I'm a big fan of attacking the academy. As Richard Mitchell once noted, (and I paraphrase clumsily) you can't fix elementary education because it requires fixing the colleges that educate teachers, and they don't want to be fixed. They don't want to be fixed because they are filled with the least capable amoung us and will never admit that. His conclusion on the only effective way to fix the education system was something along the lines of 'kill all the teachers and burn all the schools'. The older I get, the more this seems like a reasonable approach.
A compromise would be to torch the faculties of education and require future teachers to complete real academic subjects (if there are any left). Independent courses in the practical technicalities of teaching could be a minor subject, and mentoring by successful teachers could be supported.
Generally speaking, in the two schools we've started, when we got an application from a candidate who had an 'education' degree, we'd toss it in file 13. If they didn't have a solid content area, and pass our two hour interview, they weren't hired. It is astonishing the number of functional illiterates who go into education.
Them being "functional illiterates" surprises me not at all. Have you watched any videos of these fat, ignorant, lazy, things speaking to their classes? It's appalling!
I've read their resumes, Bandit. I was cynical before helping start schools and hiring teachers. After reviewing over 1000 resumes in the first few years of starting the school (this was in the 90s mind you), I was beyond cynical.
There is no plumbing the depth of ignorance in the "education" profession.
Every time I drive by a local, newly built jr/sr high school in my area I think to myself, "This is little less than a temple to Satan, at this point."
My sister used to be on Harvard faculty. I didn’t think much of it at the time because i know our backgrounds. She complained most of the time about how pointless the place was as Larry Summers was just a bullshitter and the deans above her were lazy assholes. She was mostly pissed off when her boss told her “We don’t expect A-grade work here.” Obviously she began her time there during meritocracy and saw it transition to mediocrity.
But when I finally realized that the majority of her time was spent writing grant applications and finding donations, I blurted “ so basically you’re just doing a more sophisticated version of panhandling .” We don’t talk much anymore.
I entered the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1965. It was presumed that we had taken calculus in high school. I hadn't. Given that every class except English class used calculus, I had a hard time. I didn't flunk out, but switched schools after two years and became an English major. The new school was like playschool compared to an engineering college.
In my life since then, I've had one foot in the world of academia and one in the world of engineering. They are two entirely different worlds. I respect anyone who can think their way through an issue and make rational conclusions. Many liberal arts majors can do that. Engineers MUST do that, or people die.
Good point, but not entirely true. The engineer of the Titanic was on the Titanic. He quickly assessed the situation and realized his errors. Oops.
Roebling, the engineer of the Brooklyn Bridge, suffered from the bends as a result of time spent, with others, in the pressurized caisson. He became unable to visit the jobsite. His wife became the go-between concerning construction.
I'd credit the engineer in that case for risking getting bent to personally supervise and check the work. Perhaps their depth-and-time charts and decompression protocol needed some work.
Of course I had to look it up. At 80 feet underwater and equivalent air pressure to counteract the water column and atmospheric pressure, the PADI guideline for time spent at that depth on air with no decompression is only 30 minutes!
Let's presume they have a conscience. (I know some engineers. I'll vouch for them.) How would you feel if you made one simple misjudgment and it got a hundred people killed? Of course, that can happen, to some extent, with anyone. Think of the damage you can do driving a car. Or the fire you might start in your apartment complex because you forgot something on the stove.
I’m an engineer myself, so I am not intending to impugn engineers. But one of the things they pound into you at engineering school is that the decisions you make in your office affect hundreds or thousands, possibly millions of other people, and if you make a mistake, they’re the ones who will suffer the consequences. Your punishment comes later, either from your conscience, or from the courts.
You pay $82,000 per year to join a club. That club runs Wall Street and the Federal government. When entrance to the club is cronyism and not merit, members of the club are, let's say, not the brightest.
