Brilliant! The cancer metaphor is right on the money. I hope this piece will help to raise awareness of a deadly nature of woke cancer. It is not a "pendulum", it is not going to "swing back", unless we forcefully root it out.
I worked in industrial research for 20+ years and spent the last decade at a non-western university before re-patriating to the insane 'west' and getting out of academia. I tried my best over that time to do some half-decent theoretical physics. Fortunately, I managed to avoid almost of all of this nonsense.
You inspired me to write my own snarky and decidedly non-professional piece
Thanks! I'm honored. I am copying my comment to you there:
A convocation is a gathering we hold in the beginning of the academic year. Luckily, the Provost's speech is only a small part of it. There is a guest speaker and all the tenured and promoted professors are honored. The Chancellor also speaks. For some reason I don't completely dislike our Chancellor, but it could be his wonderful Argentinian accent that makes me biased.
In previous years there was also food but alas, no more.
When my university went full woke in 2020-2021, the guest speakers wokefied accordingly.
This year's speaker, by the way, is Massachusetts' new Secretary of Education. Before that he was the Superintendent of the Lynn, Massachusetts public school district, which boasts a whooping 14% math proficiency and 25% reading/language/art proficiency (state averages: 37% and 49%, resp.).
To be fair, it wasn't entirely his doing - he inherited a highly failing district with a majority Latino students, many of whom are not native English speakers, but he managed to bring it down even further.
But hey, he believes in educational equity. Maybe he will manage to bring everyone to Lynn's levels of proficiency.
Count me among those who are skeptical of any effort to salvage the universities. Euthanasia is the most prudent course of action. Inject a terminal dose of funding into the DEI programs, allow them to complete their work by dissolving the rest of academic body, and start fresh.
The reason I believe this is that at this point the cancer has metastasized well beyond grievance studies departments and admin. STEM faculties are also thoroughly penetrated. The older faculty may be somewhat skeptical, even apprehensive, but their default politics are liberal and they are easily cowed by the radicals. Younger faculty are almost without exception true and enthusiastic believers in the cult. Fire the admin, dissolve the Departments of Marxism, and the cancer will simply spread from the infected members of the STEM departments - the ones who have been forcing codes of conduct on conferences and collaborations, staffing discipline-specific diversity boards, pushing for diversity statements, and watering down curricula to enable retention of diversity admits. Departments everywhere have junior faculty who are only secondarily scientists, and are generally quite mediocre scientists, who use their positions to help their discipline DIE.
I don't have a good answer for how science survives outside the universities, but it will have to. As they DIE, they will lose prestige, therefore enrollment, therefore funding; indeed this is already happening. The quality of undergraduate and graduate students will plummet; indeed it already has. Doing any science at all inside the institutions will become increasingly difficult. Scientists are going to have to find ways of conducting their research in alternative settings, obtaining funding from non-traditional sources, and probably making a lot less money at first. However, they will have a lot more freedom to choose what they research.
Excellent analogy, indeed! We should challenge our fellow senior faculty who embraced DEI to practice what they preach: transfer all their merit-based achievements (tenure status, office space, promotional raises, and cite-score metrics) to junior faculty that possess all the current traits that make them “under-represented”. Those junior faculty who are “over-represented” can join the custodial staff, where positions will be vacated by those who will be appointed department chairs and deans (after all, their socioeconomic status was the sole reason they did not get a PhD in astrophysics).
Exactly! If you listen to the video segment in the middle, that features an excerpt from our Provost's 2021 convocation speech (and I very much recommend that you do if you haven't so far) - you'll hear how much he denounces whiteness. You can hear the disgust in his voice.
Alas, he is a white man. I say - practice what you preach, Provost!
Superbly stated. This should be spread far and wide. It is thorough and works it’s metaphor with fluidity. One of the best pieces I’ve read on the Woke cancer.
Wow. I read this with the exact same thoughts and feelings I would have had if I were reading my own cancer diagnosis. As Anna said below, the pendulum will not swing back by itself. Let's push back even harder and become cancer free.
Well written! As a cancer survivor (stage 3 Hodgkins Lymphoma), I not only take zero offense from this article, I see how the analogy is excellent. Neo-Marxian praxis manifests exactly this way.
One treatment that might be added (though I don't have a fitting analogy to offer) is to filter out cluster b personality disorders. Since there are 14x more antagonistic narcissists among woke activists than the general population, a performance evaluation based on a series of challenges that require lower scores on the narcissistic and sociopathic inventories to consistently generate desirable results. (See https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12144-023-04463-x )
Thank you and I hope you are doing well. It certainly wasn't meant to offend or disrespect cancer patients and survivors.
