51 Comments
Apr 17, 2022Liked by John Carter

Just here from El Gato (commented on your "federalism" comment) - So much substack/so little time! - most days I am bookmarking 2 or 3 additional substack sites. I am printing this out for careful reading. I wanted to spend my life in "the academy" but got booted out in the first job crash of the 1980s. Now? - I am so happy not to have found a place there; imagine reaching retirement age and looking around and seeing the sort of place you were leaving; the place you had dedicated your professional life to ... it must be SO depressing!

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Apr 18, 2022Liked by John Carter

I read it. Much more depressing than I expected.

I had formed an image of the current academy; sort of an updated “two cultures” configuration (are you old enough to remember that famous debate circa 1950s?) - in which one culture was the “departments” (especially the science tech depts) – the academic side of the house - sort of keeping the other culture (the administration – with its fast expanding DIE bureaucracy) at arm’s length. That would be the “ticking the box” approach you raise.

But no? - Not at all? - No arm’s length – but full and genuine acceptance by the academics? By which, for example, a person who has spent much of his life reading; whose livelihood depends on it – can only scoff at the tragedy of blindness with “ablelist” one liners?!

Depressing.

You say very little about COVID. And the way, that after a couple decades of preparation, the academy embraced in a death grip like way that operation – every.single.one.of.them! … Sort of a dream come true way of enhancing the totalitarian grip. The masks in particular now make more sense to me: a fully visible (rather than merely verbal / cognitive) way of signaling compliance and submission.

Did you hear of the North Korean refugee?– graduated from Harvard last spring (as I recall) and then remarked (probably on social media) – re: Harvard: “North Korea wasn’t as crazy as this”.

Ha! I thought, amusing hyperbole. But no. She meant it quite literally.

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Apr 20, 2023Liked by John Carter

Btw, man, I'm really, really, enjoying your stuff. I can't believe I didn't know about this blog. Thanks so much. I follow quite a few subs, but this is such a breath of fresh air, it's great.

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May 14, 2022Liked by John Carter

I just can't wait till our defense industries are 100% staffed by gender fluid pan-sexual POC womyn. That should make winning the next war in Ukraine a piece of cake.

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Jan 1Liked by John Carter

Sad as it may be to see the state of higher education, at least your biting invective was cathartic to read.

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Dec 30, 2023Liked by John Carter

Fried gold man, superb and spot-on.

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Dec 30, 2023Liked by John Carter

I resigned my university tenure (medical) in 2014 after beginning gradually pulling out over 6 years. This was before the hockey stick DIE process of the last several years, obviously. I left because the university had transitioned from a faculty-centric system (given that the faculty provided the medical care, the research and the teaching) , to a top down command-control structure where the university president dictated her ignorance down to the faculty. To be clear, this began before Obama, but accelerated under the Obama culture. I saw it happening, recognized it as the fascism that it proved to be, ad escaped what had been a distinguished career. Fascism is what progressivism is all about.

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Apr 11, 2023Liked by John Carter

So no sign of my instant favourite IED yet; the best take their time to arrive 😏

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Jan 17, 2023Liked by John Carter

Bit late, coming here from your latest post in the series.

"...The thought-policing language games so beloved of the cultural Marxists have conquered the daily discourse of scientists just as thoroughly as they have the humanities departments. You see this everywhere in the sciences, now."

Indeed. In The Glass Bead Game -- a work that I think says much about our situation, and, to readers and potential readers, a note that it is not the presentation of some academic "utopia" but a critique of such, noting its dangers and responsibilities -- someone somewhere says that the post-WWIII society realized they needed academic freedom -- including freedom from ideological demands -- not as an expense luxury for the humanities, but because if Truth is not held as an ideal, the rot will spread, and the bridges won't stand up either.

You find this sort of thing at a lot of "dissident but not entirely alt" Right sites, like Unz.com; the humanities are inherently a bunch of Marxist claptrap, best dealt with by finally getting around to eliminating them altogether; bright White kids should be directed to the "hard" sciences rather than wasting their time elsewhere, etc. (For some reason, they simultaneously disparage psychology but base most of their ideas on IQ, HBD, etc.). Needless to say, Our Enemies had and have other ideas about how useful the humanities are; that's how we got here. (Another curious fact: despite their legendary high IQs, Our Enemies themselves find it useful to devote lots of time to the humanities).

