Feminists strengthen their stranglehold on academia

[Malakas]

What I was trying to say in a clumsy and indirect way is that there's still an opportunity here - Summers the Martyr.

It should be milked for all it's worth. "Look at Summers - hounded out for telling the truth".

[gwallan]

The feminist jihadies at the conference got the vapors and stormed out of the room.

This was the silver lining for me. It made me realise that feminists are no better than spoilt little brats. From that time I began to use schoolyard analogies for their activities. Suddenly it all made sense.

"Wah, wah. The bad man said nasty things about girls. Wah, wah."

[zarby]

I have operated on what I call the "bad dog theory" for years.

You must never back down. You must never look down or away.
You look the bad dog in the eye. If you back down, it is all over.
The bad dog will pounce on you. Don't shown any weakness.

I have had "bad dogs" attack me over the years. I always
feel I am safer if I stand my ground. It has worked so far.

Of course, if you are wrong, you admit it. But, if you are
right, you stand your ground. He was right. He should have
stood his ground. He showed weakness and it was all over.

The feminazis like always are inconsistent. They have no
problem acknowleding differences between men and women
so long as the differences are women being superior. If
you dare suggest that men are better at some things,
then you must be crucified. They are inconsistent, always.

The truth is that men and women are different. Each has
their strengths and weaknesses. Yes, there is overlap.
Some women are better and bench pressing than most
men. However, as a general rule, men will have more
upper body strength. Numerous virtually incontestable
examples like this could be given. It is denial of reality
to claim that these differences don't exist.

He was in a position of power. He was the President of one of  
the most prestigious universities in the world. If he had
stoon his ground, he probably would have been OK. He
could have made his case. Certainly, his opinion was
defensible. I suspect he would have been OK.

[gwallan]

Zarby, have you ever read any of Terry Pratchett's Discworld books. One of them delves extensively into the "good dog, bad dog" concept through the eyes of Gaspode the Wonder Dog. It's hilarious and you've managed to some extent to capture some of it.

[no2fembots]

What I was trying to say in a clumsy and indirect way is that there's still an opportunity here - Summers the Martyr.

It should be milked for all it's worth. "Look at Summers - hounded out for telling the truth".

Martyrs become martyrs because they are willing to die for their beliefs: death before recantation!

Summers, you Sir are a one hundred percent weenie!  Ya, I'm talkin' TO YOU!

no2fembots has only one thing to say to this traitorous vomit stain:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/sounds/exterminate.mp3

[Malakas]

Martyrs become martyrs because they are willing to die for their beliefs: death before recantation!

Politics, brother, politics. I don't approve of the wimp any more than you do. :lol:

[johnnyp]

What I was trying to say in a clumsy and indirect way is that there's still an opportunity here - Summers the Martyr.

It should be milked for all it's worth. "Look at Summers - hounded out for telling the truth".

There are three possible results from this situation (I will not venture a prediction):

1) The feminists will have taught all potential foes that if crossed, feminists will win

2) The outrageous nature of the incident will shock stakeholders (students, government, society, and academics) back into reality... things have gone too far... academia has rejected the search for knowledge in favor of demagoguery

3) This will be a ripple in the pond and will be forgotten with longer term positive or negative impact.

(my fear is that the result will be number 1)

[Malakas]

Good point, johnnyp.
Worst case scenario:
Quite possibly the result could be 1. but that does not negate 2.
Because by 'winning' they shoot themselves in the other foot. A formerly prestigious university is shown to be just another feminist factory which has abandoned the search for knowledge and truth. Male students will cease to apply and it's awards are lowered in value. The imbalance in the sexes grows as it has in almost all colleges throughout the US. The media starts to ask questions.
Perhaps only then the people you describe in 2. will start to get worried and try to change policy. By then it's too late and the institution is locked in a downward spiral.
End of scenario.

My guess is that they're already worried but can't see the way out. Whatever they do they face the prospect of campus feminists throwing another group tantrum so they'll work in underhand ways to change things. It's either that or extinction.

[Prometheus]

I agree that Summers should have stood his ground against the feminists last year.  I read his speech and he said absolutlely nothing wrong.  It was a great dissapointment when he caved.

