"they were about as committed to a robust exchange of ideas as North Korean secret policemen; like the spooks of Pyongyang, these aging professors were dedicated solely to protecting their own Hermit Kingdom from outsiders and preserving their rigid and uninterrupted way of life"
https://twitter.com/CyberneticsFTW/status/1405037284802523137
"Academic journals were set up to ensure that the anointed speak only to the anointed. Tenure committees sprang up to hire more like-minded folks—and squelch dissenters. Real diversity—not of the color of one’s skin but of the content of one’s character—was snuffed out"
"By the time I entered college in the late 1990s, what passed for excellence, at least in the humanities, was learning to recite the secret language these fearful men and women had invented to keep the outside world at bay."
"A friend who went through the same system and gleaned the same insights amused both of us by writing a paper stating that Hollywood’s practice of only using living actors to portray murder victims revealed a deep-set bias against real dead people...
...whose deadness was being culturally appropriated by the living. My friend had meant the paper as a joke; it got him a teaching assistant’s job."
"Promoted largely for their ability to impress their narrow circles of peers, most American professors have little ability to speak about meaningful things to any large numbers of people. In fact, they had come to see even teaching students within the university as a liability"
"when you’re praised for pointing out the vicissitudes of victimhood, why not play the victim, and whine endlessly about your pain, instead of doing your homework and going to class?"
"There’s hardly a point in faulting these kids for trampling on academic freedom or free speech; these were never their values, nor the values of their teachers. By stomping their feet, these useful young idiots are telling their elders something true and valuable:Your time’s up"
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