So you have the Great Financial Crisis where nit-wits created financial instruments no one understood, but had regulatory approval by other nit-wits who went to school with the first batch of nit-wits. You have unwinnable proxy wars being waged by foreign policy nit-wits ready to meat-grind non-nit-wit sons and daughters in video-game carnage using "over-the-horizon" drones guided from the Maryland suburbs. You have pandemic-related authoritarian edicts spewing from posh Napa Valley and Georgetown restaurants, locking down the non-elite hordes who simply want to attend school and church. You have Nobel Prize winning nit-wits telling us a $25 minimum wage is mandatory because of those greedy business owners while simultaneously cheering on the importation of tens of millions of illegal workers wiling to work off the books for a fraction of that $25.
It was discovered long ago that inbreeding creates horrific mutations. A lesson that seems to have been lost on our ruling Ivy League elites.
And, of course, the most aggravating circumstances of the Great Financial Crisis:
1- the middle class involuntary bailed out the gamblers, because the gamblers had paid off their friends in the federal government, and the feds continued to print money going forward, and,
2- the same gamblers remained in power to ostensibly "fix" the system (wink, wink) and very few were ever prosecuted.
....... What a racket! Go to the casino with someone else's money, if ya win, great, if ya lose, no problem, your losses are covered. And you'll never get in trouble. Just keep going to the casino, maybe try a different game next time.... Just have to be a member of the club.
They knew that the "financial instruments" were worthless frauds. It was as great joke to them, and a nasty trick on those who believed what they were told about how sound they were.
Pinocchio buried his five gold coins in a field because Fox and Cat told him they’d grow overnight into gold coin bearing trees. But I guess we know better than simple “fairy tales”…
What's missing from the discussion is that the American university business model is imploding, much in the same way the MSM imploded in the 2010s. Universities can't sustain their exorbitant prices in a world where information is free and widely available. (The entire MIT comp sci bachelor's degree is available free online).
Some schools already get it, and are undercutting the rest. An online, technical Masters degree at Georgia Tech costs only $10K.
Tenure has gotta go. As well as hiring foreign "professors" who can't speak English well enough to be understood by their students (looking at you, Chinese engineering profs).
Ms. Mar (Peking U. class of 1920 +/-) was one of my advanced calculus teachers at U of M. Sometimes a little difficult to understand, but well worth the effort. Bless her soul.
I'm hard of hearing, especially with mumblers and accents, but I recently had a Chinese doctor who quickly adjusted his delivery to accommodate me and I had no trouble whatsoever. No idea whether he was born here or there though.
I gotta say the first programming course i took in college was also a comp sciinstructor at my high scool - fortunately i never had the displeasure of meeting him in high school - my high school comp sci was taught bu the best teacher i ever had in my life. The other guy was absolutely useless and unhelpful and I nearly changed majors.
Instead i took the class over again and this time the instructor was a Chinese woman who did not speak well. But she knew how to teach and she actually gave a damn about students learning. An amazing experience and i took another course she taught the following year. What she lacked in speaking ability she made up for in honest effort.
We've hired non-native American teachers. But they need to have fluent English. And I'd say this is even more true for post secondary education. You are paying for it and you deserve a teacher who is good at what they do, AND speaks comprehensible English.
I'm glad you had a great Chinese teacher. I've known people who have had advisors who were foreign, didn't care about the students, and were hard to understand. Given the cost of American college and university educations, this is completely unacceptable.
If Harvard and Columbia had merely kept their campuses open and safe for all students, none of this would have happened. Blame the university administrations for not being adult enough to discipline the tantrumming two year olds. I’m happy they didn’t: this has been a long time coming, and is richly deserved.
Another great essay -- and especially delicious after having earlier today read Senor Gato Malo's piece. Thanks as well for introducing me to Inky and reminding me that William F Buckley Jr was a bit of a pompous ass.
Legacy admittance policies are one of the reasons the Ivy League schools have such large endowments. Buckley was a "man of his time" and should be judged accordingly, IMO. But why spend the money to go to an Ivy if you don't meet and associate with scions of the ruling class?
One observation: Reading Punch, Dickens, Matthew Arnold, Tennyson, and the law may be a narrow intellectual diet, but it's still more nutritious than the slop that is currently assigned to high school and university students.
Our great folly was failing to foresee the long-term consequences of allowing our universities to become colonised by a smart-arsed intelligentsia intent on ‘cleverly’ unpicking the threads that held Western civilisation together. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/the-madness-of-intelligentsias
That's not a "dark bag of ashes" you are using as a heart, Chris. You're being modest, you know you can fan those embers and roaring flame will follow.