But I am going to reserve judgement as to this latest flack.  It sounds like it is mostly internal politics between him and the arts and sciences dean Kirby and God only knows who else.  The fact is that Mr. Summers has been controversial from the start of his presidency and had been accused of being a bully long before the feminists berated him.   I see his resignation as a non-event with regard to men's rights.  For whatever reasons, this guy just made too many enemies and ruffled feathers of all colors and persuasions. He already "made ammends" for his audacity to suggest that there is a difference between the sexes and that women aren't better than men at everything.  Therefore, I don't see  the impending no confidence vote as having much to do with that issue.  Read between the lines here and you pick up a lot of internal nasty academic politics and ego clashes that would have occurred with or without last year's battle....IMHO

[Galt]

This is just a side note ... but someone else can gladly have those jobs on a political hot seat - I sure wouldn't want it.  There was also a flap between Summers and Cornel West.  Basically, Summers had the opinion that Cornel should maybe do some of the "school stuff" (if he was being paid by the university for school stuff) instead of promoting his rap career and racial politics (and not much else).  Summers also had the gall to say that maybe professors shouldn't be handing out "A"s like candy, half of all students shouldn't be getting As.

Basically, Summers saw a lot of the really looney things going on, but he made the mistake of actually SAYING it and trying to change it.  That's a big no-no.  It would drive me crazy, but he would have survived a lot longer if he just let all the politically-correct looniness go on.  Or if he was promoting those things, like a lot of feminist college presidents today.

I'm sure Galileo and Giordano Bruno are spinning in their graves.  Although people no longer believe in goblins and fairies, and the Pope doesn't decree what people at universities should think, we've returned to a time when scholarship and truth are frowned upon, and passing rumors, political ideology posing as science and hating another group, basically white males, are the way to go (like in women's studies or basically any other "studies" subject).

[Galt]

It made me realise that feminists are no better than spoilt little brats.

I've thought that for quite some time.  It's harder to detect the arrested development in the older feminists, but just look at some of these college girls who are loud-mouthed feminists.  I honestly can't tell any difference between them and a 13-year-old spoiled girl who screams and stomps her foot until daddy does what she wants.  Never thinking about her part, or accountability, or her place in the world, or what she does in return, or fairness or responsibility or anything else.  In fact, they are more like a 2-year-old who is pure "I want, I want, I want" than anything else.

Back when I was in college, I had the bizarre idea that I was there because I could learn something from people older than me (professors) who had a lot of experience and learning in a subject I wanted to learn.  That's apparently not the case with radical college feminists.  They know it all, and they know it far better than anyone else.  Why are they even in college?

[CaptDMO]

If nothing else,
Let it now be national and global common knowlege what a degree bestowed by Harvard  University demonstrably represents.

[Rob]

I will apologize in advance for offending all those on this forum who have attained a high level of education.

I think it's about high time that the western world's fascination with post-secondary education gets put into check anyway. If Harvard has been exposed as just another feminist soapbox, then so be it. Society has to quit kissing people's ass who have "a degree". So what? Whoopty Doo! University politics is ridiculous. It's hard to ignore on a university campus that a person in graduate studies looks down on an undergrad, a Ph D looks down on someone with only a Master's etc. The actual intellect and contribution someone can make is far too connected with their academic achievment and politics. It has far too little to do with the subject at hand.

I got in trouble once for laying into my linguistics prof when I was a junior. He stopped me out of class one day and chewed me out and humiliated in front of several people (not education related, but I don't remember what for anymore). He pissed me off, so I laid right back into him asking if he felt that 4 or 5 more years of education than me made him a higher class of human being than me. I paid to learn language from him, not his moral code.

This whole feminazi system can be traced back to our post secondary educational institutions. Where people get to live in "theory world" and ignore the real world. Where do you think that people attain the authority to say the bullshit rhetoric that feminism spews? And no-one is allowed to question someone with a Ph D. unless they also possess a Ph D. - Cough, BULLSHIT, cough! (I don't need a Ph D to recognize the dilema in that theory.)

I'm glad that Harvard has been exposed as yet another institution that panders more to the "politically correct" (which was created by these same great thinkers) and ignores it's mandate to seek the truth.

Albert Einstein, with his measly education, wouldn't even be acknowledged in today's world by someone with a Ph D in Physics. Leonardo Da Vinci, Galileo and Isaac Newton probably received the equivalent education of today's junior high school student - yet it didn't stop them from making profound observations and discoveries.

