Author: Theo

How Colleges Silence Eccentrics – Geoffrey Miller (The Chronicle of Higher Education)

Imagine a young Isaac Newton time-traveling from 1670s England to teach Harvard undergrads in 2017. After the time-jump, Newton still has an obsessive, paranoid personality, with Asperger’s syndrome, a bad stutter, and unstable moods. But now he’s subject to Harvard’s speech codes that prohibit “disrespect for the dignity of others”; any violations will get him in trouble with Harvard’s Inquisition (the “Office for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion”). Newton wouldn’t last long as a public intellectual in modern America. Sooner or later, he would say offensive things that become moral-outrage clickbait. His eccentric, ornery awkwardness would lead to swift expulsion from the academy and would make him a pariah on social media.

On the upside, he’d drive traffic to 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.

Worth considering the same phenomenon as applied to neurodivergents in the comic book industry.

H/t: Instapundit

Academia’s “Ethnic Cleansing” Hits Music: No performer or theorist is safe from the progressive mob. – The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal

In a pair of cases, music educators have been subjected to academic “herd culling,” as one administrator honestly described his efforts at ridding his school of unwanted faculty members. In both instances, professors were attacked simply because they wrote things that upset some of the irritable “progressives” on campus.

H/t: Instapundit