Quote from the Dilettantism chapter: "The press was still the last resource of the educated poor who could not be artists and would not be tutors. Any man who was fit for nothing else could write an editorial or a criticism. The enormous mass of misinformation accumulated in ten years of nomad life could always be worked off on a helpless public, in diluted doses, if one could but secure a table in the corner of a newspaper office."
I read it a few years back & his description of the elite education of his day was hardly better than today’s — just a social club for the sons of the rich
Lol. I feel for you man! Put five kids through the university mill (I tear up a little when I think of the money as through lots of sacrifice and savings we helped them do it without incurring any debt). Only one of the five is professionally engaged related to their field of study. Knowing what I know now I would have worked hard to move them in a different direction. I read the article you referenced/linked to earlier today. It was a great piece. The days when universities bestowed credentials on someone that said they were capable of performing in the private sector are long over. Love what Palantir is doing and hope many others begin to adopt it.
My youngest did not go to college. Very high net worth for a 38 year old. He could easily never work again in his life and he and his family could live well. Second eldest did not finish high school, but got his GED. He took specialized computer training at a tech school and now is an electrician making over $100 an hour. Eldest went to university became a school teacher. BEd, a 5 year program here; BA plus a 1 year teaching program. Barely worked as a teacher. Has financially struggled. All 3 super bright. But my youngest is by far the most successful, and least formally educated.
Our last Site Super we hired is a very competent guy. Site super on concrete high-rises where one might have 200 guys from 20 different subs on site at any time. Very skilled position. Grade 8 education. We paid him $225,000 a year. He went straight into construction at 14 and moved his way up the ladder until by 40 he was making very good money.
Academia is full of social climbers and snobs who want to rub elbows with the rich and powerful, who are also snobs.This phenomenon is particularly prevalent at the “elite” schools.
The thing is - the whole model is basically obsolete. The schools are parodies of themselves now and we don’t need to spend $400K for a bachelor’s degree. These schools are essentially hedge funds and real estate developers with colleges attached to them. People go there to network.Their massive endowments allow them to generate billions in revenue every year through their investments. But we plebeians are supposed to subsidize these snobs’ Hamas encampments with our tax dollars.
I was going to say something similar quoting the Wolves and finance YouTuber: a hedge fund that offers classes. I recently learned that one of those classes was called culinary physics, and was taught by a chef. Apparently, you can just cobble together any old thing for an undergraduate degree.
In a biography of Woodrow Wilson that I read, the author discussed Wilson's disappointment with the caliber of academics at Princeton and his efforts upon becoming President there to make it more rigorous. The main issue was it was basically a country club for children of society... I guess there's nothing new under the sun.
Just one comment. What do the anti-censorship folks here have to say about the censorship of any criticism or critical commentary on the history of, teaching by, or current actions of Islamic leaders and those who support them. If anyone has such views they are not welcome on campus, in the media or even online at “approved “ sites. If jews or Christian students were out doing exactly what the Hamas movement is doing, they would not only be censored but rotting in jail.
I say that censorship of criticism and critical commentary of any group, be it Islamic, Judaic, Christian, atheist, or any other, should not be committed or promoted by our government.
Yes, people can deride Muhammad. Yes, they can scorn Jesus. Yes, they can condemn Israel for its genocide in Gaza, and they can dispute the story of the gas chambers.
Fights may break out, as is likely in an ethnically divided and politically polarized society. The duty of anyone in authority is to punish or forgive strictly according to the offense, and never according to who they are or what side they are on. The alternative is civil war, and the loss of our First Amendment protections.
I'm a big fan of attacking the academy. As Richard Mitchell once noted, (and I paraphrase clumsily) you can't fix elementary education because it requires fixing the colleges that educate teachers, and they don't want to be fixed. They don't want to be fixed because they are filled with the least capable amoung us and will never admit that. His conclusion on the only effective way to fix the education system was something along the lines of 'kill all the teachers and burn all the schools'. The older I get, the more this seems like a reasonable approach.