Institutions of Higher Learning have been effectively stifling mankind's development. Check into the population of the earth today as compared to the total sum of the populations of the earth from the Middle Ages to the Industrial Revolution. Anyone with a Degree in Math or Stats should be able to tell you that there should be several of each of Shakespeares, Mozarts, Davincis, Gallileos, Copernicus, Einsteins, etc etc that should be alive today. Where are they? Why are they not out there in todays world? We have the population base that dictates that statisticly they should exist.

Degrees in the humanities might just as well be all classified as degrees in the Department of Questionable Theories, because they have such a wide variance of conclusions that nothing is concrete - it's all theorized conclusions and 15 + 35 can be argued to create the sum of 0 or 100 and anywhere in between, depending on the Ph D's particular leanings and views.

And how come I've never seen a Psychology Ph D doing a University funded study on the causes and effects of the arrogance new Ph D recipients seems to universally possess? Why is there no study on why most Ph D's look down on those "dumber" people with only a Master's, and so on? Where's the University Study on the effects of the Collegiate Hierarchy? This phenomenon can be traced back (and blamed) throughout history for many things:
    - Galileo and Copernicus were censured by the more learned.
    - When Samuel Champlain's ship's crew was cured of scurvy by an Indian concoction made of pine needles (high in vitamin C), the medical community in Europe scoffed that savages knew of such things and millions of more sailors died as a result.
    - Louis Pasteur was publicly humiliated and almost drummed into obscurity by his educated peers for suggesting that unseen germs cause people to die after surgery - therefore doctors should wash their hands.

Now that everyone and their dog is educated, one has to wonder if development is being stifled with an all time severity. God help the plumber with a 155 IQ being looked down upon by the Ph D with a 120 IQ.

As Mensa can quickly tell you, their members include people from all walks of life. Including people who have dropped out of high shcool, those who are on welfare, and those that are homeless. Intelligence has absolutely nothing to do with "a degree". Yet a degree gives the owner the right to...

Two of the most successful businessmen in the world are Bill Gates and Michael Dell. Both dropped out of college in their first year. Their level of education hardly qualifies them to manage the local Radio Shack. However, I would personally take their views on economics and marketing far more seriously than a Harvard Economics Ph D. Wouldn't  you?

Here we go again, at Harvard. A bunch of over educated individuals causing a bunch of fuss over something so stupid it shouldn't even have been mentioned.  

When everyone in town has a Ph D in ?BS?, guess who's going to be getting paid $1,000/hr? Yeah, you guessed it, the one guy who chose to be a plumber. Your local Ph D must have skipped ECON101 in his first year as an undergrad! You never know, that guy who mows your lawn might be the equivelant of George Washington, because George would never have become President today with his level of education. (Being that George was home-schooled and his post-secondary education was as a surveyor).

I'd like to have a Ph D. in Reality. Then I could preach to the world two things: "I have a BA Degree... would you like fries with that?" and "Righty Tighty, Lefty Loosie". Then I would lead my students in a rousing rendition of Pink Floyd's "The Wall".

The world of Academia needs to be exposed for it's fraudulent beliefs and practises. It is self serving in that it has made itself the benchmark for preaching whats important and then it preaches that it is itself the most important. But of course, no one will believe that until someone with a Ph D says so.

Thank you, Mr. Summers, for again showing the world how screwed up Institutions of Higher Learning are.

Rob
(Ph D in Reality, Summa Cum Laude, School of Hard Knocks)

[johnnyp]

I will apologize in advance for offending all those on this forum who have attained a high level of education.

No apologies needed.

There is some strange transformation that seems to happen with the schooled mind.  Smartness seems to universally increase from school year 1 to 12.  Years 13 to 17 seem to have mixed results.  Then from school year 18 and onward there seems to be a huge reversal in smarts for the majority of students.

[johnnyp]

Feb 23, 2006
by Thomas Sowell

The resignation of Lawrence Summers as president of Harvard University tells us a lot about what is wrong with academia today.
When he took office in 2001, Summers seemed like an ideal president of Harvard. He had had a distinguished career in and out of the academic world, including having been a professor at Harvard, so there was no obvious reason why he would not fit in.

http://townhall.com/opinion/columns/thomassowell/2006/02/23/187525.html