Just another day in the American academy:
Saida Grundy is an incoming assistant professor of sociology and African-American studies at Boston University who identifies as a "feminist sociologist of race and ethnicity," according to her bio on the school's website.
Her tweets started to go viral after they were noticed by the website SoCawlege.com.
Like this one:
why is white america so reluctant to identify white college males as a problem population?
And this:
every mlk week I commit myself to not spending a dime in white-owned businesses, and every year I find it nearly impossible
Weird. Who'd have thought it'd be that difficult to find a Korean grocery store?
I'm not unsympathetic to this one:
can we just call st patrick's day the white people's kwanzaa that it is? this is not a thing in actual ireland. its completely made up
"Incoming assistant professor of sociology and African-American studies" is not a thing in actual universities. It's completely made up. Albeit not as much fun as "McNamara's Band".
Also from the Greater Boston Area:
Time To Rethink Our Social Construct Of Motherhood
This is no mere incoming assistant professor of sociology, but the President of Smith College. My old friend John Podhoretz responds:
The president of Smith College wrote this sentence: "Motherhood is a cultural invention." So long, humankind.
I think he means, "So long, mankind." Unless they've gotten to John, too.
One of the few things I take issue with Tom Wolfe over was his confidence, around the time he was visiting colleges to research I Am Charlotte Simmons, that students force-fed political correctness just sat metaphorically rolling their eyes for four years and then got on with their lives. I don't think so. The damage done is real and profound. The first peddlers of this hooey had at least had the benefit of a real education themselves: Somewhere deep down they knew enough to know they were burning down their own inheritance. But look at that picture of young "Professor" Grundy: This is all she knows and all she's ever known.
Time to rethink our social construct of education.
~A word on the British election:
Yes, it's always fun to stick it to the pollsters and the media and especially Russell Milibrand (as I shall ever think of him). Characteristically myopic headline from my old newspaper, The Independent, just a week or two back:
Russell Brand interviewing Ed Miliband was the most authentic moment of the election so far.
Was it even (whisper it) exciting?
Only to you. Maybe you need to get out of the house more.
It would be churlish to deny oneself the pleasure of hooting at the politico-media establishment, but, when that's done, this is a deeply unhealthy electoral result. The Conservatives won because Labour got wiped out in Scotland and the Liberals got wiped out in England. But the reality is that, for a supposedly United Kingdom, the country no longer has any national political party. England and Scotland have taken on the characteristics of Northern Ireland - hermetically sealed polities full of weird, unlovely regional parties ("SNP", "Conservative", "Labour") that have no meaning once you cross the border, and whose internal disputes are of no relevance to the other three-quarters of the kingdom: Nobody outside Ulster cares about "official" Unionists vs the more red-blooded Democratic Unionists. And so it goes with the Scots Nats and Labour in Scotland: nationalist socialists vs unionist socialists; Likewise, with the Tories and UKIP in England: transnationalist conservatives vs nationalist conservatives.
Wales is the exception that proves the rule, where UKIP outpolled Plaid Cymru, albeit with no seats to show for it. The Scottish National Party got 4.7 per cent of the UK vote, and 56 seats. UKIP had nearly thrice as many voters - 12.6 per cent - but only one seat. That discrepancy is because there is no longer any such thing as "the UK vote". I far prefer the Westminster first-past-the-post system to European "proportional representation", but it only works if you have genuinely national parties. If the system decays into four groups of regional parties, the House of Commons will look less and less like a genuine national parliament, and more and more like some surly conditional arrangement - Scottish Kurds, Tory Shia and seething Labour Sunni triangles.
The composition of the new house would strike any mid-20th century Briton as freakish and unsettling. It's a bit like Canada in the Nineties - where Reform couldn't break out of the west, the Bloc Québécois dominated Quebec, the rump Tories clung on in the Atlantic provinces, and Ontario and a few seats hither and yon gave the Liberals their majority. The difference is that the Bloquistes are pretend separatists; the Scottish National Party are not.
And that's before you take into account the competing nationalist dynamics of the Anglo-Scottish victors: secession from the UK north of the border and detachment from the EU south. Cameron is a wily operator and one notices he uses the words "United Kingdom" far more than his predecessors. But saying will not make it so.
~Tomorrow I'll be back with Toronto's Number One morning man John Oakley live on AM640 at 8.30am Eastern. Hope you'll swing by.