The most open-minded students I see are the freshmen. By open-minded I mean interested in anything but the limited number of the standard woke slogans.

As they progress through the college career, students tend to lose interest in anything but the discussion of how the US did something bad. I could offer a Senior seminar titled “The US Is Evil” and get gigantic enrollments and fantastic reviews.

There’s been a marked increase in wokeness among students over the past decade. It’s popular because it’s so easy. You can ace any course in the Humanities if you memorize a bunch of punchy slogans that make you feel like everything that’s complicated is suddenly easy and clear.

I’m so proud of myself. Last August I anticipated that an issue might arise in the schedule for Fall 2021. I set things up so that if the issue did crop up, I’d have an easy, elegant way to solve it.

This week I found out that the issue I had anticipated did, indeed, arise. And I now had everything set up to solve it.

The Dean’s Office is very impressed. There are several more things like these where I’m playing the long game. I’m calculating things so far in advance that I have several projects going on that will benefit the department five years from now. I also have a very long-term strategy aimed at making sure that the administration of the university system as a whole does what I need it to do in a very important issue that might crop up eventually. I can’t reveal the details because it will only work if my antagonists in this struggle are caught unawares.

N says he’ll buy me The Art of War by Sun Tzu and Machiavelli’s The Prince but I’m not sure they have much to teach me.

Professors who talk the most about “critical thinking” are the ones who are the most eager to turn students into brainwashed drones. It’s gotten so, I cringe whenever I hear this expression. “We teach critical thinking” has come to mean “we know THE TRUTH and make sure all students parrot our dogma.”