May 26, 2016

"I’m thinking, Oh, God! I’m cast in one of my least favorite plays of all time, ‘The Crucible,’ by Arthur Miller!"

The laugh-out-loud line (for me) in "Letter from Oberlin/The Big Uneasy/What’s roiling the liberal-arts campus?" a great New Yorker article by Nathan Heller. The line is spoken by Roger Copeland, a professor of theater and dance who's been teaching at Oberlin since the 70s.
In the late fall of 2014, during rehearsals for a play he was coördinating, he spoke sharply to a student: a misfire not of language, he says, but of tone. The student ran out of the room. Copeland says that he wanted to smooth ruffled feathers and keep the production on track, so he agreed to meet with the student and his department chair. At the meeting, the student asked that he leave the room, and she and the department head spoke alone for about half an hour.

Later, the dean of arts and sciences asked to meet with him. He reported complaints that Copeland had created “a hostile and unsafe learning environment,” and that he had “verbally berated” a student—but said that it must be kept confidential which student or incidents were concerned. Then the dean asked Copeland to sign a document acknowledging that a complaint had been lodged against him.

“I’m thinking, Oh, God! I’m cast in one of my least favorite plays of all time, ‘The Crucible,’ by Arthur Miller!” he told me. He gave the dean a list of students he thought could confirm that he hadn’t “berated” anyone. He says the list was brushed aside: “They said, ‘What matters is that the student felt unsafe.’ ” Then he was told that, because gender could have been a factor, the issue was being investigated as a possible Title IX violation. That inquiry was later dropped; by then, Copeland had hired a lawyer. In September, 2015, the original inquiry was still going on, and Copeland said that the dean told him that if he wouldn’t meet without his lawyer he would be brought before the Professional Conduct Review Committee. Copeland and his lawyer welcomed that idea: the committee process would bring some daylight. They never heard back.
Much, much more in the article. Highly recommended. You should be able to read it without a subscription.

86 comments:

Big Mike said...

I did read it. I felt sick to my stomach. If I wasn't retired, and still a hiring manager, I'd inform HR not ever to send me the resume of an Oberlin graduate.

tim in vermont said...

What would be really transgressive would be to write a play as critical of the dominant culture as The Crucible was when Arthur Miller wrote it. But no, liberals just keep bouncing the rubble of the old culture will getting a chubby for "speaking truth to power."

How about a remake of "The Playboy of the Western World"? Who would that be?

Ann Althouse said...

"What would be really transgressive would be to write a play as critical of the dominant culture as The Crucible was when Arthur Miller wrote it."

David Mamet, "Oleanna"... a while back but Mamet is still around, tweaking the liberals.

Lewis Wetzel said...

A year earlier, a black boy with a pellet gun named Tamir Rice was killed by a police officer thirty miles east of Oberlin’s campus, and the death seemed to instantiate what students had been hearing in the classroom and across the widening horizons of their lives.
Thirty miles? A year earlier?
There are twenty-four post-secondary schools in Cleveland (https://www.mycollegeoptions.org/college-search/OH/Ohio/0/Cleveland.aspx). Oberlin is not in Cleveland. Whatever happened at Oberlin, it had nothing to do with Tamir Rice and everything to do with Oberlin's intolerant culture.

Anonymous said...

Tamir Rice seems an odd name for a pellet gun. If I had one I imagine I'd call it Betsy or somethin' down-home like that.

rhhardin said...

I'd inform HR not ever to send me the resume of an Oberlin graduate.

Hey, I'm an Oberlin graduate.

tim in vermont said...

At least state universities have to answer to the voters.

buwaya said...

Saw this.
UCLA, from insider reports, does not seem quite as insane.

rhhardin said...

Here's a pic of Igor Stravinski in a safe space that I took.

robinintn said...

Terry: "Thirty miles? A year earlier?"
Paul: "Tamir Rice seems an odd name for a pellet gun."
Good points! I'm still frozen in horror at "instantiate", though.

Michael K said...

"UCLA, from insider reports, does not seem quite as insane."

Oh yeah ?

Read this.

And this A story similar to the Oberlin story.

Bay Area Guy said...

