Clarissa's Blog

The No Grades Initiative

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Clarissa

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August 6, 2026

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The University of Michigan will remove the grades that students receive in their freshman year from the transcripts and the GPA. The stated goal of this exercise is “to curb the mental health crisis unfolding among college-aged individuals.”

We keep hearing that mental illness is just like physical illness. But the proponents of this theory clearly don’t believe it themselves. They like to compare what they call mental illness to diabetes. Nobody suggests, however, that hiding my blood sugar readings from me will help alleviate my illness. To the contrary, if I don’t know what my readings are and if I don’t track them carefully on a daily basis, the illness will get worse. It’s only if I know exactly what is happening and share this information with my doctor that I will be able to control my condition. Eating 3 slices of chocolate cake and then pretending that my blood sugar reading is fantastic is not going to cure me. To the contrary, it will end up killing me.

Whatever people mean by this “unfolding mental health crisis”, the idea that hiding from reality will help people feel better about their lives makes no sense. People who are actually healthy in their minds like their lives, even when their grades are not great or when they have diabetes. Mental health is the capacity to accept what is. If you find the idea that you failed calculus devastating, that is not mental health. If you can’t look at your transcript without falling apart, that is anything but healthy.

University of Michigan does not allow students to opt in or out of this initiative. This will be imposed on everybody because if only some people opt in, they will stand out by virtue of not having freshman-year grades. This will “inadvertently become equated with them not doing well in class”, as the explanation provided by the university states. Of course, the reality is that these students are not doing well in class, indeed.

It is disappointing that mental health is now equated with being delusional about yourself and presenting a fake persona to others. This is a university that teaches very young people who are still in their teen years that this is a good life strategy.

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humor, wokeism

A New Sexuality

Published by

Clarissa

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August 6, 2026

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As if we didn’t have enough already, a new sexuality has been announced, and it’s a doozy.

The British Association of Psychotherapy & Counselling has just released new ‘Gender, Sexuality and Relationship Diversity Guidance’.

It categorises infidelity as a brand new sexuality: ‘secret non-monogamy’.

Therapists must affirm this sexuality to prove ‘cultural competency’.

https://x.com/i/status/2076261276678820324

There is a description at the link that is delightfully funny.

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antidepressants, history, humor, third party, Tucker Carlson

A Parody of History

Published by

Clarissa

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August 5, 2026

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I’m weeping with laughter. You’ve got to be a clinical choo-choo to believe something so clearly stupid. Tucker keeps mocking white working class people (“the fat, tattooed Walmart customers” he calls them) but who’s supposed to hear these pearls of wisdom and not die of laughter?

By the way, Tucker killed any possibility that his third party will be a success. He declared that he’s against SSRIs and benzos. There’s no constituency for that, so it’s over for his political project.

A statue of Judas in Moscow. I work in education and even I never heard anything equally stupid.

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parenting

No Children Allowed

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Clarissa

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August 5, 2026

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For the back-to-school event at Klara’s school, we were warned that only parents are allowed to attend. There is construction going on, and they don’t have enough space.

Of course, what makes people parents is that they have children. If we can’t bring our child, then we can’t go. I strongly believe that it’s better not to have a back-to-school event at all than to inform parents who are paying for the school that their children are not welcome.

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academia, humor, Trump

A Scary Truth

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Clarissa

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August 5, 2026

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Minus the lake, I had a nearly identical experience with a colleague who took me far away from campus to confess in a terrified whisper that she kind of likes Trump.

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neoliberalism

A Path to Losing

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Clarissa

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August 5, 2026

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15

This kind of attitude is why we’re going to lose the next election:

I know how to cook. My husband and I make a very good living. What I am not is blind and clueless. Grocery costs have indeed gone extremely high since COVID. The market for used cars is downright insane. Rents have skyrocketed. My entire promotion of 2021 has been completely eaten by rising costs. For people who make less, this must be an absolute bloodbath.

This is not an issue of individuals making bad choices. There are some things that can be solved on the level of individual choices. There are others that can’t. That’s why politics exists. It allows people to seek solutions to collective problems together. Offering “biographical solutions to societally begotten problems” is the definition of neoliberalism. You can’t choose your way out of a dysfunctional economy.

We’re rightfully annoyed that young people get snared in the gimmicky promises of dishonest socialists. But what can we expect if we superciliously dismiss their very real concerns with these silly neoliberal slogans?

Yes, learn to cook. I’ve learned. I cook better than the absolute majority of people, and I’m still horrified every time I hit checkout at the grocery store.

Just move, just learn to code, just learn to cook. Okay, but why does anybody need to vote for the party that offers nothing except these inane suggestions? Because it will guarantee me the “freedom to learn to cook”? I already have it.

