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trueblue
Joined: 15 Jun 2014
Location: In between the lines
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 Posted: Wed Nov 11, 2015 9:53 pm Post subject: |
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| Plain Meaning wrote: |
The topic is almost trivial, and the title is borderline offensive. People can claim that "'diversity' is a religion" all they want, but it will be very difficult, if not impossible, to show that one controversy at one university establishes the truth of that claim.
| sirius black wrote: |
Great triumph for student activism. We often say college age kids are tuned out, etc. but this shows that there is hope.
The students, specifically the football players believed enough in what they deemed as injustice to put themselves at risk.
Bravo. Even if its something I don't believe in, like the woman who wouldn't issue gay marriages. While I think her views are bigoted, she believed enough in what she thought was wrong to go to jail over it.
Gotta respect that. |
So, I'll comment on this. Kim Davis, the woman who refused to issue gay marriages, really won. She secured a private meeting with Pope Francis. Then Matt Bevin, the underdog candidate for Governor of Kentucky, won in an upset. He deliberately campaigned on social issues, quite contrary to his economic focus when he ran for primary for Mitch McConnell's Senate seat.
Activism on social issues works. |
☝🤔...Even for those who really have little, if any, have a well informed world view, reacting only on emotion, misinformation, constant sense of victimization, a complete degeneration of values and reason...(etc, etc.)?
Yes, activism on "social issues" does in fact work. |
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Plain Meaning
Joined: 18 Oct 2014
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| Posted: Wed Nov 11, 2015 10:02 pm Post subject: |
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| trueblue wrote: |
| Plain Meaning wrote: |
...
| sirius black wrote: |
Great triumph for student activism. We often say college age kids are tuned out, etc. but this shows that there is hope.
The students, specifically the football players believed enough in what they deemed as injustice to put themselves at risk.
Bravo. Even if its something I don't believe in, like the woman who wouldn't issue gay marriages. While I think her views are bigoted, she believed enough in what she thought was wrong to go to jail over it.
Gotta respect that. |
So, I'll comment on this. Kim Davis, the woman who refused to issue gay marriages, really won. She secured a private meeting with Pope Francis. Then Matt Bevin, the underdog candidate for Governor of Kentucky, won in an upset. He deliberately campaigned on social issues, quite contrary to his economic focus when he ran for primary for Mitch McConnell's Senate seat.
Activism on social issues works. |
☝🤔...Even for those who really have little, if any, have a well informed world view, reacting only on emotion, misinformation, constant sense of victimization, a complete degeneration of values and reason...(etc, etc.)?
Yes, activism on "social issues" does in fact work. |
Yes, certainly even for those who react on emotion, a constant sense of victimization; didn't I just use Kim Davis as my example of successful activism on social issues? |
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geldedgoat
Joined: 05 Mar 2009
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| Posted: Fri Nov 13, 2015 8:19 am Post subject: |
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| The day this story of his firing hit the news, our class had to listen to the dean self-flagellate about why our college is still flying the state flag, why he personally feels like it should be removed, and how sorry he was that we hadn't already had such an important and relevant conversation. This was then followed by an opportunity for students to discuss feedback on any school-related issue, including the curriculum, so I suggested that our professional development class be used more for topics like ethics and business management and less for topics like the African Union. I suppose I deserved the chiding that followed; how could I be so culturally insensitive as to think that issues like declawing and euthanasia might be more appropriate for veterinary students than the political and economic relationships between Djibouti and Ethiopia? |
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chellovek
Joined: 29 Feb 2008
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| Posted: Fri Nov 13, 2015 8:25 am Post subject: |
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Think it's less a case of "leftism gone out of control" and more a case of dumbass North Americans and the dopey political discourse that goes on here in the US.
That so many people on here seem to trot out this tired old canard is just pitiful.
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geldedgoat
Joined: 05 Mar 2009
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| Posted: Fri Nov 13, 2015 9:01 am Post subject: |
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| chellovek wrote: |
| a case of dumbass North Americans and the dopey political discourse that goes on here in the US |
...which in this instance has taken the form of...