It was a good, insightful article -- a bit unexpected from the New Yorker:)

The topic, though, was cringe-inducing. This is how 20-year olds, paying $58,000/year in tuition, fees and rent are developing at a major University? Wow, I say, just wow.

They would be better off, dropping out of school, dropping out of all political discussions, and going to welding trade school to learn a marketable skill.

Is this representative college life across America? God, I hope not. Where's the joy of learning? Reading good books? Making friends? Finding pretty girls? Going to football games? Lounging on the grass quad in the sunshine between classes?

The article describes a left-wing cesspool, where 10,000 social trip wires are placed to: (a) enforce leftist conformity, and (b) blow-up the unsuspecting person, who didn't get the memo.

I'm not too old to remember college "rap" sessions where we would debate/argue any issue under the sun: Does God exist? Is Communism a better system than Capitalism? Should Reagan give up the Star Wars defense? Then, we would drink beer and (hopefully) make-out with the girls.

These confused, humorless, snowflakes should all be forced to watch Animal House a dozen times, memorize the lines, and publicly recite them on campus.

Michael said...

Anyone else notice that most of the activist students in this piece referenced some fairly serious mental health issues?

Mike Sylwester said...

A major part of the problem is the Federal Government's involvement in schools.

The Obama Administration is demonstrating the pernicious effect.

Ron Winkleheimer said...

I read a pretty large portion of it, found it pretty tedious.

These people just aren't that intelligent. I know we are supposed to pretend they are. But its all an elaborate con which they are trying to pull on themselves as well as us. All the jargon and talks of oppression and the constant cry of "me, me, me" is just a cover.


buwaya said...

Gist of the troubles here -
- They are letting in a lot of people who don't seem to be up to the academic standards. I don't know if its affirmative action or just failing to filter for people with mental problems.
- The liberal arts professors seem to wallow in the trivial. Nothing in this article leads me to think that they are actually doing anything serious. Some of that may be because of a plurality of the less-than-appropriate quality of the students they have to deal with.
- The idea that identity is knowledge is dumb. Try to sell that in any Asian university and they will, most likely, politely ignore the mad person. This is also I think the result of affirmative action, as inability to compete in the proper business of education leads to this assertion, as a way to get some respect.
- A critical mass of affirmative action enrollees who make a constituency and amplifier for the above.

tim in vermont said...

Nobody has the moral authority to send a kid like that to a therapist.

Ron Winkleheimer said...

Anyone else notice that most of the activist students in this piece referenced some fairly serious mental health issues?

Yeah, why should I care what a at most 20ish year old with mental health issues thinks about anything. Oh you care about an issue. How special.

tim in vermont said...

I told my kids we should fight a war to toughen their generation up. They knew I was sort of kidding.

Ron Winkleheimer said...

Also a lot of lying in that article. Failed because of getting Tuberculosis? Called the N-word and told to go back to Africa by Oberlin alumni.

Yeah, not buying it.

buwaya said...

Michael,

No doubt, but as my inside contacts have it, little enough of the silliness has penetrated into even the liberal arts classes. Not Oberlin-level anyway.
The worst problem seems to be that the quality/level of the liberal arts curriculum is not at all what one would expect.

UCLA is very heavily foreign students (11%), and even more heavily US Asian (33%) and only 27% white. I suspect that more than anything all this is a fad/weakness preying on white populations. In UCLA there are few victims.
Oberlin is terribly vulnerable, having only 4.5% Asians to inoculate them against stupid fads, and 75% whites to prey upon. Many victims.

Sebastian said...

"a play as critical of the dominant culture" Huh? It perfectly affirmed liberal self-satisfaction. Nothing "critical" about it. Kudos to the prof for at least recognizing mediocre posturing.

"The topic, though, was cringe-inducing. This is how 20-year olds, paying $58,000/year in tuition, fees and rent are developing at a major University?" They don't. Only foreign, Asian, and some upper-middle-class white suckers pay sticker price. Care to guess the proportion of aid going to diversity admits? The article has a nice vignette on a scholarship girl who now despises the U.S.