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teaching, technology

Technology Woes

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Clarissa

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August 5, 2026

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4

I have Claude check my inbox for important emails, summarize them, work with them, and send out replies if necessary. I caught Claude again simply not reading the email thread to the end and just ignoring the latest emails.

https://x.com/i/status/2084727476761083926

I assume the “important emails” were also written by AI. Which makes me wonder what these two AI instruments say about the unnecessary human criticizing them when they talk to each other l.

In other technology-related news, I am very happy that I am not teaching in the fall because my university switched to a new version of our learning management system. Some upgrades make things better. Others do the opposite. This is the situation of the opposite. I spent 20 minutes with the new LMS yesterday, and it gave me a headache. The color scheme is an unrelieved milky gray where everything bleeds together. Changes in federal law already took the most useful functions of the LMS out of play. You can’t upload most of the .PDFs and PowerPoints with images.

The change in the LMS is unfair to people who have to teach in the fall. They have under a month to master the new system, even though they’re not on contract and nobody is paying them for their time until the week before classes start. Then they’ll have to spend the first month of class trying to teach students how to use the new LMS because nobody will know where to find anything in the update.

Some technology is very useful. I am eagerly anticipating the automation of our scheduling. In theory, it was great that people could choose their own teaching schedule. That system was heavily abused, however. Everybody insisted on scheduling themselves at 12:30 on Monday and Wednesday, which meant that crucial, higher-level courses would often have to be canceled. I begged people for years to try to be reasonable about it, with no results. Now we will lose one of the biggest perks of our job, which is fair, because if you can’t be responsible with your privileges, you deserve to lose them.

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nature, Trump

Trump Conservationism

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Clarissa

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August 4, 2026

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I checked, and yes, it’s true. I had no idea.

None of this gets any coverage and instead we hear endless reporting on what Trump said and what joke he made.

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academia, liberals, plagiarism, United Kingdom, wokeism

The Jason Arday Drama

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August 4, 2026

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Ohio State University says it has no record of Cambridge’s embattled sociology professor Jason Arday being a ‘Visiting Professor’ there, despite the claim appearing on his Cambridge University profile.

It’s very funny that the poor bugger had to fake being a Visiting Professor, which, in case people don’t know, is not prestigious at all at Ohio State.

If you are not following the story of Jason Arday, you should. The guy is a pathological liar who DEI-ed his way into a professorship at Cambridge. He invented all sorts of really bizarre achievements for himself, such as, for example, running a 12-day marathon on a broken leg or something like that. With one or two exceptions, the faculty at Cambridge are still slobbering over the guy and defending this liar and plagiarist.

By the way, has everybody noticed that I now add categories to every post? Are they useful? This is aimed at making it easier to search posts with similar topics.

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Iran, war

A Weak Army

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Clarissa

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August 4, 2026

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23

How do the people who insist that the U.S. army is not in terrible shape explain the war in Iran? It’s been dragging out for months. There have been zero successes. If the army is good, why are the results so bad?

The only attempt to handle this contradiction that I’ve encountered so far is to say that the army is good, but its leadership is bad. This is ridiculous because army and its leadership are inseparable. What’s good about it if it’s not achieving any results?

Let’s leave aside for the moment the issue of whether the war was necessary. I don’t believe it was, but that’s not the point. Is this the army anybody wants defending them in case of an attack? With all of the money in the world, with all of the best science and technology, why is it so exceptionally unsuccessful against a smaller, weaker, more primitive regime?

The war was unnecessary. It was a big unforced mistake of the Trump administration, but since it already happened, can’t we try to learn something from what we’re seeing?

I have no idea how it is possible to sit on a conflict with Iran for half a century and fail to prepare for it to this degree. I also have no idea how it is possible to observe Iran actually wage war for the past four and a half years, as it has done in Ukraine, and not learn anything from the kind of weapons it very obviously and insistently uses. What kind of a “good” army fails to notice the rise of a completely new type of warfare spearheaded by the very country you’re attacking? A good army is prepared for the existing warfare. You can’t be a good army when you come out with muskets against machine guns. This is exactly what the US Army is doing in the war with Iran.

None of this would change if the war were completely justified. Let’s say, God forbid, that we need to fight a defensive war. How would we suddenly gain competence in drone warfare? Not that this army won anything before drone warfare was invented.

The US Army is like the US secondary education. Gigantic amounts of money are thrown stupidly at the issue, with predictably poor results. Maybe this is the unplanned purpose of the war with Iran. It’s a low-stakes conflict that finally makes us realize that urgent reform to the armed forces is needed.