Walter Olson is a fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, and has made a “storyfied” collection of some of the demands of college-student protestors in the last few weeks. As I’ve said, some of the “demands” (I prefer “requests”) are reasonable, but many are not only ridiculous, but hilarious. A few of Olson’s tw**ts:
This one is reminiscent of the public shaming during China’s Cultural Revolution:
From Dartmouth:
This one augurs no good:
The Wesleyan demand didn’t go down well:
No more campus cops!
Would this work in biology?:
From Michigan State:
And two more reactions:
sub
Triggered!!! No, students saying ridiculous things don’t bother me but administrators and deans that take them seriously DO bother me.
Well, sometime students do say ridiculous things that irk me (and there certainly is such a thing as a “dumb question”), but the administrators go to school to get degrees in Educational Administration and actually write theses for their PhDs. I have read some and they are all dumb – as bad as theses in physical education. Deans seem to be chosen, with a few exceptions, for their detachment from reality. I must admit to having had Saudi like thoughts about both castes.
“and there certainly is such a thing as a “dumb question””
There sure is. 🙂 Yeah, I hear you.
If anyone wants to enjoy British style amusement on all this go to @bindelj and look at her recent tweet. A spoof script from the popular BBC University Challenge TV programme.
To all the students: It’s your dime, go to school or not. You are no longer in pre-school.
Maybe they could have a course that college students could take to get their priorities corrected. These things that your crowd tells you are important are not at the top of the list. Do learn to think for yourself and stop following the herd.
Maybe try a protest of the loss of hundreds of billions of dollars in Iraq and Afghanistan for no gain and think how cheap an education could be if money were directed that way.
What gets me is, not only did they choose to go to college, they picked the colleges that they went to.
I think I would volunteer every week to be the officially-designated racist misogynist pig. And then I’d channel Mel Brooks, and do so exhaustively. I’d count coup in the number of triggers I pulled…and, of course, all whilst being so tearfully apologetic about how I know I need to become a better person….
My generation grew up with “Nuke the Gay Whales” bumper stickers. This generation needs something even more offensive. Suggestions?
b&
That would make a great stand-up routine. To raise awareness of you performances, finagle an invitation to a campus, get loudly disinvited, then you could hit all the off-campus venues, and really clean up.
My guess, better than half of university students are not as foolish as this loud minority.
F*ck the cisheteroneoconpatriarchy. But only if they give notarized written assent.
Instead of Decolonial Theory, I suggest Decolonial Therapy.
I narrowly escaped the pseudo-education at Dartmouth for a solid if not quite as fanciful educational experience at UC.
Perhaps university staff should be required to publicly do some dance, currently popular among the various, magnanimous student protest groups, on the Quad.
Couldn’t that be construed as appropriation?
Indeed. We simply can’t allow the elite, if nerdy, academic caste to take all the cool out of low-brow, popular activities like dancing. Let the underprivileged regular folks have their dancing. Why can’t the geeky scholars be content with their books?
Because the books they’re going to read are often written by white males?
Yes, no doubt.
But, if it also provided mirth to the exquisitely-offendable it might be tolerated/allowed.
Or, maybe staff should go to the basketball court and jump.
Just saw this on twitter — satirical university quiz challenge.
I hadn’t seen that before:
“We’ve decided to no-platform you.”
Someone has to compile a dictionary of all this stuff.
Cisheteropatriarchy?
You’re part of it dude and therefore have no right to question it! Do you think you’re living in a democracy that supports freedom of speech in its founding legislation or something?
🙂 I poked around a bit and found this comment in the Google summary of a page that had vanished: If you are ever tempted to use the phrases … “cisheteropatriarchy,” you should seek professional psychiatric help …
Meanwhile, I’ll remain content with cis/trans isomerism.
“Meanwhile, I’ll remain content with cis/trans isomerism.”
I remember becoming enamored of diasteromers and enantiomers in organic chemistry.
I’ll never forget “lithium aluminum hydride.” Nor, the story of Kekule’s (sp.?) dream of a snake swallowing itself, leading to the discovery of ring structures. Or, IIRC, Wallace Carother’s ingenious experiment determining how to distinguish between two chemically-identical molecules, one levo the other dextro.
Love it! 😀
Are there “boat” and “chair” versions?
#concernedstudent1967
For those students joining Greek letter organizations, would the protesters be satisfied by a viewing of “300” and Oliver Stone’s “Alexander”??
http://www.martialartsactionmovies.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/300-Movie-Poster.jpg
Well at least the queer studies thing would fit well into the physics department, a la Haldane.
I suppose so.
I find myself oscillating between thinking that these compiled demands are parodies of demands, or real demands. I am still not sure…
They’re real.
More’s the pity, then.
Mandatory mathematics
Mandatory physics, biology, chemistry
Mandatory non-stop studying
Mandatory straight A’s
Also:
Mandatory respect your teachers & other school authorities
Mandatory have some maners
Yes. The Red Guard.
Saw a documentary on the Red Guard last year and I immediately thought of the authoritarian SJW.