Of course, there is no connection between the identity insanity on campus and the promotion of breaking down traditional morality and cultural categories by the feds, as in sex meaning one's "internal sense of gender." Oberlin is the reductio ad absurdum of progressivism. Most Progs can no longer recognize the absurdity, but the tone and publication of this article offers a very slight glimmer of hope.

Big Mike said...

@rhhardin, based on what Oberlin students are saying in that article, you'd report me to HR the first time I asked why you're surfing the Internet during work hours when the software you signed up to complete still had bugs in it. So, no, I'd just as soon not hire you. If I was still a hiring manager.

cubanbob said...

The simple solution is for Congress to redact Title 9 to sports and only sports and to abolish the Department of (Mis)Education and Indoctrination. The shock to the Leftist nervous system should be enough to kill the beast.

Lewis Wetzel said...

Average composite SAT score for Oberlin: 2059.
Average composite SAT score for Hahvahd: 2260.
Average composite SAT score for UW Madison: 1916
Average composite SAT score at my alma mater: 1393
Somebody has to clean the floors at Oberlin, Hahvahd, and UW Madison.

Michael said...

I saw an excellent performance of The Crucible at the Tyrone Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis recently. Miller thought he was referring to the McCarthy hearings, but I was really struck by how apt the analogy was to modern times, with the young girls playing the campus cry-bullies, the town authorities playing the university administrations, and the unjustly accused townspeople appearing as anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy. The Crucible has really become a send-up of the contemporary American Left.

fivewheels said...

Believe me, I know what confirmation bias is, but I must confess, when the excerpt started out by generically describing "a student" and "the student," somehow I knew that if there was ever a more specific reference ... yeah, there it is: "She."

David Begley said...

How does Oberlin stay in business? Seriously.

holdfast said...

Nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

Lewis Wetzel said...

"Oberlin College rescinds Bill Cosby's honorary degree"
http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2015/12/oberlin_college_rescinds_bill.html
How can you rescind an honorary degree? Did they find out that Cosby didn't do the work? That he didn't fulfill the course requirements that weren't required?

n.n said...

They need safe spaces in a reality show.

And Planned Parenthood in case she visits the bathroom after midnight.

buwaya said...

"How does Oberlin stay in business? Seriously."

Social signalling and student loans. Like almost all universities.

There are exceptions.
My favorite value, bang for the buck, no nonsense US university - Cal Poly

Moneyrunner said...

As a Christian,a conservative and a Trump supporter this made me smile. This is the future of academia; at least for a while. By the way, based on the edicts promulgated by the Obama Justice department can anyone deny than I'm a gay, female mouse?

https://youtu.be/ixrQcGQ6o-w

buwaya said...

I have talked to these fellows quite a bit at several "Maker Faires" and they stand out, people who want to be professionals among a mass of clever but unserious hobbyists. I am very impressed.

http://www.csuchico.edu/mmem/programs/bsmanufacturing_technology/index.shtml

Very solid program and very, almost obsessively, practical. The "sustainable" in the name is just PC marketing. No mad people should apply, as molten aluminum doesn't make allowances for mental health.

buwaya said...

The last thing I take from all this is that these poor kids are going to be crushed.
They are right, they are victims, but they are victims in waiting. In the meantime they are wasting piles of money and years of their lives.

The world is showing up to compete with them, and they simply are unprepared, they offer no service or value, no reason for anyone to keep them on, there is no reason for anyone in Seoul or Shanghai or Singapore to give them a living, no reason for anyone to prefer them to the products of IIT. They are Eloi and the Morlocks are coming.

Fred Drinkwater said...

As a former engineering hiring manager, I always looked favorably on students from CSU Chico, Cal Poly, and Oregon Institute of Technology. Berkeley, not so much,even though that's where I went. Practical, clever, and not full of themselves. I'm particularly glad to hear that Cal Poly, which my father recommended back in 1972, is still well-regarded. I think it must be its relative geographic isolation from the rest of coastal California that has saved it.

Chanie said...

America's chickens are coming home to roost

Fred Drinkwater said...

