I know everybody hates long quotes but this one is just too good:

It is true that last year’s poll suggested that nationally a disappointingly low majority of 59% of Canadians accept the notion of common descent. However, only 22% accept young earth creationism. In Ontario, the data are especially disheartening, with only 51% of respondents accepting evolution (but still only half as many choosing creationism). In Quebec, 71% accept evolution and only 9% align with creationist ideas. . .

The US poll referred to above (by CBS) indicates that 53% of respondents believe that life was created in its current form within the past 10,000 years by God, 23% accept a form of evolution guided by God, and 17% believe in a strictly natural evolutionary account.

If you have never visited Quebec, then I have no idea what you are waiting for.

I just encountered yet another stupid and nearly unreadable article from an academia-hater. I won’t analyze it in detail because it is as boring and poorly researched as a gazillion other anti-education pieces that appear in print and online every two minutes. I just want to offer the following quote as an example of the author’s stupidity:

Just about everyone in academia believes that they were the smartest kid in their class, the one with the good grades and the awesome test scores. They believe, by definition, that they are where they are because they deserve it. They’re the best.

If this freakazoid actually had an education, he’d know that yapping stupidly about what “everyone” does or does not believe is completely ridiculous and makes him sound like an idiot that he is. It would be phenomenal to work in an environment where everybody had this healthy self-esteem. Sadly, though, I have never encountered this crowd of folks with robust psychological health in academia. I’ve taught in different countries, different states in the US, different types of university, I have spoken at regional, national and international conferences, I have met people from a variety of colleges around the world. Most of these academics are tortured with endless self-doubt all day long. The rest are lucky enough only to experience it every other day.

What is really sad is that all of these endless and endlessly boring articles keep erasing universities like mine in a dogged fashion of true fanatics. My school charges the lowest tuition by far in the state, provides students with textbooks so that they don’t have to spend money on them, does not exploit adjuncts, does not pay excessive salaries to administrators. Yet the people who claim to be extremely preoccupied with the future of academia never mention us as a model that is worthy of emulation. If they really gave a damn about improving the existing model of higher ed, wouldn’t it make sense to mention places where things are done in a better way?

We never hear about anything positive happening in academia, though. The completely imaginary student who has a hundred thousand dollars worth of debt after getting a BA is discussed ad nauseam (including in the linked article, of course). And everybody is so eager to hear that higher ed sucks that they never question this obvious lie and never notice all of those students who are the first ones in their family to get a college degree thanks to schools like mine. Their journey of discovering the world is less valuable to the screechers than their fantasy of horrible, mean profs and miserable, stupid students.

P.S. I don’t know if you are following Ian Welsh but he and Thomas Frank are the most prominent peddlers of male hysteria these days. Have you noticed how fashionable it is becoming these days to be a male hysteric? I’m attributing this to misguided attempts to imitate sensitivity. Chest-thumping machismo is not in demand, so more and more men try to look sensitive. Sometimes their efforts look like an embarrassing show of unhinged shrieking we can see in the linked article.