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| "leftism gone out of control" |
The Mizzou president did nothing wrong but was still punished for the narrative. Not even Bernie Sanders is safe. |
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chellovek
Joined: 29 Feb 2008
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| Posted: Fri Nov 13, 2015 9:10 am Post subject: |
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| geldedgoat wrote: |
| chellovek wrote: |
| a case of dumbass North Americans and the dopey political discourse that goes on here in the US |
...which in this instance has taken the form of...
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| "leftism gone out of control" |
The Mizzou president did nothing wrong but was still punished for the narrative. Not even Bernie Sanders is safe. |
I see what you're saying old top, but I'm a leftist too and I don't recognise any of this stuff as being especially leftist. It's identity politics, not leftism per se. The blurring comes that a number of people who are also leftist are also big on this identity politics jazz. |
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Fox
Joined: 04 Mar 2009
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| Posted: Fri Nov 13, 2015 5:12 pm Post subject: |
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| chellovek wrote: |
I see what you're saying old top, but I'm a leftist too and I don't recognise any of this stuff as being especially leftist. |
In principle, that could simply mean that your "leftism" is "in control." I drink alcohol, and so does an alcoholic, but his drinking is out of control, and thus a problem for him, while my drinking is firmly in control, and thus no problem for me. Couldn't one posit something similar for political ideology? It seems like a semantic matter, which isn't to say it's not important, but rather, to say that if we give the other party the benefit of the doubt and try to understand what they are actually trying to say, much of the disagreement may vanish. You yourself say:
| chellovek wrote: |
| It's identity politics, not leftism per se. The blurring comes that a number of people who are also leftist are also big on this identity politics jazz. |
I for one am certainly inclined to agree with with the suggestion that identity politics are intrinsically pathological. Some people would classify "identity politics" of the sort you're speaking about here as an attribute of the modern political left and thus to some extent speak about them interchangeably. More precision is probably a good thing, but a vaguer approach can also leave room for additional exploration and interpretation as well, so it's not necessarily a problem as long as everyone involved in the conversation is honest and participates in good faith. |
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Plain Meaning
Joined: 18 Oct 2014
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| Posted: Tue Nov 17, 2015 6:21 pm Post subject: |
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| chellovek wrote: |
Think it's less a case of "leftism gone out of control" and more a case of dumbass North Americans and the dopey political discourse that goes on here in the US.
That so many people on here seem to trot out this tired old canard is just pitiful.
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That's kind of what Freddie DeBoer has said, but of course with more thoughtfulness and less dismissive snark. 
http://fredrikdeboer.com/2015/11/07/its-my-job-to-take-college-students-seriously/
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Yale students are calling for the resignation or firing of Erika Christakis, Associate Master of Silliman College, and her husband, Master of Silliman College Nicholas Christakis, over an email about potentially offensive Halloween costumes. Here is what has so inflamed Yale undergraduates:
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“I don’t wish to trivialize genuine concerns about cultural and personal representation, and other challenges to our lived experience in a plural community. I know that many decent people have proposed guidelines on Halloween costumes from a spirit of avoiding hurt and offense. I laud those goals, in theory, as most of us do. But in practice, I wonder if we should reflect more transparently, as a community, on the consequences of an institutional (which is to say: bureaucratic and administrative) exercise of implied control over college students.
Is there no room anymore for a child or young person to be a little bit obnoxious… a little bit inappropriate or provocative or, yes, offensive? American universities were once a safe space not only for maturation but also for a certain regressive, or even transgressive, experience; increasingly, it seems, they have become places of censure and prohibition.” |
That’s sufficient to get people screaming for your firing, nowadays. Note that what Christiakis is talking about — students becoming complicit in the hierarchies of the neoliberal university by constantly invoking the power of administrators — is precisely what I was warning about in my New York Times Magazine piece… and that the students have responded by epitomizing that tendency. |
I quote Freddie's drop of the term 'neoliberal' with some concern, because some posters here seem to use it a lot with only the fuzziest idea of what it actually means. But its important; the administrators have taken over universities, which is one reason why they are so expensive now.
