Nobody asked this but I still want to ponder if going conservative was worth it.
I’m still in academia, and it’s very lonely. Whenever I’m in a room with people, they are together and I’m separate. They don’t know it, for the most part, but I do. I miss talking to colleagues. I miss having friends at work. I miss going to lunch or for coffee. But I can’t because we are not equal. They can say anything they want and I can’t. We have a “bias response team” that considers my beliefs bias but the opposing ones virtue.
On the positive side, I had the best time of anybody I know during COVID. I was unafraid and free. I can explore my curiosities without having to bring them into alliance with any sort of a party line.
Most importantly, I’m not confused like everybody else I know in academia. Like the professor of mathematics who is publicly yelled at and branded as a racist because most of the students who fail Calc I are black. Like the professor of Gender Studies whose organization removed the word “woman” from every communication. Like a friend from Romania who was booed by the students in his own classroom when he started answering a question about his experiences behind the Iron Curtain. Like a gay colleague who after a few drinks at a bar said, “I’m gay, I like dick” and is now shunned as a transphobe. Like a Jewish friend whose students organized a mass walk-out during her class on the Holocaust. These people are all so left-wing, it’s almost comical. And they don’t understand what they did wrong. My exclusion is voluntary and a result of a consciously made set of decisions. I don’t feel lost and betrayed. I left the group first and wasn’t kicked out against my will. And that’s a net positive.
Clarissa's Blog 
I’m hoping the pendulum will swing back the other way. We’re definitely seeing a lot of extremism out of academia, and that is being noted very headily nowadays, definitely a lot more than before when a lot of this would go under the radar and nobody would mention it.
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“they don’t understand what they did wrong”
Again I’m reminded of an article I read years ago about a woman who had been a member of the communist party in the 1940s-50s written by one of her children.
When the party detained her she didn’t question it… She had no idea what she had done wrong but it must have been something really bad. After all, it was the party! They know best!
Years later she and her friends would meet and fondly reminisce and laugh about the various tortures they had endured using funny names they came up with. The one I remember was being stripped and doused with ice cold water outside in the winter (they called that ‘Zakopane’ after the most famous winter resort in the country).
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@cliff arroyo “She had no idea what she had done wrong but it must have been something really bad. After all, it was the party! They know best!”
Those are the saddest cases, frequently cited when reading about Communist crimes. It means that the Party didn’t even have to brainwash these people. The same mentality was painfully evident during the Covid lockdowns. Very depressing when you think about humanity.
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Before his execution, Nicolai Bukharin wrote letters to Stalin, saying, “I understand that my death is necessary to the cause of the revolution. I’ll gladly die if the decision was made that it’s the best thing to do.” So yeah. It must be so enjoyable to farm out your entire sense of judgment to “the cause.”
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Your campus sounds off-the-wall nutty. There is a certain level of nonsense at my university, but it pales in comparison to most of your stories.
Our administrators are very worked up about failure rates in basic math and science courses, but they haven’t accused anyone of being racist. They’ve been funding extra tutoring opportunities and a STEM pedagogy initiative that is supposed to help the professors improve the courses. I know some people who’ve been involved in that and they say they’ve gotten some good ideas. Though some of what they are doing is so painfully obvious, that it is hard to believe people had to have it suggested to them. I was at an event recently and had to nod politely at a STEM professor who makes twice what I do telling me about the amazing improvement they had seen from doing a one day training workshop for their TAs at the start of the semester and assigning an experienced TA to help the new TAs with their teaching. I can only imagine how poorly taught the courses are if that counts as major pedagogical innovation.
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The funny thing is that we did introduce a huge tutoring scheme in high-fail courses. And fail rates grew after that. Now everybody is completely confused. A sincere Middle Eastern professor said, “Bit isn’t it obvious that if you accept everybody with no entrance barriers, them fail rates would be high?” People reacted like he did something exceptionally atrocious. It’s kind of really funny when you look at it.
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A new idea that I think is coalescing is too many people are going to college when they really have not place being there.
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Absolutely. College should be selective. But we can’t say that aloud because any selectivity will have a disparate impact. And we are right back where we started.
“You cannot possibly say that there are people who are incapable of succeeding in college!” bellowed our university Chancellor recently. “This is eugenics! This is Jim Crow! This is unscientific, medieval lunacy!”
I mean.
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I don’t think that’s a new idea, but it’s an idea that has been out of fashion for a while. Another problem is the devaluing of programs outside of the STEM fields. Every brain is not equally suited to every field of study and lots of the people who flunk out of those intro-STEM courses would be doing better in other areas.