So, in some sense, teaching kids about butt sex does bring about a brighter future, assuming you have a large Pakistani population.
The British will be pleased to hear this.
A compromise would be to torch the faculties of education and require future teachers to complete real academic subjects (if there are any left). Independent courses in the practical technicalities of teaching could be a minor subject, and mentoring by successful teachers could be supported.
Generally speaking, in the two schools we've started, when we got an application from a candidate who had an 'education' degree, we'd toss it in file 13. If they didn't have a solid content area, and pass our two hour interview, they weren't hired. It is astonishing the number of functional illiterates who go into education.
If only parents understood this.
I think the kids know
Well, when the kids have to teach the class, yeah.....they do know.
Them being "functional illiterates" surprises me not at all. Have you watched any videos of these fat, ignorant, lazy, things speaking to their classes? It's appalling!
I've read their resumes, Bandit. I was cynical before helping start schools and hiring teachers. After reviewing over 1000 resumes in the first few years of starting the school (this was in the 90s mind you), I was beyond cynical.
There is no plumbing the depth of ignorance in the "education" profession.
I am in partial accord with that approach, but I certainly endorsed it a lot more when I was actually in the belly of the Secondary Education Beast.
Every time I drive by a local, newly built jr/sr high school in my area I think to myself, "This is little less than a temple to Satan, at this point."
And built with our funds…
Sadly, you're right.
Pol Pot tried this with the entire "educated" class and everybody got mad at him and called him bad names. ; )
My sister used to be on Harvard faculty. I didn’t think much of it at the time because i know our backgrounds. She complained most of the time about how pointless the place was as Larry Summers was just a bullshitter and the deans above her were lazy assholes. She was mostly pissed off when her boss told her “We don’t expect A-grade work here.” Obviously she began her time there during meritocracy and saw it transition to mediocrity.
But when I finally realized that the majority of her time was spent writing grant applications and finding donations, I blurted “ so basically you’re just doing a more sophisticated version of panhandling .” We don’t talk much anymore.
Meanwhile, at Georgia Tech they expect frosh to come in ready to dive into calculus, if they haven't done so already.
I entered the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1965. It was presumed that we had taken calculus in high school. I hadn't. Given that every class except English class used calculus, I had a hard time. I didn't flunk out, but switched schools after two years and became an English major. The new school was like playschool compared to an engineering college.
In my life since then, I've had one foot in the world of academia and one in the world of engineering. They are two entirely different worlds. I respect anyone who can think their way through an issue and make rational conclusions. Many liberal arts majors can do that. Engineers MUST do that, or people die.
Let’s be clear: if engineers don’t think their way through an issue, OTHER people die. Not the engineer.
Good point, but not entirely true. The engineer of the Titanic was on the Titanic. He quickly assessed the situation and realized his errors. Oops.
Roebling, the engineer of the Brooklyn Bridge, suffered from the bends as a result of time spent, with others, in the pressurized caisson. He became unable to visit the jobsite. His wife became the go-between concerning construction.
The exception proves the rule, I suppose; sometimes the engineer suffers the consequences directly, but it’s pretty rare.
I'd credit the engineer in that case for risking getting bent to personally supervise and check the work. Perhaps their depth-and-time charts and decompression protocol needed some work.
Of course I had to look it up. At 80 feet underwater and equivalent air pressure to counteract the water column and atmospheric pressure, the PADI guideline for time spent at that depth on air with no decompression is only 30 minutes!
Let's presume they have a conscience. (I know some engineers. I'll vouch for them.) How would you feel if you made one simple misjudgment and it got a hundred people killed? Of course, that can happen, to some extent, with anyone. Think of the damage you can do driving a car. Or the fire you might start in your apartment complex because you forgot something on the stove.
I’m an engineer myself, so I am not intending to impugn engineers. But one of the things they pound into you at engineering school is that the decisions you make in your office affect hundreds or thousands, possibly millions of other people, and if you make a mistake, they’re the ones who will suffer the consequences. Your punishment comes later, either from your conscience, or from the courts.
Kipling sized it up nicely. https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poem/poems_strain.htm
And so they should expect. Do they admit only students who can do so?