Nonetheless, if you read the news on this, you would think that English departments are horribly distorted enclaves of 'the turn,' i.e. post-modernist language police centers. They are not.
http://fredrikdeboer.com/2015/11/14/what-goes-on-in-english-departments/
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The fact of the matter is, there are all kinds of things happening in the liberal arts and social sciences that have nothing to do with the cultural turn, and all you have to do is be bothered to look for them. But because there are so many people invested in pretending that there is nothing but the cultural turn and “postmodernism,” whatever that even means, they don’t get discussed. The humanities today are defined in the public imagination by a terribly limiting definition of the actual working getting done, despite the fact that much of what is happening is precisely what sighing commentators say they want. This email epitomizes that position.
It happens that I have recently completed my doctorate in the humanities at a major Midwestern research university. Not just the humanities, but an English department. Surely, that must be the darkest pit of the “authoritarian turn” in the liberal arts, right? A place where nothing but wooly postmodernism and viciously-enforced identity politics reigns.
No. Quite the contrary, in fact. Within Purdue’s English department, you have people who, like me, are primarily quantitative researchers. I spent my last several years there working in assessment theory, spending a healthy amount of my time taking graduate statistics courses and learning the ins and outs of algorithmic approaches to language research. This learning was not only not resisted by my faculty or department, but was widely and enthusiastically supported. My friend Xun, one of the most brilliant quantitative minds I’ve ever interacted with, spent his career as an English PhD student at Purdue almost exclusively working in testing theory, psychometrics, and statistics. He’s since gone on to a great job in another Big Ten school. My friend Ploy is working on her dissertation now, having pursued a similar path. Many other students in the department pursue some engagement with quantification, mixing it with more traditional English methodologies, learning skills that they may have to apply in their research or their administrative service in the future. Though I have occasionally received skepticism from people in my broader field about this work, I in fact find that the overwhelming response has been positive and receptive.
Quantitative work remains a niche in English, of course, and probably should; we don’t want to try to save the humanities by making them something else than the humanities. But there are dozens of paths to pursue that are neither numbers-based nor emblematic of the cultural turn. We have many students studying rhetoric here, examining the arts of persuasion, looking at ways in which motivated arguers persuade or fail to persuade an audience. We have experts in composition, who study how better to teach within, administer, and assess university writing programs. We have people studying technical communication, working with scientists and engineers and programmers on how to relay complex technical ideas to an untrained audience. We have scholars devoted to business writing, who work with students on how to understand the complex and subtle communicative codes of the workplace. Our building houses the Indigenous and Endangered Languages Lab, where thousands of hours of audio of endangered or extinct languages has been collected and analyzed, some of it the last remaining record of these languages in the whole world. We have people working in visual rhetoric, asking how design cues make various kinds of texts more readable, more stylish, and more persuasive. We’ve got people looking at how reading text on computers, tablets, and phones alters the reading experience. My friend Kyle is looking at disasters as the product of breakdowns in written communication, studying how incidents like the Challenger explosion could have been prevented with more effective written communication. Another friend is examining decades worth of trial transcripts concerning expert witnesses to see how expertise is defined in a courtroom and how that definition influences legal outcomes.
We also have plenty of people doing the traditional humanistic work that critics so often say they want. We have people studying literature and the arts for their aesthetic value and meaning, undertaking historical analysis and close reading of precisely the kind that the people mourning the good old days ask for. We have people workshopping novels and poetry. We have plenty of people looking at the work of the old dead white guys, if that’s what this is really about. And, yes, we do have people looking at the world through a lens of critical race theory and feminism. Many. I don’t see that as a problem. In fact, much of this work is profoundly generative and necessary. Like all disciplines, these fields contain both better and worse, but the basic notion that we should consider the role of race and gender and similar issues in society seems beyond obvious to me. I do think, and have said, that my own subfield’s manic embrace of cultural studies has led to many negative consequences, and that we need to re-broaden our subjects and our methods. I do recognize that the urge to politicize everything can be overpowering. But plenty of people are doing other kinds of work, and if people like myself continue to advocate for the need for balance and diversity in our approach, that condition will continue.
