No Pleasing Some People

Life's tough.

Ivy League's female presidents gather

Although women have made gains at the top, women still are not proportionately represented in the ranks of tenured faculty at the world's major research universities, the panelists said. Reforms in parental leave and merit-based hiring are needed for women professors to catch up, Tilghman said.

"It is much too early to declare either victory or defeat," Tilghman said. "In a way, the Ivy League is anomalous among research universities in the world."

Gutmann noted the biggest gap in education is between the rich who can afford the ballooning cost of tuition, and the poor who are left outside campus walls.

Well then lower your prices, you're the ones in charge!

But it's just oh-so-satisfying to trot out the old tired "gap between rich and poor" complaint about how awful our society is.

Simmons also pointed to the dearth of openly gay, black and Hispanic college presidents.

Oh, now that's a thigh-slapper!

How many openly gay black and Hispanic people are there?

And how many slots are available for the job of college president?

Because people can fall into multiple groups, you can ALWAYS find some over-defined sub-populations that is "under-represented" in any sufficiently small fixed-roster organization, because the sum of all conceivable subgroups (i.e. openly gay Hispanic women) adds up to more than 100%. Using lack of such perfect proportionality is NOT evidence of discrimination, but rather is a consequence of statistical sampling.

I suspect these Ivy presidents wouldn't be satisfied with actual proportional representation anyway.

Just looking for something to complain about.

This is an example of what Wretchard at Belmont Club is talking about:

But rather than resulting in a world of reasoned discourse between different moral points of view, the systematic teaching of moral relativism in the classroom resulted in its precise opposite: a culture of uncritical conformity in the guise of political correctness whose members, unprepared to think for themselves became fair game to any cult leader or demagogue who card to take advantage of the milling flock of sheep. Quoting Maimon Schwarzchild, law professor at Catholic San Diego University, Kesler writes:

Our civilization’s peculiar misfortune is to be under a double assault, physically by the undercivilized from without, and psychologically by those surfeited with it from within. And these last own the classroom ...

73 percent of the students said that when their professors taught about ethical issues, the usual message was that uniform standards of right and wrong don't exist ("what is right and wrong depends on differences in individual values and cultural diversity"). It's not news that today's campuses are drenched in moral relativism. But we are allowed to be surprised that college students report they are being well prepared ethically by teachers who tell them, in effect, that there are no real ethical standards, so anything goes.

The result is a civilization in the "process of committing suicide", whose dominant ideology is anti-anti-barbarism, where the highest value is not to oppose even the greatest evil. I found Kesler's observations interesting not merely in the intellectual sense, but because it bore directly on the conduct of the War on Terror.

Terror, if it is anything, represents the ultimate challenge of barbarism against civilization. And if the great centers of Western learning, the giant flagships of its literacy as represented by newspapers, magazines and television stations cannot rouse themselves to oppose terrorism then in some fundamental sense it has already pre-surrendered. And this ethos of surrender, this "anti-anti-barbarism" will inevitably manifest itself in all facts of public life; a life which has been converted into a moral vacuum. Polygamy, endogamy, special dispensations for cults, the inordinate fear of giving offensive; these endless and futile accomodations to maintain a void which is rapidly being filled not by the same indefinite vapor, but is instead being occupied by a very definite point of view. A point of view that stipulates when one must wash, pray or what one should eat; that knows even the genders of vegetables.

And in a comment,

Sometimes I think that one of the reasons that Marxism did so well is that was essentially a heretical version of Judaeo Christianity. A grotesque mutation to be sure, but it had its Worker's Paradise, sacred canons, doctrine. Oh boy, did it have doctrine, and its theological disputes were played out in show trials. Left devionists, right deviationists, Trotskyists, capitalist roaders, wreckers, etc. It even had its revolutionary saints, of which Che Guevara perhaps, it the best known. The reason socialism took over Europe so quickly after World War 2 is simple: it was the old faith warped into the a new mold. The transformation was as natural as it was degenerate.

But the point is that there was and is a deeply ingrained desire for transcendance which the post-Christian Western world wants to keep in the closet. And to indulge their desire for faith and meaning without going to church and lighting votive candles, they go to the commode and sand down their butts with recycled toilet paper. Self-flagellation in modern form. In place of God they now have Gaia. It's all second rate, and cheap, tawdry plastic eco-babble theology; a monstrosity composed of equal measures of new age mysticism and folk Marxism.

And that's why Europe in general and socialists in particular are so vulnerable to Islam. Islam is far more cohesive as a religion than this stupid nature worship. To become member of the ummah is so much cooler, so much more exciting and -- face it -- so much more intellectually sophisticated that to become a member of the local organic food co-op.

You see all these guys running around buying pieces of paper giving them carbon credits, knowing it doesn't make a lick of difference to anyone, especially the people in the Third World and you know. You just know these are sheep ripe for the leading. Open a mosque and watch them flood in the door.

It's not just sad. It is pathetic.

And our elite university presidents lament the dearth of openly gay Hispanics in their ranks as the barbarians are assaulting the gates.

How many Ivy presidents can dance on the head of a pin?

Wretchard notes,

I guess people have to learn the hard way that it doesn't pay to hand over the knife to your enemy in a fight. That there's no percentage in playing to lose and hoping to come out smelling of roses. The hard political times Olmert has been going through came from Israeli setbacks. Nothing teaches as well as defeat.

The reason people can be so cavalier about surrender to the enemy is that they have been safe and comfortable for so long they cannot believe anything they do can endanger their gilded world. Like the Titanic, it is full speed ahead. Not even God can sink this ship, with its lights, its dancing and towering pride. Of course, people do learn when the crisis comes. Our task is to make sure that enough people learn before the crisis comes. That small cohort may make the difference.

Pass the word.