As for the personality disorders: That would be an excellent idea - but in a normal department. The woke departments celebrate and take pride in these kinds of disorders.
Nov 19, 2023Liked by Dorian Abbot, Frank and Louie
The response that needs to be demanded, as loudly as possible (if there’s one thing the woke cultists understand, it’s loud), is for their absurdly stupid identity-based proportional representation principle to be applied to university faculty, just like they think it should be applied to absolutely everything else. Specifically, the political affiliation of the faculty should mirror that of the populace paying their salaries. In Massachusetts, this would mean 44% of faculty would have to be non-Democrats.
I would greatly look forward to the stammering contortions of the wokerati as they try to justify why, in this one and only instance, their toxic principle does not apply.
Absolutely do not worry about offending or disrespecting when you write a piece like this! I agree, it wouldn't work on infected departments. So, implement where you can to bolster defensive immunity. A different set of strategies is needed for the infected ones.
Infected departments' woke staff will act out cluster b pathologies, celebrating them as you say. Their weaknesses are being simultaneously scheming and impulsive, highly compartmentalized thinking, and rigid paramoral and pseudoscientific beliefs. All of their accusations are psychological projections in some way because they have impaired reality testing.
So, the more you can get them to scheme against a mental object that they believe exists in the world, by using their ideological jargon to frame it in an oppression narrative, the more they will exhaust their minds, bodies, and resources fighting with it. They are most likely to change their minds in states of exhaustion.
These people usually don't change their minds and there's no talking to them, but something like the recent Kendi scandal can sway those who believe in this crap at some level but have some common sense left in them - and also the silent majority that was afraid to speak up.
It could have all been nice and good had the cancer stopped at stage 0 - that is, contained in those crazy departments. Why do I care if some loonies publish about queer theory as long as it doesn't eventually become policy that causes irreversible damage to children? But it did. Same for obsession over race to the detriment of members of all races.
I just came across this article which might be pertinent. You're definitely expressing things that I can relate to, and I hope this helps.
"There’s no need to defend yourself. Absolute narcissists will try to ensnare you in your own moral doubts by pretending they care about moral standards they care nothing about. They operate on defaulty logic. If they can find any fault in you, that proves that they are faultless by default. They blare their morality police siren so loud they don’t have to hear their own hypocrisy. Don’t let yourself be ensnared. Be proud of your human fallibility and shame them for pretending to be superhumanly infallible."
A corollary: If they blame you for causing "harm" and demand an apology - never apologize! It's a power play. If you do - you show weakness and they feed on weakness. They don't really want an apology because they know you didn't do anything wrong. They just want to see if you buckle in order for them to humiliate you further.
Sep 28, 2023·edited Sep 28, 2023Liked by Frank and Louie
I was exposed to this conspiratorial rot way back as a Lit major in the 80s—I applied and paid to study Literature but was told instead that all our ideas and beliefs (especially about art and culture) were really just invisible oppressive impositions of unseen hegemonic Power structures!—and the experience shocked and appalled me so deeply that ever since I've been tracking this unkillable monster called "Critical Studies" as it marched from victory to victory and eventually ate the brain of the entire Western world.
Anyone who's been paying attention for maybe 30 years now has known that the Critical Studies Depts are pseudoscholarship that may pose many questions but all come with the same single prepared answer: Western Civ and its Christian white male leaders are guilty of inflicting infinite oppressive harms on the marginalized (and their self-esteem) and thus they deserve the death penalty, which will be delivered through death by 1000 guilt trips. (In this cosmogony, European males and the world they created are the Great Satan that pulls every string.)
A few brave souls tried to sound the alarm, Allan Bloom, Robert Hughes, Camille Paglia, and especially Sokal and his hoax, but they were all ignored by conservatives who didn't care about any issue that couldn't be readily converted into cash and most esp by the liberal class, who have been trained to never oppose an enemy to the Left and who are congenitally incapable of disputing any statement if it comes wrapped in the tears of a minority group.
I guess my point is that the time to expose and defeat this newest iteration of the Left's Permanent Revolution came and went at least a generation ago. The thinking classes of the entire Anglosphere have been as conquered and brainwashed as a Christian convert in 4th-century Rome or the newest member of Jim Jones' Peoples Temple.
Any interesting or intelligent work in any sector of society, from art and thought to science, will have to take place far away from American academia and the liberal gentry class that owns and operates it, certainly for the rest of this decade at minimum.
Brilliant! The cancer metaphor is right on the money. I hope this piece will help to raise awareness of a deadly nature of woke cancer. It is not a "pendulum", it is not going to "swing back", unless we forcefully root it out.
