Spectator Life

Welcome, freshpersons and already indebted students, to the fall semester at COVID College. The college experience is an essential part of American life. For it is here that our young adults learn the American values of democratic socialism, gender exploration, racial guilt and defaulting on the first of, we hope, many unpayable debts.As our adjunct instructors will fail to teach you, before the slaveholder’s charter had ‘Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’, there was white supremacist philosopher John Locke’s ‘Life, liberty and property’. Owning a property is so American that even the homeless of Los Angeles aspire to have their own tents. So it’s right that your college education is your first mortgage.

I did not buy into the American Toilet Paper Hoarding Epidemic of 2020, as posterity will dub our present unfortunate episode decades hence. In an effort to help my wife avoid murder charges when the courts resume — though she could plea down to third degree manslaughter with minimal jail time — I decided to take the lead on handling the urchins’ schooling as America hunkers down. By mid-morning — around the time I heard the toddler say, ‘don’t call me a buttcheek, you dummy’ — I began weighing the odds on whether my wife had the guts to pull the trigger.Our Catholic school in Alexandria, Virginia, was one of the last to call it quits in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak, a testament to our stalwart faith.

Debate over school choice has got ugly. A public school district administrator in Kentucky recently suggested he’d delay students’ graduations if the state legislature passes school choice legislation that would give tax credits to private donors who support voucher programs for kids to attend schools of their choice. The proposed program is similar to one in Florida, and the federal government has reportedly pledged up to $70 million in support to the Bluegrass State if it passes the bill.At the heart of the outraged responses to such programs is the assumption that supporting public school students who want to attend private schools will undermine public education and hurt the kids left behind by transferring funds into private hands.

These days, 'school choice' has become such a polarizing term that many bristle at the mere mention of it. Up to this point, discussions have centered on public charters vs. traditional public schools, yet talk about religious schools has been largely left to the periphery. But that will soon change, once we hear the outcome of a potentially landmark education case that’s currently before the Supreme Court. And if tradition holds, bitter political arguments over the outcome are certain to overlook the most important stakeholders — the children and their parents.The case, Espinoza v.

‘You’re about to learn why people generally avoid fucking with me.’ Thus spake Nietzsche scholar and Macquarie University philosophy professor Mark Alfano in a tweet directed at me.I’ll start from the beginning. In late December I published a paper in the academic journal Philosophical Psychology defending the study of race differences in intelligence. This topic arouses strong emotions. But I am a philosopher, and the job of philosophers is to confront issues dispassionately, guided only by reason and evidence. This activity may lead us to question orthodoxies and challenge taboos, but that is what philosophy is all about. Or at least it’s supposed to be.

What does flushing the toilet have to do with reducing political extremism? This isn’t a weird joke. There’s a bizarre connection here, studied by behavioral researchers. It relates understanding our ignorance to moderating extreme views.By way of entry, you have probably heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect, the phenomenon of incompetence that’s too incompetent to recognize itself. When people have very little exposure to a subject, their confidence in their own opinions about it becomes dramatically inflated. If, for example, a plane crashes in controversial circumstances, many people on Twitter magically become aeronautical engineers and air-traffic control 'experts' in about five minutes.

Since 2012 I have publicly identified as Wrongskin. To those ignorant of the term, this means I was born white but I identify as black. I'd kept my race dysphoria a secret for many years but it had become increasingly difficult to hide. Being the transcendental trailblazer I am, I decided to come out and challenge the bigotry of cisrace people. Predictably enough at the time, it was regarded as nonsensical and I was strongly ridiculed. Today however, transracial individuals are finally being ‘seen'.According to the UK’s Telegraph, the Universities and Colleges Union (a British trade union in further and higher education) have stated that regardless of skin tone, people should be able to identify as black.

Student journalists at Northwestern University apologized for doing journalism on Sunday.In response to complaints by student activists over their coverage of Jeff Sessions’s recent visit to campus, the staff of the Daily Northwestern apologized for causing ‘harm’ to their fellow students in a recent editorial. Among their supposed transgressions, the reporters posted pictures of protesters to social media, which was ‘retraumatizing and invasive’, and committed an ‘invasion of privacy’ by contacting students for interviews.Why apologize for standard journalistic procedures? The editors offered this reasoning: ‘We feel that covering traumatic events requires a different response than many other stories.

