Universities Infected With Social Virus Destroying Intellectual Freedom and Inquiry

[From article]
Can we rid the campus of these misguided fools? Are we condemned to an academic life where free and open discussion is subordinated to creating “safe spaces,” trigger warnings, and formal channel to report professors who accidently (sic) hurt somebody's feelings?
The situation initially appears bleak. Forget about stiffening the administrative spines -- these apparatchiki were chosen by virtue of their cowardice and lack any incentive to expel, let alone arrest, disruptors. Similarly useless is reasoning with these fools. That a non-negotiable demand is impractical, too expensive or illegal hardly settles the matter in this quest for a Utopian fantasy.
[. . .]
What about the little Stalinist snowflakes and buttercups who insist that they cannot learn unless instruction is thoroughly cleansed of anything associated with the white, oppressive, capitalist patriarchy and that the school’s primary educational mission is to expand diversity, multiculturalism and inclusion? Let me suggest that the best antidote for this fantasy is to let them spend their junior year (or more) in an academic setting that resembles this daydream so they can see for themselves.
[. . .]
Better yet, how about a junior years at one of several hundred universities in sub-Sahara Africa? Not all that difficult since many use English as the instructional language and these universities would be delighted to receive the hefty tuition that would otherwise be paid to Dartmouth or Yale. No doubt, those American students who feel stifled by the hyper-white Ivy League would academically thrive at, say, the University of Lagos in Lagos, Nigeria that offers numerous academic programs in a highly diverse setting. Residing in Nigeria and other post-colonial African nations is surely the perfect escape from the evils of white-dominated Western civilization.
[. . .]
ridding the campus of the SJW folk will improve higher education and do so without much upheaval. Undergraduates will now on average be smarter, work harder and will no longer substitute feelings for knowledge. As an added bonus, schools like Yale and Brown that have shamelessly surrendered to the SJW mob will regain some lost intellectual prestige.

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/12/ridding_the_campus_of_the_social_justice_pox.html

December 17, 2015
Ridding the Campus of the Social Justice Pox
By Robert Weissberg

Intellectuals and Journalists Mislead Others

[From article]
Police follow their impressions – impressions not obtained by monitoring the queue at the polls, or watching little black girls troop off to church on Sunday in starched dresses and patent leather shoes, but instead accumulated night after night at the calls they answer in the black community. And so you can lecture them about jumping to conclusions about black people until your tongue falls out of your mouth, but if a big percentage of the last one hundred young black males they encountered had an illegal pistol within reach, they’re going to be damned aggressive with the one hundred and first.
[. . .]



Being an intellectual doesn’t mean you’re smart – it simply means your worldview is entirely derived secondhand, from what you’ve been taught in college, from whatever public opinion is, from whatever conclusions you’ve arrived at on your own, from what is an intellectual exercise only.
[. . .]
the current president of the United States, intellectually committed to the theories of socialist/Keynesian economics long after they’ve been exploded. Indeed, long after he wasted much of the nation’s treasure in yet another attempt to make them work and they still didn’t.
[. . .]



the novel To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee. One of the most widely read books in recent history. Assigned in thousands of college courses, endlessly debated and parsed by intellectuals.
It’s a great read, but the fact is that the novel was set in the nineteen-thirties and that segregation and most of its abuses – certainly its legal abuses – ended fifty years ago in the South and never existed at all in the West and North. Yet despite that, despite the Voting Rights Act and the now numerous black officeholders everywhere, despite having an African-American elected president, the intellectual view of race relations in America is still that one book.