Fantastic article.
I worked in industrial research for 20+ years and spent the last decade at a non-western university before re-patriating to the insane 'west' and getting out of academia. I tried my best over that time to do some half-decent theoretical physics. Fortunately, I managed to avoid almost of all of this nonsense.
You inspired me to write my own snarky and decidedly non-professional piece
https://rudolphrigger.substack.com/p/blongleflipping-in-nardle-throbbleswitch
(sorry for the self-promotion).
Thanks! I'm honored. I am copying my comment to you there:
A convocation is a gathering we hold in the beginning of the academic year. Luckily, the Provost's speech is only a small part of it. There is a guest speaker and all the tenured and promoted professors are honored. The Chancellor also speaks. For some reason I don't completely dislike our Chancellor, but it could be his wonderful Argentinian accent that makes me biased.
In previous years there was also food but alas, no more.
When my university went full woke in 2020-2021, the guest speakers wokefied accordingly.
This year's speaker, by the way, is Massachusetts' new Secretary of Education. Before that he was the Superintendent of the Lynn, Massachusetts public school district, which boasts a whooping 14% math proficiency and 25% reading/language/art proficiency (state averages: 37% and 49%, resp.).
To be fair, it wasn't entirely his doing - he inherited a highly failing district with a majority Latino students, many of whom are not native English speakers, but he managed to bring it down even further.
But hey, he believes in educational equity. Maybe he will manage to bring everyone to Lynn's levels of proficiency.
Count me among those who are skeptical of any effort to salvage the universities. Euthanasia is the most prudent course of action. Inject a terminal dose of funding into the DEI programs, allow them to complete their work by dissolving the rest of academic body, and start fresh.
The reason I believe this is that at this point the cancer has metastasized well beyond grievance studies departments and admin. STEM faculties are also thoroughly penetrated. The older faculty may be somewhat skeptical, even apprehensive, but their default politics are liberal and they are easily cowed by the radicals. Younger faculty are almost without exception true and enthusiastic believers in the cult. Fire the admin, dissolve the Departments of Marxism, and the cancer will simply spread from the infected members of the STEM departments - the ones who have been forcing codes of conduct on conferences and collaborations, staffing discipline-specific diversity boards, pushing for diversity statements, and watering down curricula to enable retention of diversity admits. Departments everywhere have junior faculty who are only secondarily scientists, and are generally quite mediocre scientists, who use their positions to help their discipline DIE.
I don't have a good answer for how science survives outside the universities, but it will have to. As they DIE, they will lose prestige, therefore enrollment, therefore funding; indeed this is already happening. The quality of undergraduate and graduate students will plummet; indeed it already has. Doing any science at all inside the institutions will become increasingly difficult. Scientists are going to have to find ways of conducting their research in alternative settings, obtaining funding from non-traditional sources, and probably making a lot less money at first. However, they will have a lot more freedom to choose what they research.
Can't wait for it to reach Hospice Care status.
Excellent analogy, indeed! We should challenge our fellow senior faculty who embraced DEI to practice what they preach: transfer all their merit-based achievements (tenure status, office space, promotional raises, and cite-score metrics) to junior faculty that possess all the current traits that make them “under-represented”. Those junior faculty who are “over-represented” can join the custodial staff, where positions will be vacated by those who will be appointed department chairs and deans (after all, their socioeconomic status was the sole reason they did not get a PhD in astrophysics).
Exactly! If you listen to the video segment in the middle, that features an excerpt from our Provost's 2021 convocation speech (and I very much recommend that you do if you haven't so far) - you'll hear how much he denounces whiteness. You can hear the disgust in his voice.
Alas, he is a white man. I say - practice what you preach, Provost!
Superbly stated. This should be spread far and wide. It is thorough and works it’s metaphor with fluidity. One of the best pieces I’ve read on the Woke cancer.
Thanks! Highly appreciated!
Scary.
Good piece - cheers!
Wow. I read this with the exact same thoughts and feelings I would have had if I were reading my own cancer diagnosis. As Anna said below, the pendulum will not swing back by itself. Let's push back even harder and become cancer free.
Well written! As a cancer survivor (stage 3 Hodgkins Lymphoma), I not only take zero offense from this article, I see how the analogy is excellent. Neo-Marxian praxis manifests exactly this way.
One treatment that might be added (though I don't have a fitting analogy to offer) is to filter out cluster b personality disorders. Since there are 14x more antagonistic narcissists among woke activists than the general population, a performance evaluation based on a series of challenges that require lower scores on the narcissistic and sociopathic inventories to consistently generate desirable results. (See https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12144-023-04463-x )
Thank you and I hope you are doing well. It certainly wasn't meant to offend or disrespect cancer patients and survivors.