I wrote last week that Catholic nationalist ‘groypers’ were beating the likes of Charlie Kirk and Ben Shapiro at their own debate nerd game. Shapiro tried to return fire on Thursday. His speech at Stanford University was aimed directly at the ‘alt-right.’ I agreed with much of what he said, about the immorality of equating skin color with moral worth and of jokes about the nature of the Holocaust. Shapiro made a good point in saying that ‘irony’ can be a weaselly rhetorical maneuver inasmuch as it allows people to express contentious opinions with the escape clause of insincerity. But Shapiro's speech had serious weaknesses in style and content. Firstly, he refused to name anyone that he was referring to.

Stacked up next to lessons on queering Shakespeare, feminist interpretive dance, and non-binary archery, studying journalism is only mildly less ridiculous than many courses offered by the academy today. Yet each time my alma mater’s increasingly woke newsletter arrives in the mail I’m stunned these programs still exist. I think, these poor students are being led so far astray, as I was, by studying journalism. Today, more than ever, it is harming, not helping, their future career. I came out of school in 2005, before iPhones, before Big Social Media, before journalism was completely dead, when reading the news on your computer was unpleasant and people mostly still bought print.

Campus debates over free speech have raged through the pages of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal in recent years, as columnists turn their sights upon university quads. With all this attention, President Trump signed an executive order in March to limit funding for schools failing to support freedom of expression. To learn more, Cockburn stopped by a debate on Tuesday on the resolution, 'Are college campuses eroding free speech?'.Hosted by the McCain Institute, Robby Soave, associate editor of Reason, and FIRE vice president Samantha Harris argued in the affirmative, while Wesleyan University president Michael Roth and Georgetown’s Free Speech Project director Sanford Ungar argued — somewhat — against the proposal.

Like growing numbers of public high school students across the country, many California kids are receiving classroom instruction in how race, class, gender, sexuality and citizenship status are tools of oppression, power and privilege. They are taught about colonialism, state violence, racism, intergenerational trauma, heteropatriarchy and the common thread that links them: 'whiteness'. Students are then graded on how well they apply these concepts in writing assignments, performances and community organizing projects. At Santa Monica High School, for example, students organize and carry out 'a systematized campaign' for social justice that can take the form of a protest, a leaflet, a workshop, play or research project.

University of Pennsylvania Professor of Law Amy Wax was subjected to a smear campaign following her remarks at the National Conservatism Conference on July 15, 2019. A writer for the website Vox, Zach Beauchamp, characterized Wax’s statements on immigration as 'an outright argument for white supremacy.' The founder of the conference, Yoram Hazony, quickly denied Beauchamp’s allegation. Hazony tweeted, 'In fact she made no such argument.' Beauchamp held his ground and offered what he said was a transcript of part of Wax’s remarks. Others, such as David Marcus, Rod Dreher, Jeremiah Poff, Steve Sailer, Mark Pulliam, and Steven Hayward  pointed out that Beauchamp had completely mischaracterized Wax’s remarks.

As President Trump ponders restrictions on Chinese tech company Huawei, the FBI is warning American universities about espionage by Chinese researchers and academics. The FBI now advises research universities to track and observe Chinese students and faculty for signs of intellectual property theft. In the last year, the federal government has voided or re-evaluated the visas of 30 Chinese academics for this crime. In April, FBI Director Christopher Wray commented on China’s intelligence operation. China, Wray said, has 'pioneered a societal approach to stealing innovation any way it can, from a wide array of businesses, universities, and organizations'.

I agree with Bernie Sanders, at least to a point. It is lamentable how students are expected to pay back an average of almost $40,000 in debt after they graduate from college. Frankly, it might be a good idea to cancel it, and if the money can be raised from Wall Street, well, so much the better. Yes, I know the conservative arguments against this move. Does it not penalize people who have paid off their debts? It makes no difference to them. Should conservatives oppose the cutting of regressive taxes because people have already been paying them? A more challenging argument was made in a blunt form by Matt Walsh: 'I guess I'm meant to cry tears of sympathy for all of these college grads with student loan debt. Somehow I just can't muster a single tear.

Higher education is dominated by liberal professors and progressive impulses. Conservative professors like me are often apprehensive about teaching in the dominant method, lecture based classes. It’s in the humble seminar, with students and professor debating around a table, that viewpoint diversity can thrive, and discussions of conservative thought survive.Colleagues tell me that they are regularly afraid of the scenario when their class spirals out of control and blows up. In the safe-space, trigger warning, micro-aggression climate of the campus, a professor’s intentions and statements are easily mischaracterized.