http://americanthinker.com/2014/08/summoning_the_mockingbird_mob.html

August 28, 2014
Summoning the Mockingbird Mob
By Richard F. Miniter

White Liberal Elites Keep Black Americans Dependent

[From article]That false racial narrative is a white, not a black, construct – the product of half a century of white political opportunism, neo-Marxist revisionism, and cultural deracination. Its greatest victims have thus far been blacks themselves, its main beneficiaries a cabal of white intellectual and political elites. The white cabal, which, for its own advancement, created the false narrative (and the entitlement mentality that maintains it), has convinced its black victims that it's their savior rather than, in fact, their victimizer. The inflammatory racial unreality has now reached staggering national proportions, whose social consequences presumably can't much longer be avoided.
This isn't something for which we can blame Barack Obama, Jerimiah Wright, Cornel West, Al Sharpton, or their political, religious, academic, or media brothers. They are, in fact, the symptoms of the problem, not its cause – useful tools rather than enablers.

[. . .]

white society deserves black resentment – not because its distant ancestors enslaved West Africans to colonize the New World, but because white society in the here and now has itself tolerated an opportunistic intellectual and political elitism that has, in fact, victimized inner-city blacks and made them dependent social outcasts rather than independent social collaborators. Good governance advances citizen independence; bad governance advances citizen dependence.
[. . .]

racial animus in the modern American Republic is really rooted in the elitist intellectual and political power structure whose ascendancy depends on maintaining a vast national industry of dependency, entitlement, victimization, and ignorance.
Our increasing racial divide isn't likely to end prettily.

http://americanthinker.com/blog/2014/08/of_bens_baracks_and_the_real_race_war.html

August 27, 2014
Of Bens, Baracks, and the Real Race War
By Michael L. Grable

Obama Intellectualism An Abomination in Real World

Image credit: Stephen Melkisethian

[From article]
there is no denying that Obama’s rudderless foreign policy has been a disaster. The international order has rapidly deteriorated since Obama entered the Oval Office. The current situation is so perilous that so long as Obama remains President, the phrase “presidential leadership” will continue to be an oxymoron.
The President suffers from two fundamental flaws. The first is that he is unwilling to make decisions. He much prefers to play the role of a disinterested observer who comments on a set of adverse events that he regards himself as powerless to shape, of which Assad’s carnage in Syria is the prime example. The second is that he fundamentally misunderstands the use of force in international affairs. He handicaps himself fatally by imposing unwise limitations on the use of American force, such as his repeated declarations that he will not send ground troops back into Iraq.
[. . .]
The number of hotspots in the world—including Gaza, Syria, Libya, Nigeria, Ukraine and the China Sea—is increasing. The President wrings his hands over how difficult it has become to find credible allies in the world to address these problems without ever asking why no one trusts him.
[. . .]
A record as dismal as Obama’s does not happen by accident.
[. . .]
He sees himself as a deep thinker who sees issues that lesser minds just miss.

http://www.hoover.org/research/pax-americana-dead

The Pax Americana is Dead
by Richard A. Epstein
Monday, August 11, 2014
Hoover Institute

Intellectuals in The Military

[From article]
Trevor-Roper's case from his superiors, if they had come across his frank wartime journals. The officers were a "colony of coots in an unventilated backwater of bureaucracy," Trevor-Roper wrote, and "a bunch of dependent bumsuckers held together by neglect, like a cluster of bats in an unswept barn." Driven to despair by their "hieratic indolence" and "ceremonious evasions of responsibility," Trevor-Roper found his anger at these "corrupt racketeers" mounting year by year.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304450004577278474202378552.html?KEYWORDS=When+the+scholar+was+a+soldier

When the Scholar Was a Soldier
Japes provide relief from the horror of bombing and the tedium of rationing; officers are described as 'a colony of coots' and 'corrupt racketeers.'
Wall Street Journal
By BRENDAN SIMMS
March 14, 2012

Thomas Sowell on Intellectualism

Thomas Sowell reveals the dangers of intellectuals outside of the academy.

http://rightwingnews.com/2010/02/interviewing-thomas-sowell-on-intellectualism/

February 15, 2010

Interviewing Thomas Sowell On Intellectualism
John Hawkins
RightWingNews.com