CREF, a savings account, and the underwear drawer (can we say NO ROI?) and after going to all this trouble, posted it to the mailing list.

Oh, the cacophany! The howling! You would have thought I had suggested they drink the blood of babies. I was dressed down for being insensitive and considering only the bottom line (”What are you, some kind of Repug?” one of theses Einsteins asked), and all because I was trying to be helpful.

You know, I don’t give a flying f*ck about the rainforest. I want my money to make money, so I can retire and not have to live in a cardboard box. However, there’s a reason those of us who are not slobbering leftists tend to stay DEEP in the closet. Even gently question the PC party line, and they will tear you limb from limb. These people are not the gentle, tolerant, nurturing souls they claim to be.

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Those mailing lists are such good examples of leftist idiocy, we might as well pull another one from the hat.

This mailing list has Tina on it (you remember Tina, right? The education prof who does all kinds of touchy-feely-gooshy and why-I-hate-America “activities” in her doctoral seminars? Tina, who has a poster of Castro on her office door?)

It wasn’t Tina, but one of her PhD students who started this particularly scary example of brain death. I’ll call him Greg.

Greg is from Canuckistan, and a more stereotypical Canuckistani couldn’t exist. When he isn’t trashing the United States or insisting that “America” is not the United States (get over yourself), he’s whining about how insulted he is when people assume that he’s an American.

Just for the record, he’s no American.

Anyway, Greg just loves Tina, and practically kneels at her feet. You can see him anywhere Tina might be, like at protests. He tags along like her dog–the little yappy mop type of dog. He even tags along beside her on the mailing list, which is supposed to be only for faculty–but Greg is her shining star PhD student, and he yaps at her every command, so she put him on the list.

Tina: “Greg, remember what you were telling me yesterday about your grading system? Would you like to share it with our teaching list?”

Greg: “Grades are competitive and competition ruins the cooperative nurturing environment necessary for education, so I ask students what grades they think they should get, and that’s what I give them.”

Tina: “Competition is so destructive to effective learning, I’m so very glad you do this, Greg!”

Then everybody jumped in, and the stupidity began.

“Don’t they all want As?”

“Yes.” (Nothing else: just this).

“Do you conference with them first, and ask them in conference?”

“No, I ask them in class on the first day.”

“That’s such a GREAT idea! That way, you effectively destroy the competition before it begins!”

Here, let me interpret. What that last statement means is, “You effectively destroy any motivation for the students to do anything at all before it begins–provided they have any at all, after god knows how many idiots like Greg they had for their courses.”

“I do something like this. I ask my disadvantaged [read: female and non-white] students what they should get, and give that to them, but I grade my other [read: white male] students on a traditional A-B-C model.”

Ah, I’d better explain the “traditional A-B-C model” to you. You’re thinking this is what you are familiar with, but you’re wrong. These education school people don’t believe in giving anything lower than a C, except for “bad content” or “lack of critical thinking” (these mean, “content is not PC party line,” by the way–we’ll get to that later).

“That’s fascinating. Tell us more!”

“It levels the playing field, so the marginalized students aren’t futher disenfranchised by our patriarchal, ethnocentric system. Privileged students are privileged by the system, so I use it to evaluate them.”

Then Tina jumps in.

“I like that system a lot. In our classes we role-play, so all the privileged students take on the roles of the disinfranchised. That way, we can build on our sensitivities, and create a more nurturing, fruitful class environment.”

Okay, is anyone still wondering why public education has gone completely to hell?

Well, if you thought it couldn’t get any stupider or more frightening, you’re wrong. Very wrong.

On the same list, we have Jeremy. Jeremy, like Tina, is education faculty. He teaches math and science education courses. When Jeremy jumps in, the idiocy takes a nosedive.

“Ethnocentrism is the crucial issue. In my seminars on math and science ed, you wouldn’t believe how ignorant these students are. Why, they actually believe in an objective truth!”

“Oh yes, I know, my students are like that, too.”

“I find that my courses have to concentrate on unlearning what they think they know. I have an activity we do on Newton, where students learn that Newton’s Laws are really only perceptions.”

“Could you fire us a copy of that activity, Jeremy? We could adapt it to our own classes, maybe!”

I can see it now in first grade math: “Class, 2+2=4 is only a perception. In other cultures, 2+2 could equal 8, or maybe they don’t need the concept of 2.”