As for the personality disorders: That would be an excellent idea - but in a normal department. The woke departments celebrate and take pride in these kinds of disorders.
The response that needs to be demanded, as loudly as possible (if there’s one thing the woke cultists understand, it’s loud), is for their absurdly stupid identity-based proportional representation principle to be applied to university faculty, just like they think it should be applied to absolutely everything else. Specifically, the political affiliation of the faculty should mirror that of the populace paying their salaries. In Massachusetts, this would mean 44% of faculty would have to be non-Democrats.
I would greatly look forward to the stammering contortions of the wokerati as they try to justify why, in this one and only instance, their toxic principle does not apply.
Absolutely do not worry about offending or disrespecting when you write a piece like this! I agree, it wouldn't work on infected departments. So, implement where you can to bolster defensive immunity. A different set of strategies is needed for the infected ones.
Infected departments' woke staff will act out cluster b pathologies, celebrating them as you say. Their weaknesses are being simultaneously scheming and impulsive, highly compartmentalized thinking, and rigid paramoral and pseudoscientific beliefs. All of their accusations are psychological projections in some way because they have impaired reality testing.
So, the more you can get them to scheme against a mental object that they believe exists in the world, by using their ideological jargon to frame it in an oppression narrative, the more they will exhaust their minds, bodies, and resources fighting with it. They are most likely to change their minds in states of exhaustion.
These people usually don't change their minds and there's no talking to them, but something like the recent Kendi scandal can sway those who believe in this crap at some level but have some common sense left in them - and also the silent majority that was afraid to speak up.
It could have all been nice and good had the cancer stopped at stage 0 - that is, contained in those crazy departments. Why do I care if some loonies publish about queer theory as long as it doesn't eventually become policy that causes irreversible damage to children? But it did. Same for obsession over race to the detriment of members of all races.
I just came across this article which might be pertinent. You're definitely expressing things that I can relate to, and I hope this helps.
"There’s no need to defend yourself. Absolute narcissists will try to ensnare you in your own moral doubts by pretending they care about moral standards they care nothing about. They operate on defaulty logic. If they can find any fault in you, that proves that they are faultless by default. They blare their morality police siren so loud they don’t have to hear their own hypocrisy. Don’t let yourself be ensnared. Be proud of your human fallibility and shame them for pretending to be superhumanly infallible."
https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/ambigamy/202002/how-to-humiliate-an-absolute-narcissist
A corollary: If they blame you for causing "harm" and demand an apology - never apologize! It's a power play. If you do - you show weakness and they feed on weakness. They don't really want an apology because they know you didn't do anything wrong. They just want to see if you buckle in order for them to humiliate you further.
More shameless self-promotion:
https://theflickeringbeacon.substack.com/p/the-auto-grovellator
100%
I was exposed to this conspiratorial rot way back as a Lit major in the 80s—I applied and paid to study Literature but was told instead that all our ideas and beliefs (especially about art and culture) were really just invisible oppressive impositions of unseen hegemonic Power structures!—and the experience shocked and appalled me so deeply that ever since I've been tracking this unkillable monster called "Critical Studies" as it marched from victory to victory and eventually ate the brain of the entire Western world.
Anyone who's been paying attention for maybe 30 years now has known that the Critical Studies Depts are pseudoscholarship that may pose many questions but all come with the same single prepared answer: Western Civ and its Christian white male leaders are guilty of inflicting infinite oppressive harms on the marginalized (and their self-esteem) and thus they deserve the death penalty, which will be delivered through death by 1000 guilt trips. (In this cosmogony, European males and the world they created are the Great Satan that pulls every string.)
A few brave souls tried to sound the alarm, Allan Bloom, Robert Hughes, Camille Paglia, and especially Sokal and his hoax, but they were all ignored by conservatives who didn't care about any issue that couldn't be readily converted into cash and most esp by the liberal class, who have been trained to never oppose an enemy to the Left and who are congenitally incapable of disputing any statement if it comes wrapped in the tears of a minority group.
I guess my point is that the time to expose and defeat this newest iteration of the Left's Permanent Revolution came and went at least a generation ago. The thinking classes of the entire Anglosphere have been as conquered and brainwashed as a Christian convert in 4th-century Rome or the newest member of Jim Jones' Peoples Temple.
Any interesting or intelligent work in any sector of society, from art and thought to science, will have to take place far away from American academia and the liberal gentry class that owns and operates it, certainly for the rest of this decade at minimum.
It is your article that is highly appreciated! Everyone: send links to this to all you know!