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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29600 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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Right, but in practice, his academic understanding and dialectic amounted to devising ever more sophisticated methods of waging culture war, in ever sharper methods of criticism, and all with a clear ideological outcome in mind - the production of political activists to go and spread the bad news. It's hard to imagine the same thing occurring in a programming course. These kids weren't dumb. They were carefully and rigorously selected - no doubt for their ideological discipline, their ability to internalize antiracist rhetoric, and their willingness to challenge and rebel against traditional authority. They were then armed with the finest rhetorical weapons modern society affords, and taught they were not allowed to defend themselves against them. Of interest is that the professor himself has no defense against them either, beyond a weak appeal to his own anti-racist credentials.

These kids weren't dumb. They were carefully and rigorously selected - no doubt for their ideological discipline, their ability to internalize antiracist rhetoric, and their willingness to challenge and rebel against traditional authority.

They were also a bunch of impressionable 17 year olds feeling flattered that they had been selected for Real Grown-up College seminar. Since the professor seems to have done damn-all, by his own account, to protect them, they were ripe for being bullied into compliance with a loud, aggressive young adult (but still older than them and with the authority of being a teaching assistant) like Keisha while Lloyd just sat around in the background wringing his hands:

Eventually, two of the Asian-American students would be expelled from the program for reasons that, Keisha said, couldn’t be shared with me.

Right then is when he should have slapped her down about "I'm the professor contracted to teach this seminar, not you, and I need to know why my class is being expelled without my knowledge or consent", but he let it all go until too late and the leadership of course would not back him up:

Telluride is governed and largely run by program alumni who volunteer their time to further the goals of the association. The volunteer overseeing the summer programs explained to me that there were internal divisions within the loose, sprawling Telluride world over the direction of the summer programs, with some corners of that world zealously pursuing a singular focus on anti-blackness and other corners hoping to continue seminars as they had been conducted in the past. They realized this summer was bumpy not just in our seminar, but across the program. Because Telluride wanted to respect the democratic self-governance of the student community, the leadership didn’t feel comfortable intervening.

Adults with their own careers and lives were too scared to stand up to this virago, why would a small group of kids who were strangers to the place be able to do so?

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