I remember, many many moons ago, chatting with a group of students from the school "Sciences Po" in Paris. I had been under the impression that the "Po" meant Polytechnique, but was disabused of this when they all said they hoped for government jobs after graduation. "Po", after all, really means "Political".
Same sinking feeling I got when nearing graduation at UCB in 1980, and a group of female Computer Science students looked askance at being called "engineers". (I had asked why they had not joined IEEE and ACM as student members, for a bit of resume-padding, and they said, more or less collectively "We're not engineers!")

Tari said...

The only cheering thought I have when reading about horrible people like this is: if these are the people my boys have to compete against in the job market in 10 years, WE WIN.

Of course, they're not the competition. My boys are going to wind up studying something like engineering, medicine, or finance - anything concrete and useful - so their competition won't come from a washed-up, insular liberal arts college. It will come from overseas.

Cal Poly, eh? It might have to go on the list.

buwaya said...

As it happens, a good friend of mine went to "Sciences Po" (after Harvard, and a stint at Cambridge). Quite rigorous as I recall. Its not quite ENA in the hierarchy of French feeders to the bureaucracy. The friend went on to a long and distinguished career in education.

glenn said...

Watching the faculty and student body at a liberal arts university eat each other should give me some sense of satisfaction. But I know who is going to pick up the tab for their pensions and unemployment benefits. That would be me.

MadisonMan said...

Students are so brittle at Oberlin. You're gonna self-harm 'cause someone calls you a name? Serious Mental health issues.

I have to agree about The Crucible, I can't stand it, but maybe that's because I remember it through the prism of required reading in 8th grade.

Michael K said...

"I think it must be its relative geographic isolation from the rest of coastal California that has saved it."

There are two Cal Polys. One is in Pomona. The other, of course is in SLO.

Lewis Wetzel said...

So, the small state college I attended has an average composite SAT score of 1393 for new students. I felt kind of bad about that until I realized that we received the same race and gender indoctrination that Harvard students get! Though sometimes the textbooks were a little old.
I took Physical Geography as a humanities elective. The class had eighteen guys, no women. Physical Geography is mostly maps. I think that women don't like maps.
The classroom was used to teach Women's Studies just before my Physical Geography class. Twenty women, no guys. I noticed on the last day of class they all brought in baked goods -- cupcakes and breads -- to share for a little hen party. We didn't do anything like that in Physical Geography. I kind of felt bad, like maybe I should have brought in some beef jerky, or some pickled hot peppers to pass around.

Laslo Spatula said...

Daddy Issue America...

"Mom -- Guess what!?"

"What, Amanda?"

"Mr. Nickels said he'd write me a recommendation for my college applications!"

"Mr. Nickels? Your math teacher?"

"Yeah!"

"Hasn't he given you 'D's in all his classes?"

"Yeah, but he says he sees something special in me and will write me a GREAT recommendation!"

"Really?"

"Yeah! I just need to go over to his place and he'll work with me to write it!"

"Oh, baby..."

"What, Mom?"

"Honey, I'm afraid that this is that point of Life where you have to decide if giving an old man a blow-job is worth some nice words on paper."

"Really, Mom? Is that what he is after?"

"Baby, I love you. But you are no math scholar, and you have great tits."

"I KNEW it couldn't be that easy."

"Honey, when it is THAT easy a blow-job is always required."

"I guess that's OK. I really didn't want to go to college, anyway."

"Baby, you don't need college to work as a bartender, you just have to keep your clothes tight."

"Mom: you really think I could be a bartender?"

"My sweet girl, I believe that is what you were born to do."

"Thanks, Mom: that's soooo nice."

"Just remember, baby: tits equals tips..."


I am Laslo.

Amadeus 48 said...

I don't know much about Oberlin except in historical terms. Something in the article, though, mentioned more settled students living on the north campus. Did Heller talk only to student activists and campus administrators? Perhaps these students are at the "mental ward" end of the Oberlin student body.
Also what is the "this work" that some of the student activists refer to? Do they think they are working by having late-night sob sessions about their intersections?
Heaven help us.

Amadeus 48 said...

As to Oleanna, David Mamet nailed this phenomenon years ago. I am sure Mamet would write it again today, but I think the SJWs would turn the hounds loose on him. He is a truthful but brutally frank playwright. I wonder how many fans of "Girls" would suffer trauma if they knew Zosia Mamet is David's daughter. Maybe there should be a trigger warning before each episode of Girls--oh well, they can put the trigger warning on the boxed set.