And then the auto de fe? Or the guillotine?
I can think of some other images to go with the very apt picture of the counter-revolutionaries in the tweet from Gabriel Rossman. First would be Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son. This is also so monstrous that I have a zillion comments I’d make. The whole situation would be funny, except that, if people like these actually somehow got power, those would be the scenes we’d see.
I hope that those students who weep for the Abenaki will remember to put signs like those up in their parents yards, because if any of the land is stolen, it all is.
“Incorporate into each department at least one queer studies class.” I suppose in zoology the text could be Bagemihl’s “Biological Exuberance,” a fascinating if repetitive compellation of unexpected sexual behavior in diverse animals.
In botany, though, we deal with so many variations on sexuality that I had to learn new words, like gynodioecious, outcrossing and selfing, pin and thrum, chasmogamous and cleistogamous. Just in grasses, plants can have male and female parts in the same flower (synoecious), separated in different flowers on the same plant (monoecious), and on separate plants (dioecious). Even if they have fully developed synoecious flowers, they may be apomictic (setting seed without sex). Dandelions (not grasses) look like they’re outcrossing, but they’re apomictic and in Europe, where there are many species of dandelion, the species we know as weeds pollinate the ovules of the other species, producing hybrid offspring that become members of the other species. Kentucky Bluegrass, on the other hand, is often pollinated by other species, and the hybrid offspring become part of Kentucky Bluegrass (cultural appropriation?), united by a shared maternal genome. Kentucky Bluegrass has probably the most extensive series of chromosome numbers of any plant (27, 28, 32, 35, 37, 41–46, 48–147); some of those lineages set seed clonally, without sex (agamospermy).
Lest you think I’m totally unaware on this topic, I once outed myself to a medium-sized biology class when a student declared that gays shouldn’t be allowed to marry because kids needed to grow up in a family with a father and a mother, and I responded, “We need marriage because we’re not waiting around for permission. Many of us have kids, and those kids need the legal protection of marriage that defines the parents’ responsibilities for those kids and the kids’ right to continue relationships with the parents they have bonded with.” And of course I didn’t stop there.
” . . . gynodioecious . . . synoecious . . . monoecious . . . dioecious . . . . ”
Bodacious!
” . . . a student declared that gays shouldn’t be allowed to marry because kids needed to grow up in a family with a father and a mother . . . . ”
I would like to have asked him his solution for when a father deserts a family, or dies when the children are less than five years old.
“…become part of Kentucky Bluegrass (cultural appropriation?)…”
Actually, horticultural appropriation.
BAM!
How to do a protest of a speaker while giving them free speech:
That sounds like a remarkably mature compromise.
Please can we clone those students and quietly replace all other students with the Brunel strain?
cr
So is acting like Maoists an example of cultural appropriation?
The one from Michigan State, asking for more faculty in Black Queer Studies, Hip-Hop Studies, and Decolonial Theory, seems to me to capture best the strange notion these students seem to have of what college is about.
I am a big fan of liberal arts education, but the notion that these subjects are what it is about really makes me wonder. It is as if they think that having these classes would result in changing the world, or something. That they think they don’t actually need to go out and do something in the real world, they just need to get a class established at Michigan State, and that will take care of it.
There is something very naive about the whole thing.
Cute kitteh studies!!
I’d be down for that.
Of course, such a course is speciesist and lookist:(
lol! I’d be down with it, too.
Any truth to the rumor that these schools are adding a ritual auto-de-fé to their annual homecoming weekends? Should we start a pool on which school will be first to name Torquemada its new team mascot?
I like the throwing into the lake one, as it might be tongue-in cheek…
Will this ever end??
I looked up the demands from my graduate alma mater, and the one that stood out was the one about fraternities and sororities. Those organizations seem cisheteronormative, elitist, and exclusionary to me, so why do the students want any part of them? I heard similar demands and complaints recently from student representatives interviewed on an NPR program: basically she perceived that she was less desirable during sorority rush because she was a WOC, and this had RUINED her college experience and ability to make connections. Another student thought that being in a fraternity or sorority improved chances for academic success. 😛
Interesting how the ‘n’ word is still a big no-no, but ‘black’ and ‘queer’ are apparently okay again.
Ummmm
cr
And “person of color” replaces “colored person”
I had noticed that. But then it gets abbreviated to POC, which sounds vaguely disreputable.
(As does POTUS. Does no-one vet these acronyms for euphony before launching them?)
cr
about cultural appropiation:
Pakistani bagpipes on camels
Seems like the Lunatics are attempting a takeover of the Asylum.
Anonymous denunciation (reports) – sort of like Ratemyprofessor.com?
About 10 years ago, I got into an online tiff with a creationist that found out where I worked and made several ‘anonymous’ negative comments on ratemyprofessors about me. When I contacted the rmp admin, they said, in essence, “Oh well. We do not know who raters are and will not attempt to find out.”
The negative comments – to this day, the only ones, remain.
That’s pretty scary! (And disgusting.)