And it’s worth saying: even in the world of theory, the kind of postmodern nothing-is-realism that typical complaints caricature is hopelessly out of fashion. People are at least a couple turns of the generational cycle away from there now. I’m out of touch with that world, but it’s worth saying at least that the world of theory has been through a robust rejection of the linguistic turn that the emailer skewers. You sometimes see this referred to as the “new materialism”: the insistence by theorists, so often derided as rejecting reality entirely, that we have to pay attention to the structure of the world as its experienced by most people and to have an accounting for that structure that enables us to do ethical work. Donna Haraway, one of the key architects of the new materialism, once put the challenge this way: “to have simultaneously an account of radical historical contingency for all knowledge claims and knowing subjects… and a no-nonsense commitment to faithful accounts of a ‘real’ world, one that can be partially shared and friendly to earth-wide projects of finite freedom, adequate material abundance, modest meaning in suffering, and limited happiness.” That sounds like a project worth embracing to me. Yes, Haraway insists that knowledge claims are radically contingent — that our understanding of the world is necessarily situated in a context which limits our understanding and shapes how we describe it. But she also insists that we can’t make progress without being no nonsense in developing accounts for how the real world works. Karen Barad, another new materialist whose doctorate is not in English but particle physics, titled a profoundly influential article on these themes “Getting Real.” |
As for the old "Leftist in academia" canard . . .
| Quote: |
| Why do these stories not get told? I’m not sure why this anonymous email critic isn’t aware of the vast world of non-cultural studies work going on in the humanities. If I were to hazard a guess, I’d say he (and it’s probably a he) is one of the academy’s legion of disgruntled types who believes himself to be an undiscovered genius whose work is ignored because of a powerful political conspiracy. But in general, why do the many critics of the modern humanities, like Steven Pinker, still describe English departments the way they looked in the 1980s? Because though they say they dislike that condition, they are comfortable with that narrative; it is easy to ridicule and easy to dismiss. Much of the media has a party line, when it comes to the academy, and emails like the one at the top pretty much epitomize it: that the liberal arts are universally about left-wing pomo nonsense. Actually bothering to look and see if that’s true is harder than simply getting all of the anti-academic pageviews they’ve specialized in. You see, reform requires actual investment. It requires work. You actually have to care enough to dig in and get your hands dirty and see both the good and the bad. Far more fun, and far easier, just to wave your hand and deride without bothering to look. |
Basically, there is a wide variety of thoughts and opinions and activities in English departments. |
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Swartz
Joined: 19 Dec 2014
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| Posted: Wed Nov 18, 2015 7:46 am Post subject: |
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| Plain Meaning wrote: |
| I quote Freddie's drop of the term 'neoliberal' with some concern, because some posters here seem to use it a lot with only the fuzziest idea of what it actually means. |
Oh, Kuros. At the very least, witnessing your regular displays of cowardice allows me to better understand how dishonesty and a lack of self-awareness leaves one so misguided and intellectually underdeveloped.
| Quote: |
| I’d say he (and it’s probably a he) is one of the academy’s legion of disgruntled types who believes himself to be an undiscovered genius whose work is ignored because of a powerful political conspiracy. |
The piece as a whole fits seamlessly with the sniveling leftist rhetoric that has made academia and humanities departments in particular such toxic environments, ones that now do little more than push out unskilled useful idiots. Since there are more of these rats than there are subsidized university slots, deft ‘professional rhetoricians’ like this DeBoar fellow receive their edge not by questioning any kind of established order, but by reinforcing institutional dogmas and attacking those who fall out of line. Just an all-around terrible piece. Irrespective of the inherently sad irony of it, it should be unsurprising that garbage like this was re-posted by a tier-3 law school graduate who probably can’t find sustainable work in his field. The obstinate won’t learn, even from their own continual mistakes.