Henry said...

I went to art school. Who cares about the SAT?

William said...

I got about half way through. Maybe I'll pick it up again later, but it was giving me a slow burn. Some kid who dyed his hair blue was complaining about being marginalized. It's annoying. He goes to all that trouble to be different and then complains about people treating him differently......I give you a trigger warning. This article is not a safe space for those over the age of sixty with a past history of hypertension or coronary problems......These are comparatively privileged people with delusions of oppression.

Richard Dolan said...

Nice article. None of the students profiled in it seems to be studying a STEM subject. As the author notes, you can find the same dynamic on almost every American campus. But it seems to have less significance at schools catering to a student body interested primarily in moving up the social and economic ladder.

Birches said...

Juxtaposition this charade with what happened at Baylor. I have no problem with Art Briles losing his job if the football team was raping and beating women left and right, but I have a bit of skepticism because of stories like Oberlin.

madAsHell said...


I went to art school. Who cares about the SAT?

I guess that explains your avatar!!!

David said...

Lack of rigor. Lack of standards. Lack of courage. Lack of intelligence. Ignorance (lack of knowledge.)

Mike Sylwester said...

We need an Intersectionality tag for our blog.

David said...

My son went to art school and grad art school at Wisconsin. Worked hard. Set high standards for himself. He did not lack rigor, and enough of his teachers did not either. He had very high SATs. The numbers don't help him but the ability they reflect does. He knows how to solve problems, which is why he can support himself with a mix of art and woodworking-carpentry skills.

The biggest deficiency in these schools is that they are teaching students to complain about problems but not how to solve them. Most problems do not succumb to demands, manifestos and harsh moral judgments. They really have no idea that is true.

Unknown said...

Nice informasinya gan?

Qwinn said...

Arthur Miller was a communist sympathizer at best, a communist outright in all likelihood, and The Crucible was supposed to be a morality play depicting the evils of The Red Scare, the left's vehicle for making themselves immune to ideological hiring and firing while taking the practice themselves to an extreme level through their Long March Through The Institutions. It worked tremendously for them, and the real problem is that once a group gets a majority voting bloc in an institution that is willing to practice "McCarthyism", it is impossible to dislodge them. Even if the Right regained the will and confidence to fire leftists for being leftists, it wouldn't do any good now.

Anonymous said...

Read the article. These kids are all cult members. All they're missing is Jim Jones.

Fred Drinkwater said...

Buwaya: Sure, Sci Po and ENA are rigorous (to the extent that their subjects allow rigor, I cannot resist snarking. Sorry.). What depresses me is the thought that so much effort and brainpower is going into, mostly, the governmental regulatory apparatus. I do not consider that a "best use" of a limited human resource.

tim in vermont said...

They could bring back "The Lottery" now, but instead of casting lots, each person would be required to tweet an honest thought.

Grant said...

The thing that really caught my attention was the woman who said, “As a person who plans on returning to my community, I don’t want to assimilate into middle-class values. I’m going home, back to the ’hood of Chicago, to be exactly who I was before I came to Oberlin.”

Why would anyone bother with college--even if they were paying for it, which at Oberlin rates it seems doubtful this student is--if they expected to be completely unchanged by the experience?

tim in vermont said...

Why would anyone bother with college--even if they were paying for it, which at Oberlin rates it seems doubtful this student is--if they expected to be completely unchanged by the experience?


Women with this perspective at some point experienced the development of a "protesting inner voice" (Love and Guthrie 1999), which allowed them to make their own claims to truth and knowledge. Along with the nascent discovery of the inner voice, subjective knowers showed a general distrust of analysis and logical reasoning (Love and Guthrie 1999) and did not see value in considering the weight of evidence in evaluating knowledge. Instead, they considered knowledge and truth to be inherently personal and subjective, - Women's ways of knowing, Wikipedia.

Gahrie said...

Along with the nascent discovery of the inner voice, subjective knowers showed a general distrust of analysis and logical reasoning (Love and Guthrie 1999) and did not see value in considering the weight of evidence in evaluating knowledge. Instead, they considered knowledge and truth to be inherently personal and subjective,

This seems to describe Althouse.

