Academic Stupidity on Parade

If you want to find true stupidity these days, don't go wandering off in the hills of Appalachia or up Tobacco Road. Real stupidity, the kind that you will be talking about to your grand kids, is where you might least expect to find it. On a  university campus.

Just pick any one-except for Hillsdale College in Michigan. Just throw a dart at a US map and see where it lands. How about Bloomington, Indiana, home of Indiana University? You would think that in the heart of Hoosier Country, common sense would prevail, right?

Think again.

The latest madcap report concerns a Franciscan monk spotted walking around campus in robes. That led to a campus alert that the KKK was loose on campus (Hat tip Campus Reform).

http://www.campusreform.org/?ID=7547


Franciscan monks


KKK rally


Thank God there were no stray cats wandering around IU. Somebody might have reported an escaped tiger from the local zoo.

Then there is the University of New Mexico, so far removed from zany places like Berkeley and Harvard, right? Again-think again. Here students are in a tither over the University of New Mexico's seal, which portrays a frontiersman and what looks like a Spanish conquistador. The little rascals think that this represents an affront to indigenous Americans. Yet the seal was designed by a Native American (hat tip Campus Reform).

 http://www.campusreform.org/?ID=7543

“President Frank, do you think the seal is racist?” one protester asked.

“I don’t but I’m open to being educated,” he replied. “I understand that you all think Native Americans aren’t represented there and I think that’s an important point.”

Of course, the university president acted like a wimp. It's part of the job requirements.

Let's throw our dart in a northeasterly direction. There. We have hit Yale in Connecticut. Yale is in the Ivy League, one of the most prestigious universities in the land, where reason surely must prevail, right?

 Think again again. In this case,  the president of Yale is already planning ahead in anticipation for Halloween (hat tip Minding the Campus). It seems there are certain words in the Yale lexicon that make students think slavery still exists in the US of A.

http://www.mindingthecampus.org/2016/04/yale-tries-to-dodge-new-protests/

Then there is San Francisco State University, which has been darkening the pages of Fousesquawk quite a bit over the past two years. Here you really expect to find lunacy.  In the latest example, students are going on a hunger strike......

ahem, to protest the shortage of funding for ethnic studies (hat tip The College Fix).

http://www.thecollegefix.com/post/27304/

But the absolute biggest example of stupidity this week comes to us from Portland Community College (hat tip The College Fix), where a lecture on feminism and whiteness was videotaped by a blogger while the instructors asked students to block the reporter's camera so their ridiculous lecture might not be shown to the public. This video is priceless. Watch the pusillanimous reactions of school officials and campus police who were present.

 http://www.thecollegefix.com/post/27265/

"What is feminism and how does whiteness limit the work of feminism?"

No wonder they didn't want their lecture getting out into the public realm. But it is.

This, of course, reminds me of the last time I videotaped one of UC Irvine professor of cartoons Sohail Daulatzai's speeches at UCI (2015). They knew they couldn't stop me from videotaping, so what did they do? They had the student with the fattest head sit directly in front of me. It was actually pretty effective except that he couldn't block the sound, which was the most important. Pity I wasn't able to capture Daulatzai's red tennis sneakers with orange shoe laces.

http://garyfouse.blogspot.com/2015/02/america-trashed-by-professor-in-uc.html

I could go on forever, but posts should not exceed 1,000 pages, which I could easily do. I heartily recommend the three sites I linked, and you can access them on my blog. Hours of laughs.