As per usual, the Left offers bullshit, the Right responds by surrendering.

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I've lightly considered the idea of returning to academia to pursue new studies and actually research something rather than play-researching. It's been odd seeing the hard science area I'm looking into have fewer GRE (and GRE subject) requirements for DIE reasons, even though I hate the GRE and would also tick one of their DIE boxes. My opinions on academia have never been favorable, but I concluded it was a necessary evil if I ever wanted to start a research career. I guess I'm right about the "evil" part.

At least in the mean time, I've decided to read through textbooks and learn the course material on my own. If the academy ever become tolerable enough to go to grad school, maybe I'll at least have knowledge of the material before formally taking courses.

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Feb 17Liked by John Carter

This reminds me of the Academy that Gulliver finds on his travels.

https://hekint.org/2017/02/01/gullivers-visit-to-the-academy-of-lagado/

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Feb 16Liked by John Carter

I think you give the academy too much credit. I doubt if any of them know Latin to see the double entendre of DEI. It reminds me of the advertising agency employed by the European Union to promote the unity of their said entity and used a painting by Breughel of The Tower of Babel to illustrate unity. You really can’t make any of this up can you.

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Jan 2Liked by John Carter

I particularly liked this line. "Academic discourse, characterized by impenetrable jargon at the best of times, has become a submarine mine field of accepted nomenclatures continuously evolving into deeply offensive expressions of various isms and phobias under the savage selective pressure of the rabid status games played by academics desperately scrambling after the small and shrinking number of jobs. Self-censorship, as everyone knows, has become pervasive - in an environment where yesterday's mandatory vocabulary is today's cancellable hate speech, the only safe expression is to say nothing."

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My daughter had to live thru this and somehow emerged with her brain, thoughts and faith intact at the University of Michigan. She challenged the crazy thoughts they tried to indoctrinate her with, to no avail, like the infamous "Genderbread man" and other such nonsense. Of course, there was the OB who told her pre-med health club that they 'had' to do abortions because this was 'health care'. Nope, that's an elective procedure NEVER required for the life of the mother. And no, they have a religious exception always. She eventually changed her major.

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Jun 14, 2023Liked by John Carter

> When everything is potentially offensive, all communication must be as indirect as possible, and the result is that clear communication using direct and precise language becomes impossible. The result is an increasingly noisy system, from which it becomes ever more difficult to extract useful information. Inevitably, just as clear speech aids clear thought, the reverse is also true, and the minds imprisoned in this matrix become themselves noisy and deranged. It is no accident that our intellectuals, or at any rate our professoriate, have gone collectively mad.

Also it's literally ableist with respect to Aspies (and ND in general). Geoffrey Miller wrote "The Neurodiversity Case for Free Speech" https://static1.squarespace.com/static/58e2a71bf7e0ab3ba886cea3/t/5d15648877784e0001d77bd1/1561683080779/2017+neurodiversity+free+speech.pdf

> Newton wouldn’t last long as a ‘public intellectual’ in modern American culture. Sooner or later, he would say ‘offensive’ things that get reported to Harvard and that get picked up by mainstream media as moral-outrage clickbait. His eccentric, ornery awkwardness would lead to swift expulsion from academia, social media, and publishing. Result? On the upside, he’d drive some traffic through Huffpost, Buzzfeed, and Jezebel, and people would have a fresh controversy to virtue-signal about on Facebook. On the downside, we wouldn’t have Newton’s Laws of Motion.

> In this article, I’ll explore the science of neurodiversity, and how campus speech codes and restrictive speech norms impose impossible expectations on the social sensitivity, cultural awareness, verbal precision, and self-control of many neurodivergent people

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Mar 10, 2023Liked by John Carter

When I got out DEI hadn't really made the insane inroads into the hard sciences yet, but they were nonetheless still becoming quite the joke. My department went through and pruned a bunch of non-productive faculty who were cashing 6 figure checks and doing *literally* nothing for years. There were maybe 3 truly productive faculty of those who were left, my PI was NOT one of them

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