The kind of demoralized ideological subversion people like DeBoar and Kuros have been infused and conditioned with is explained well in this interview with Soviet defector and propaganda specialist Yuri Bezmenov.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3nXvScRazg
These people are completely indoctrinated, spineless pawns. |
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Plain Meaning
Joined: 18 Oct 2014
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| Posted: Wed Nov 18, 2015 8:11 am Post subject: |
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| Welcome to the ignore list, Swartz. Population 1. |
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Leon
Joined: 31 May 2010
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| Posted: Wed Nov 18, 2015 2:41 pm Post subject: |
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George Orwell- Politics and the English Language
https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm
| George Orwell wrote: |
Pretentious diction. Words like phenomenon, element, individual (as noun), objective, categorical, effective, virtual, basic, primary, promote, constitute, exhibit, exploit, utilize, eliminate, liquidate, are used to dress up a simple statement and give an air of scientific impartiality to biased judgements.
Meaningless words. In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning.The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies "something not desirable." The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different. |
| Swartz wrote: |
The piece as a whole fits seamlessly with the sniveling leftist rhetoric that has made academia and humanities departments in particular such toxic environments, ones that now do little more than push out unskilled useful idiots. Since there are more of these rats than there are subsidized university slots, deft ‘professional rhetoricians’ like this DeBoar fellow receive their edge not by questioning any kind of established order, but by reinforcing institutional dogmas and attacking those who fall out of line. Just an all-around terrible piece. Irrespective of the inherently sad irony of it, it should be unsurprising that garbage like this was re-posted by a tier-3 law school graduate who probably can’t find sustainable work in his field. The obstinate won’t learn, even from their own continual mistakes.
The kind of demoralized ideological subversion people like DeBoar and Kuros have been infused and conditioned with is explained well in this interview with Soviet defector and propaganda specialist Yuri Bezmenov.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3nXvScRazg
These people are completely indoctrinated, spineless pawns. |
| George Orwell wrote: |
| In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.... Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness... The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as "keeping out of politics." All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.... But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better. |
[/quote] |
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Fox
Joined: 04 Mar 2009
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| Posted: Wed Nov 18, 2015 4:30 pm Post subject: |
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| George Orwell wrote: |
| Pretentious diction. Words like phenomenon, element, individual (as noun), objective, categorical, effective, virtual, basic, primary, promote, constitute, exhibit, exploit, utilize, eliminate, liquidate, are used to dress up a simple statement and give an air of scientific impartiality to biased judgements. |
What's "pretentious" about these words? If I were to say something like, "The phenomenon of aggressive identity-politics activism on university campuses has begun to effectively limit the individual's ability to engage in honest, open discourse and truth-seeking in the campus environment," I think everyone here, whether they agree or disagree with that hypothetical declaration, would understand my meaning with little trouble (though you might ask, "How, exactly?" or request some specific examples), and I don't think anyone here would say, "Wow, what Fox just wrote really has an air of scientific impartiality to it." I appreciate and even enjoy Orwell's sensitivity to language and awareness of how language interacts with thought and behavior, but I think he's off the mark here regarding his specific examples, just as he's off the mark with regards to his "six rules":
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(i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
(ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do.
(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.
(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
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Rule #1 seems fair enough; I generally try to avoid being a "meme" vector myself in this regard. Rule #4 also has some reason behind it, bringing to mind a distinction between a child admitting, "I hurt my brother," and equivocating with the suggestion that, "My brother got hurt." But rules 2, 3, and 5 take a completely reasonable standard for what constitutes outstanding writing -- rhetoric which possesses clarity and descriptive power without sacrificing beauty, style, and nuance in the bargain -- and invert it. Rule 6 is the worst of all, since the only real justification for 2, 3, and 5 is a fundamental commitment to simple, honest communication, but then he outright admits with rule 6 he's willing to abandon that commitment the moment social or political concerns (i.e. avoiding the utterance of anything 'barbarous') demand it.
Beyond that, I also think there's room for some measure of vagueness in communication, most especially if the communication in question is a conversational exchange. Initial vagueness leaves room for exploration, and exploration can lead to more concrete, refined answers -- answers which may be very different than the ones which would have been produced had the party initiating the discussion attempted to articulate
himself with maximal simplicity and clarity in his opening statement. I employ this methodology myself at times, and I've generally been pleased with the results. Often I have some idea floating in my head which feels to me to have a concrete, clear essence, but which I feel I can't quite express with the same clarity, and a partner acting as a "midwife" can be profitable in "birthing" the idea, so long as they're participating with sincerity and good faith. "The great enemy of clear language is insincerity," is, in itself, an excellent quote. |
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Leon
Joined: 31 May 2010
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| Posted: Wed Nov 18, 2015 4:44 pm Post subject: |
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| Fox wrote: |
| George Orwell wrote: |
| Pretentious diction. Words like phenomenon, element, individual (as noun), objective, categorical, effective, virtual, basic, primary, promote, constitute, exhibit, exploit, utilize, eliminate, liquidate, are used to dress up a simple statement and give an air of scientific impartiality to biased judgements. |
What's "pretentious" about these words? |
I thought his choice of pretentious words was weird as well.