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And some people cannot do college-level studies at all because they don’t have the intellectual capacity.
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” I can only imagine how poorly taught the courses are”
So? The idea seems to be that if the class is taught well then anyone can learn it… but the dirty little secret of all education is… teachers cannot learn on behalf of students.
No matter how well taught the course is some people won’t be able to pass either to raw brainpower issues or personal interest issues.
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That’s exactly the problem. We weren’t allowed to say in the USSR that some people will never pass calculus because it was considered a bourgeois calumny against the working classes. And in the US we once again can’t say it.
It angers me that the US has adopted this unscientific, stupid approach. Nobody denies that I’ll never play professional basketball, no matter how great a coach tries to teach me. Why is it supposed to be very different with chemistry or math?
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Yep, no pedagogical intervention is going to save most of the ones who are going to fail. But pedagogy projects like that are still worthwhile because they can get the better students further and with less frustration. The biggest beneficiaries of good/improved teaching are the students in the middle. The top students will figure it out and thrive no matter what, and the bottom are mostly hopeless cases.
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Going conservative is an important competitive advantage in a field full of ultra liberal marxist woke DEI-ers. It makes you stand out, opens you up to new sources of funding that don’t depend on Wire Mommy Government and provides a ready exit from academia. In a field of work where most people never get tenure and have multiple gigs to look middle class that’s no small thing.
If you are at all smart, you will be hailed as an intellectual titan instead of a derivative bore. If you are beautiful, they will worship you as the beautiful woman you are instead of claiming you’re being blonde at them.
If your colleagues are still masking up like it’s March 2020s, they’re not meeting up for coffee or lunch, unless they’re having productivity sweats in their Zoom mukbangs, parroting two minute hate politsinformatsya. Imagine not knowing where to look.
Sad.
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I don’t want anything else professionally beyond being a research scholar in my field. I don’t want a wider audience and I have rejected offers to become an American talking head. I do want to be that in Ukraine but not in North America.
Thank you for a serious, insightful comment but this is not my path.
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“Your campus sounds off-the-wall nutty. There is a certain level of nonsense at my university, but it pales in comparison to most of your stories.”
Yeah, I think her campus is reaching Evergreen College levels of nuttiness.
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I know more than other professors because I’m in administration. My colleagues at the department don’t know any of this because I’m shielding them. All I said is that you fail a black student at your own peril. It’s your right but the consequences will be yours, too.
It’s the same as when McDonald’s workers have no idea what the CEOs are talking about at their retreats.
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And the overall effect will be a continuing devaluation of the college degree.
It’s a fact of life that if everyone has something, then that something will necessarily decrease in value. There are already many degrees out there that are completely worthless.
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“continuing devaluation of the college degree.”
One reason for this trend in Europe (more or less forcing most people to continue their ‘education’ after high school) has to do with unemployment statistics. If someone is a student they’re not counted as unemployed.
I remember where I worked we used to select only one in 6 or 7 applicants (and some departments the figure was closer to 30 or above). Now we take almost anyone (partly because of a demographic low and party because there is so much competition for students…
For that to remotely work high schools have to be bleached of content.
In Poland a high school diploma at least means they can read at an age appropriate level and have some basic skills (and have passed a foreign language exam in high school). But still I can’t assign students anywhere close to the amount of work I used to.
In the US, where a high school diploma is no guarantee of basic literacy or numeracy, that’s going to hurt colleges even more….
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Was it worth it?
On this topic I can think of no better guide than Solzhenitsyn’s Live Not by Lies:
https://www.solzhenitsyncenter.org/live-not-by-lies
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“And they don’t understand what they did wrong. My exclusion is voluntary and a result of a consciously made set of decisions.”
Are you really sure you’re an INTJ?
Because this is the level of door slamming that INFJs do.
“I don’t feel lost and betrayed. I left the group first and wasn’t kicked out against my will. And that’s a net positive.”
Clarissa’s new sign: “YOU WERE ALL SHOWN THE DOOR, YOU GO NOW”
🙂
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I don’t know. Which one is more rare? I’m that, for sure. 🙂
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So … clearly INTJ. :-)
And clueless about INFJs!
Because if you knew how horrible this would be, you wouldn’t want it even for the rareness.
… oh but let’s do memes, these are fun …
OH YES, STILL WANT IT NOW???
🙂
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That’s totally me. Overly sensitive with turbulent emotions. It’s very spot on.
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