Repeal the 19th Amendment.

JCCamp said...

An Oberlin verbal/math average of 1360 is really not that high these days, I don't think. Certainly some SAT inflation has taken place.

Reading the article, I was struck by a passing reference to the 2013 faked racial incident of flyes and posters, which turned out to be not a joke but rather 2 black students' attempt to fire up a incident. The New Yorker studiously avoids both the ethnicity of the fakers and the motivation.

Cyrus, the sensitive penniless trans who didn't like Sophocles without a trigger warning, arrives wearing $150 sunglasses & sits down at a gourmet coffee joint to chat. He claims various victimhoods, like teachers not allowing him time to test while dealing with TB (I call BS) and so forth. The various demands and trevails of the children at Oberlin remind me of a conversation I heard at a local high school not long ago. Two 15 or 16 year old females were arguing. One appeared to be black, the other Hispanic. They were vehemently disputing who had life harder because of their skin tone. Really. (Sample: Until you've been brown, you can't claim my experience) A third female stood by, waiting to add her victimhood. She was wearing a headscarf, although I'm not sure she was ethnically from the Middle East. She looked to be a recent convert.

I used to think this situation had some similarity to colleges in the late 60's and early '70's, but now I'm not so sure that it's not the polar opposite. Radicals back then seemed to delight in saying and doing the most outrageous or outre, trying to shock Mommy and Daddy. Now the students are those being shocked and needing some Lawrence Welk to calm those shattered nerves.

Where is Mitch Miller when we need him most?

I do question what skills or educaiton these students will have when they graduate. I fear their main job market will be in...education, since they will lack the skills to do anything else.

robother said...

Mau-mauing the Flak-Catchers turns out to be the only skill being taught in liberal arts programs. University teachers and administrators are the passive punching bags on which these student/thugs practice their sweet science. They graduate to Democrat-controlled bureaucracies (public, charitable or media) where bullying is rewarded with other people's money. I keep wondering when do we reach Peak Liberal Guilt, but so far, no end in sight.

Bill Peschel said...

My son and I are spending May and June visiting colleges in PA and NY, from lib arts with engineering programs to dedicated schools like Carnegie Mellon and RIT. Studentsreview.com with their anonymous reviews have been an interesting resource.

We haven't found any Oberlin-like campuses so far, but Lafayette College's Junior Visiting Day came near to it. There are so many bromides I started creating Admissions Bingo to score lines like, "Today is not about us. Today is a celebration of you and your lives."

"Understand that this is not a process with a logical end, but a journey full of self-celebration and full of introspection."

One admissions official bragged how their students visited North Korea and met with the locals, and how the students realized they were just like them! (After a series of statements like this, my son leaned over and said, "Bucknell was so much more professional.")

But my favorite moment came at the end of the sermon, when the guy earnestly offered advice to sooth our nerves. "If I can say one thing to make this stress-free ... if I can give you one piece of advice to make all of your worries go away ..."

My son muttered, "You're not going to get in."

jr565 said...

The crucible was really an indictment of Mccarthism. Those falsely accused of witchcraft were actual stand ins for those accused of communism. But this lesson only applies to communists who are accused of communism. If communists or leftists have witch hunts, well there are a lot of witches that need to be destroyed.

jr565 said...

In regards to miller maybe being a communist. He was pro communism, not simply anti anti communism.

http://spectator.org/64379_arthur-miller-communist/

Birches said...

He claims various victimhoods, like teachers not allowing him time to test while dealing with TB (I call BS) and so forth.

I also call BS on the alumni calling that girl the N word. These people are delusional.

Amadeus 48 said...

JCCamp at 8:26

"I do question what skills or education these students will have when they graduate. I fear their main job market will be in...education, since they will lack the skills to do anything else."

Well, as you suggest, they can always get jobs in university administration as diversity coordinators, Title IX investigation officers, and assistant deans (mice in training to be rats) of student life. So maybe their futures are brighter than they should be.

Ron Winkleheimer said...

Finished reading the article.