| Fox wrote: |
If I were to say something like, "The phenomenon of aggressive identity-politics activism on university campuses has begun to effectively limit the individual's ability to engage in honest, open discourse and truth-seeking in the campus environment," I think everyone here, whether they agree or disagree with that hypothetical declaration, would understand my meaning with little trouble (though you might ask, "How, exactly?" or request some specific examples), and I don't think anyone here would say, "Wow, what Fox just wrote really has an air of scientific impartiality to it." I appreciate and even enjoy Orwell's sensitivity to language and awareness of how language interacts with thought and behavior, but I think he's off the mark here regarding his specific examples, just as he's off the mark with regards to his "six rules":
| Quote: |
(i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
(ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do.
(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.
(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
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Rule #1 seems fair enough; I generally try to avoid being a "meme" vector myself in this regard. Rule #4 also has some reason behind it, bringing to mind a distinction between a child admitting, "I hurt my brother," and equivocating with the suggestion that, "My brother got hurt." But rules 2, 3, and 5 take a completely reasonable standard for what constitutes outstanding writing -- rhetoric which possesses clarity and descriptive power without sacrificing beauty, style, and nuance in the bargain -- and invert it. Rule 6 is the worst of all, since the only real justification for 2, 3, and 5 are a commitment to simple, honest communication, but then he outright admits with rule 6 he's willing to abandon that commitment the moment social or political concerns (i.e. avoiding the utterance of anything 'barbarous') demand it.
Beyond that, I also think there's room for some measure of vagueness in communication, most especially if the communication in question is a conversational exchange. Initial vagueness leaves room for exploration, and exploration can lead to more concrete, refined answers -- answers which may be very different than the ones which would have been produced had the party initiating the discussion attempted to articulate
himself with maximal simplicity and clarity in his opening statement. I employ this methodology myself at times, and I've generally been pleased with the results. Often I have some idea floating in my head which feels to me to have a concrete, clear essence, but which I feel I can't quite express with the same clarity, and a partner acting as a "midwife" can be profitable in "birthing" the idea, so long as they're participating with sincerity and good faith. "The great enemy of clear language is insincerity," is, in itself, an excellent quote. |
I like his rules, although I break no. 5 fairly often. I find myself going over my writing, at least when I am serious about it, and making things shorter and simpler before I publish anything, and have had pretty good results from it. As for no. 6, I guess it would depend on how he defines barbarous. |
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Plain Meaning
Joined: 18 Oct 2014
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| Posted: Wed Nov 18, 2015 5:08 pm Post subject: |
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| Rule 6 is Orwell winking as he breaks his rules. They're guidelines and they have to be broken sometimes, but writers need principles and the ones he presents are fine ones. Orwell was a much stronger writer than he ever was a thinker. |
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sirius black
Joined: 04 Jun 2010
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| Posted: Fri Nov 20, 2015 9:24 pm Post subject: |
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Bitch, moan, celebrate, whatever one wishes but potentially the sports programs, potentially the football and basketball teams have the most untapped power in college.
The real fear is that they are now recognizing it. Unless these schools are willing to forego tens of millions of dollars, hundreds of millions if you count the amount of alumni donations based on sports. Billions as a collective if you count the amount the NCAA brings in as a whole, then we had better start listening.
Women were simply asking for gender equality in pay and access and promotions. Gays were asking for the same thing as straight. These black students asking for the same equal freedom to learn in the same safe environment as others.
Simple really. The former two utilized their collective economic and political strength to achieve it. These students are doing the same. Its America at its finest.  |
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