Melissa Gilbert, Please Call the Office...

Our friends at Front Page have a delightful piece today on just how indoctrination is conducted in (of course) required college courses. In this case, we're talking about feminist prof Melissa Gilbert at Temple U, one of the schools that could be affected by Pennsylvania's increasing interest in David Horowitz' Academic Bill of Rights. Here's a snippet:

One required reading, Peggy McIntosh’s “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” summarizes the view Gilbert embraces:

It seems to me that obliviousness about white advantage, like obliviousness about male advantage, is kept strongly inculturated in the United States so as to maintain the myth of meritocracy, the myth that democratic choice is equally available to all. Keeping most people unaware that freedom of confident action is there for just a small number of people props up those in power and serves to keep power in the hands of the same groups that have most of it already.

McIntosh's unintentionally hilarious observation more accurately describes the adolescent, cliquish hiring and tenure procedures at nearly all American universities today, not the dubious proposition of "male advantage." Check out the useless neologism, "inculturated," which reminds us of our fave, "privileging," which always seems to refer to white males like Wonker who never had a chance in the tenure track. Note, too, the use of the first-person, so common in today's socialist treatises, at least the readable ones. Objective truth and the sense of authority truly learned professors used to possess seem here to have followed the well-known exit route of the dodo.

As you peruse the rest of Thomas Ryan's excellent piece, you'll duly note that things go downhill even from here, if indeed that is possible.

Truly, the American university system is in the hands of malicious idiots.