Also, did anyone else bother reading the list of demands the students presented?

https://www.scribd.com/doc/293326897/Oberlin-College-Black-Student-Union-Institutional-Demands

Most of the demands involve lowering academic standards and demands for separate facilities.

This is particularly amusing.

We DEMAND that a room be given to the Black Scientists Wing that includes ample and relevant equipment and supplies for the success of Black students in the sciences.

Also they want money and some people they don't like fired and some people they do like promoted.

A rather large proportion of the demands revolve around the Jazz students who don't like music theory or having to study classical music, which is white.

And a couple of demands seem to reveal that the black students are incapable of figuring out what paper work they need to fill out and when in order to get financial aid and graduate, so they want somebody to be appointed to lead them by the hand.


On the other hand, some of the demands actually seem pretty reasonable.

Housing for international students who can't afford to go home during school breaks for instance.

Ron Winkleheimer said...

One admissions official bragged how their students visited North Korea

Anybody who voluntarily goes to North Korea who isn't actually a spy is an idiot. Survivors of interrogations and the death camps have stated that they tried to commit suicide because the conditions are so bad.

Jupiter said...

“It’s just a massive catastrophe,” Eosphoros reported of the microaggressions he encountered even in his work-study life. “You get your supervisor monologuing about how everyone is just here for ‘pocket money,’ and you’re sitting there going, ‘You cancelled the shift on Sunday, and, because of that, I can’t pay my rent.’ ” He feels that he’s been drawn into a theatre of tokenism. “It’s always disappointing to be proof of concept for other people,” he told me."

The theater of tokenism part sounds about right, but he's got the wrong idea about "proof of concept". Proof of concept is where you show that something might work.

Fernandinande said...

Ron Winkleheimer said...
Also, did anyone else bother reading the list of demands the students presented?


It's pretty typical of the paranoid tripe emitted by other half-witted racists.

damikesc said...

Is this representative college life across America? God, I hope not. Where's the joy of learning? Reading good books? Making friends? Finding pretty girls? Going to football games? Lounging on the grass quad in the sunshine between classes?


It has been.

For decades.

Ask conservative speakers if you need examples.

They have decided to eschew Western civilization. They are now trying to install their own civilization. They are doing poorly.

The article describes a left-wing cesspool, where 10,000 social trip wires are placed to: (a) enforce leftist conformity, and (b) blow-up the unsuspecting person, who didn't get the memo.

If you ever want to know how the French Revolution went so wrong, American universities are re-enacting it.

Also a lot of lying in that article. Failed because of getting Tuberculosis? Called the N-word and told to go back to Africa by Oberlin alumni.

Yeah, not buying it.


And nobody is harmed by these laws. I'm STILL pissed that Whole Foods didn't take that gay pastor down over the cake hoax. These things need to make people HURT for doing.

They remind me of Robert Reich, whose diary was in near total-opposition to reality as recorded by video.

The last thing I take from all this is that these poor kids are going to be crushed.
They are right, they are victims, but they are victims in waiting. In the meantime they are wasting piles of money and years of their lives.


Disagree. They are going to infest HR departments, government bureaucracy, and college administration. They are going to fuck with your life in ways you cannot fathom. They will ruin your job, your government, and education even more. After all, why else would they work in those fields?

the left's vehicle for making themselves immune to ideological hiring and firing while taking the practice themselves to an extreme level through their Long March Through The Institutions. It worked tremendously for them, and the real problem is that once a group gets a majority voting bloc in an institution that is willing to practice "McCarthyism",

It should be noted that the Left's "red scare" (Palmer raids) were WAY more oppressive than McCarthyism.

Why would anyone bother with college--even if they were paying for it, which at Oberlin rates it seems doubtful this student is--if they expected to be completely unchanged by the experience?

I wonder that as well. What's the point if you intend to be unchanged?

Ron Winkleheimer said...

I wonder that as well. What's the point if you intend to be unchanged?

College isn't about learning to these people. They all ready "know" everything they need to know. College is for getting a credential so you can get plugged into the network of like-minded individuals.

damikesc said...

They feel they should be able to tell professors how to teach them.

Sad thing is, a lot of professors agree.

Fernandinande said...

Paul Zrimsek said...
Tamir Rice seems an odd name for a pellet gun.


