I don’t want to get in the way of the decent idea finally and begrudgingly approved by the Board of Regents as part of the DEI deal — approximately doubling the number of conservatives on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus faculty and adding one more.
But I do hope whoever writes up the job posting is honest.
Wanted: A really smart person to join the faculty at the OG of progressivism: UW-Madison. We don’t care about the color of your skin (just this once!) but unusual thickness is an absolute must. Epidermis should be approximately as thick as, say, a good border wall. Candidates with lesser thickness should have willingness to wear Kevlar.
I think it might be helpful to also explicitly require a good sense of humor, but that need is going be pretty apparent once the posting gets out and progressives accuse the university of both discriminating against illegal immigrants and making light of gun violence.
There’s nothing wrong with adding one more conservative — if they can find the right one. But the truth is that adding one more is peanuts.
“While happy to see the university is recognizing this as a deficiency,” one of the few admittedly conservative professors at the university, UW-Madison Political Science Professor Ryan Owens, says, “this effort needs to be much more significant and institutionalized.”
No doubt.
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Higher education across the nation, already over-priced and over-sold, is in disrepute. Add trigger warnings, cancel culture, and general all around pecksniffery and you have a system that is Out Of Touch. Stir in the “Depends on the Context” of campus anti-semitism and you have a crisis of confidence — one that legislative Republicans are addressing and Democrats are pooh poohing.
Harvard, Penn, and MIT may be entitled to their contextual equivocations, being privately endowed universities. The Universities of Wisconsin are taxpayer-supported. We are paying for this university system! But accountability violates the essence of progressivism: rule by expert. They decide, the rest of us shut up and fork over.
What is undeniable (if you want to play that game) is that the race and sex commissars discourage sifting and winnowing through a regimen of shaming, intimidation, denial of tenure, refusal to hire. Submit your DEI statement along with your doctoral thesis.
Bigotry of low expectations
Black educator and NY Times columnist John McWhorterremarks that this week’s congressional hearings “point up how low expectations are for black students on many college campuses — expectations low enough to qualify as a kind of racism.”
The Universities of Wisconsin expelled a 42-ton boulder deposited on the Madison campus 12,000 years ago by the last glacier. Someone, almost as long ago, referred to it with a racist term. The Abraham Lincoln statue is rumored to be next on the flatbed truck. Or beheaded, like the statue in front of the state Capitol of the slavery abolitionist who died fighting the Confederacy. Republicans didn’t do that; ISIS-inspired progressives did.
Professor McWhorter’s Bottom Line: “If you can’t bear walking past a rock someone called a dirty name 100 years ago, how are you going to deal with life?”
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The documentary covers the relationship between identity studies, student activists, and the DEI administration of a college in Olympia, Washington