Then Tina jumps in.

“The thing is, our students will have to go into the cities and teach, and they need to be sensitive to the cultures of inner-city students. They need to realize that teaching in the traditional model is cultural imperialism, and devalues the cultures of their students.”

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We’ll leave mailing lists and go on to actual, face-to-face UACJOB encounters.

There was a teaching seminar I wanted to attend (really, I should have known better, but I do this for my students, and am ever hopeful that I will finally go to one of these that is actually useful, and actually has something to do with pedagogy–naïve of me, I know). Next to mailing lists, teaching seminars are the best forum for these postmodernist morons to “share” their idiocy.

By the way, this is by far the stupidest teaching seminar I attended–and that’s saying a great deal.

I admit that the primary reason I wanted to go to this particular seminar was that Jeremy was “facilitating” it, and Alan Sokal had just blown the cover off postmodernist nonsense (if you’re unfamiliar with postmodernism, or more importantly, the Sokal controversy, see first this, then this; Sokal’s page is here, and if you really want to have fun, try the Postmodernism Generator.) I wanted to see what these postmodernist fools were going to do, now that Sokal had made idiots of them.

Well, let me say that I did not realize how utterly shameless these people are until I went. Nothing at all. They spewed the same “everything is a social construct” nonsense, as if nothing had happened. And even though Sokal’s hoax was exposed, Jeremy quoted from it, as if it were the latest greatest research.

Why I was surprised, I do not know. I suppose I expected some intellectual and professional integrity. But no.

Jeremy began to breaking us into groups. He then gave each one of us a “culture” and a “belief system” to represent.

We had to work with our groups to best explain our “belief systems” while being “sensitive” to everybody else’s “belief systems.”

Don’t groan until you hear the “belief system” I got. Ready?

I was from Moldirania, where we believed that all women with red hair were witches and would fly up into the air if they jumped out the window.

Now you can groan. Get it out, because it gets worse.

First, though, let me try to explain what this was like for me. I’m an empiricist, a decision sciences geek. Again, I found myself fighting the nearly overwhelming urge to ask what the hell happened to these peoples’ brains.

Fortunately for me, Jeremy hadn’t thought out the time constraints, and we ran out of time before I had to explain my “belief system.” So I can’t tell you what I did–and instead, will tell you what one of my group members did.

I don’t remember her name, but she was this lumpy pigeon-toed neo-hippie grad student from the English department, doing her PhD minor in Education. I don’t recall the “name” of her “culture,” but she was given as a “belief system” that interpretive dances purged the viewers of spirit toxins–and in order to “explain” her “belief system,” she had to incorporate her interpretive dances.

You know, I had no classes or office hours on that day. I could have been doing something really productive, like clipping my toenails or giving the dogs a bath.

I’ll call our English PhD student Clara for brevity. Clara was really into doing this little activity. Enthusiastic or bubbly doesn’t begin to cover it.

She had drawn the first spot, so she had to work up her “explanation” for all of us, remaining “sensitive” to our “cultural belief systems” in the process (the ultimate goal was to writhe about interpretively for the whole roomful and do so in a “culturally sensitive” manner).

So we watched as Clara did two or three different “interpretive dances,” each one designed to purge us of a different “spirit toxin.” Several group members stopped her from time to time because she wasn’t being “sensitive” enough.

“The way you are moving your head, there, that’s offensive to my belief system!”

That sort of thing. I just sat there, trying very hard not to laugh.

Not only did Clara “explain” her “belief system” by prancing about in front of a whole roomful of people, but Jeremy gave her props for being so “sensitive” about it. And a week or so later, Jeremy forwarded a message from Clara, saying that she had used her “interpetive dance” technique in class to great success, and her students had loved it.

Like I said, Jeremy had to stop the “activity” so he could give his presentation. He started it by quoting Sokal’s Social Text paper, as if Sokal hadn’t revealed it to be a hoax, then going on about how science is nothing more than a cultural construct. Fortunately, I had to leave–and did, before it got any worse.

The thing about those teaching seminars is, well, they rarely had anything to do with teaching — just bashing America, or learning to “feel good” about yourself and raise your “self-esteem” or that of your students, or becoming more “sensitive” to Official Protected Group concerns, that sort of thing.