I call mine "Gunny McGunface".

Speaking of half-witted racists:
"President Barack Obama told the world on Friday in Hiroshima that the American decision to drop nuclear bombs on Japan in 1945 arose from humanity’s worst instincts, including “nationalist fervor or religious zeal.”

A non-clown President said:
"That bomb caused the Japanese to surrender, and it stopped the war. I don’t care what the crybabies say now, because they didn’t have to make the decision."

Fred Drinkwater said...

But Obama was right. It was Japanese nationalism and religious fervor from which the American decision rose.
I'm sure he meant it that way.

mikee said...

Has no one read Tom Wolfe's old book about leftist agitprop, "Mau Mauing the Flack Catchers" and learned therein how to ignore crazies, while still taking their tuition money?

Jim S. said...

I love how they spell "élite" with the accent over the "e". Could you get more elite than that?

Sydney said...

About 25 years ago I attended a dinner party in Oberlin where all of the guests were faculty (except me.) The one thing I remember about that party is the way they were all tripping over the word "black" when they were talking about students. It was just at the time when calling someone "black" had become offensive somehow and "African-American" had replaced it in usage. They would start to say "black" and catch themselves just at the first sound out of their lips, then quickly switch to "African-American." I can only imagine how they talk amongst themselves now. What word do you suppose they use for gender? It could be a Laszlo sketch.

Anonymous said...

Like Andrew Jackson your pTB intend¬¬¬s to take over both parties and destroy their establishments and their Donor class. And like Jackson he as head of both parties will wait a decade or two before allowing the two parties to restore themselves in more than name only. Grandma is telling her tadpoles that the debate will start with a friendly handshake and hug, and a statement of what principles they both embrace. Followed by a good argument with Kimmel keeping the ball while play cracking wise making fun of both individuals, this on stage argument will define what today's democrats believe, as well as what guides your pTb. From this your voters will gain a sense of how your PTb will behave since he has no strong beliefs, other than the importance of free will. Which means he will and can change his mind at any time, since written policies only define his, and therefore your country’s weaknesses.

At the end of the official debate they will site on a sofa and discuss the most important things family and relationships with others, Kimmel listening in fascination, then he'll offer Bernie the secretary of labor's seat if he does not win the Dem nomination or the election, on the condition that his first priority is helping those who labor for the most tyrannical of employers, the self-employed so they, with Bernie’s’ help can restore the cities we've destroyed over the last 40 years since LBJ noble effort in the great society where its failures are documented by the smartest of Democrats, D. Patrick Moynihan, as well a commitment by you, Bernie to disestablishing the public sector unions and focus those resources on those that really need the help and end their corrupting force on governance with unions returned to their original purpose and then shake hands on it. And close by saying It’s up to voters to decide your future, not me. Please do vote on November2nd, and if you have any problems voting at all here’s my phone number. Good luck and good night. A celebration of happiness follows, with a well-placed camera showing Soros on the big screen throwing a tantrum, rolling on the floor and stamping his feet.

oh my. grandma is smiling again, which means she's going to take a nap and doesn’t want us to wake her up for at least ten of your years so she can collect on her wager. She bet my aunt pTb was a Boris Alterman happy to play the fool for advantage and he would pull it off. A ten wide blitz simul tourney, blindfolded.

MayBee said...

Kozol tried everything she could think of. She divided the seminar into work groups. She started giving lectures. She asked students to write down one thing they would do to contribute to a more productive dialogue. Only one person responded. So she did what she had never done in two decades of teaching: she dissolved the course mid-semester and let students do independent study for a grade.

Why didn't she give the students failing grades?
Wouldn't that have taught them to participate in the class?

It sounds like they threw a fit, and they won.

damikesc said...

Why didn't she give the students failing grades?
Wouldn't that have taught them to participate in the class?


I don't get it either. You're the professor. If they won't do the work, then grade them accordingly. If they go to superiors, just show them the work and, if they try to pressure you, promise to make a stink and have them explain why the work produced is worth a passing grade.

MayBee said...

Yeah, damikesc, I think we have one answer about why the special snowflakes try to get away with so many ridiculous demands. Too many people give into them.