There was the one where we were all broken up into groups (they all do that; leftists can’t imagine anyone doing anything or having a thought as an individual), and each group was given a phrase to complete, then present to the group. Ours was:

I fear …

Others were:

I am especially sensitive to …
I feel …
I am offended by …

You get the idea. Okay, so here we are in this group, and again, I find myself gritting my teeth to avoid telling them what I feared: their liberal nonsense. The woman to the right of me at the table wore one of those T-shirts with Bush in an SS uniform.

That’s important. Remember the T-shirt she had on.

Now, I had forgotten all about this thing, having no classes or office hours or meetings scheduled that day. I raced to throw on some clothes without really thinking about it, and went.

You see where this is going, don’t you.

So here I am, gritting my teeth and wishing I were giving the dog an enema instead of being here, when this aging hippie faculty facilitator ran over to our table and fairly screamed:

“That shirt is offensive!”

Now, you’re thinking she was talking about the Bush in the SS uniform T-shirt? So did I, at least until I realized she was pointing at me. I looked down and saw that I had pulled on my NRA Life Member sweatshirt (the insignia is about an inch and a half, by the way, it’s not like there’s somebody in camos with an SKS on it).

Uhm, okay. Well, that’s nice, I guess. Sure.

I told her, as nurturingly as I could manage, that she’d just have to get over it, since I didn’t have my Ku Klux Klan sweatshirt handy (some idiot liberal is going to read that and take it seriously), and went back to the exercise. The list we came up with, as well as I can remember (understanding that I did try to purge this from my memory, as one would the taste of rotting flesh), was:

I fear …

right-wingers
homophobes
George Bush, because he doesn’t believe in my right to choose
John Ashcroft, because he’s a Nazi
George Bush, because he’s a Nazi
global warming
firearms
white men
white men, because they’re rapists
white men, because they hate oppressed peoples
white men, because they oppress minorities
white men with guns
bigots
racists
militias
Republicans
Republican students, because they want to take away my academic freedom
intolerance
meat eaters, because they’re insensitive to the rights of animals
hate speech
conservatives who hate Mother Earth
Christians
Christians, because they want to destroy the Constitution
Christians, because they hate Muslims
big government

Okay, I came up with one in that list — anybody care to guess which one it was? And after I was dressed down, so to speak, for my evil NRA sweatshirt, several people came up with something gun-related.

Now, you do realize, don’t you, that these people are faculty? As in faculty who teach your children classes? Yes?

Just wanted to make sure that one sank in.

Anyway, I thought it was over, but no, the worst was yet to come. Now that we had generated our lists, we were supposed to “share” our fears with one another in our groups, and “feel” somebody else’s fear.

I wasn’t even sure what the hell that meant, feel somebody else’s fear, and frankly, I was about touchy-feelied out for the day, so I didn’t share much at all, and just sat there and listened. When one of our group started to cry because she was so scared of George Bush (you know, because he doesn’t believe in her “right to choose”), and everybody started “empathizing” and being all gushy-gooey, I had had it and left.

Back to those mailing lists. Now what follows was one of those frequently-occurring conversations, not something that happened just once. Oh no. Many times, though it always started out with somebody saying:

“I had a student turn in an anti-affirmative action paper, and I’m trying to comment on it. How do I comment on such uncritical thinking?”

The chum was in the water.

“Oh, I know! It’s so hard! What do you say to such ignorant students?”

“It’s why we’re here, remember that, we need to teach them critical thinking skills.”

“What I want to know when I get one of these papers is how to best make the student confront his or her racism.”

“I bet the student didn’t say anything about slavery!”

“No, he didn’t.”

“How did I know it was a male student! Well, there you go, comment on how he didn’t take into account slavery, and grade him down.”

[Editor’s note: Slavery doesn’t have a damn thing to do with affirmative action, and if these people were actually capable of anything approaching critical thinking, they’d know that, but perhaps that’s why the student didn’t address it.]

“Yes, I had a student, a WOMYN if you can believe it, who wrote an essay that was anti-choice! She hadn’t addressed the thousands of years of patriarchal oppression of wimmin, so I graded her down. And do you believe she actually protested the grade?”

“Such gall these ignorant students have! If they knew anything, they wouldn’t be here!”

“Remember, that’s what we’re here for, to teach students critical thinking skills!”

And don’t forget: open trackbacks at Stop the ACLU and Point Five.