AFAIK they still do.
That is good to know.
My youngest son has been acepted into a masters program there.
You pay $82,000 per year to join a club. That club runs Wall Street and the Federal government. When entrance to the club is cronyism and not merit, members of the club are, let's say, not the brightest.
So you have the Great Financial Crisis where nit-wits created financial instruments no one understood, but had regulatory approval by other nit-wits who went to school with the first batch of nit-wits. You have unwinnable proxy wars being waged by foreign policy nit-wits ready to meat-grind non-nit-wit sons and daughters in video-game carnage using "over-the-horizon" drones guided from the Maryland suburbs. You have pandemic-related authoritarian edicts spewing from posh Napa Valley and Georgetown restaurants, locking down the non-elite hordes who simply want to attend school and church. You have Nobel Prize winning nit-wits telling us a $25 minimum wage is mandatory because of those greedy business owners while simultaneously cheering on the importation of tens of millions of illegal workers wiling to work off the books for a fraction of that $25.
It was discovered long ago that inbreeding creates horrific mutations. A lesson that seems to have been lost on our ruling Ivy League elites.
And, of course, the most aggravating circumstances of the Great Financial Crisis:
1- the middle class involuntary bailed out the gamblers, because the gamblers had paid off their friends in the federal government, and the feds continued to print money going forward, and,
2- the same gamblers remained in power to ostensibly "fix" the system (wink, wink) and very few were ever prosecuted.
....... What a racket! Go to the casino with someone else's money, if ya win, great, if ya lose, no problem, your losses are covered. And you'll never get in trouble. Just keep going to the casino, maybe try a different game next time.... Just have to be a member of the club.
They knew that the "financial instruments" were worthless frauds. It was as great joke to them, and a nasty trick on those who believed what they were told about how sound they were.
Pinocchio buried his five gold coins in a field because Fox and Cat told him they’d grow overnight into gold coin bearing trees. But I guess we know better than simple “fairy tales”…
at least some of the inbreeding will be eliminated by all the people cutting off their own genitals
What about the minors whose breasts or genitals were cut off. When can we expect the criminal surgeons who did it to have their genitals cut off?
What's missing from the discussion is that the American university business model is imploding, much in the same way the MSM imploded in the 2010s. Universities can't sustain their exorbitant prices in a world where information is free and widely available. (The entire MIT comp sci bachelor's degree is available free online).
Some schools already get it, and are undercutting the rest. An online, technical Masters degree at Georgia Tech costs only $10K.
Tenure has gotta go. As well as hiring foreign "professors" who can't speak English well enough to be understood by their students (looking at you, Chinese engineering profs).
Ms. Mar (Peking U. class of 1920 +/-) was one of my advanced calculus teachers at U of M. Sometimes a little difficult to understand, but well worth the effort. Bless her soul.
I must say I could easily understand my Chinese calculus professor.
I'm hard of hearing, especially with mumblers and accents, but I recently had a Chinese doctor who quickly adjusted his delivery to accommodate me and I had no trouble whatsoever. No idea whether he was born here or there though.
I gotta say the first programming course i took in college was also a comp sciinstructor at my high scool - fortunately i never had the displeasure of meeting him in high school - my high school comp sci was taught bu the best teacher i ever had in my life. The other guy was absolutely useless and unhelpful and I nearly changed majors.
Instead i took the class over again and this time the instructor was a Chinese woman who did not speak well. But she knew how to teach and she actually gave a damn about students learning. An amazing experience and i took another course she taught the following year. What she lacked in speaking ability she made up for in honest effort.
We've hired non-native American teachers. But they need to have fluent English. And I'd say this is even more true for post secondary education. You are paying for it and you deserve a teacher who is good at what they do, AND speaks comprehensible English.
I'm glad you had a great Chinese teacher. I've known people who have had advisors who were foreign, didn't care about the students, and were hard to understand. Given the cost of American college and university educations, this is completely unacceptable.
If Harvard and Columbia had merely kept their campuses open and safe for all students, none of this would have happened. Blame the university administrations for not being adult enough to discipline the tantrumming two year olds. I’m happy they didn’t: this has been a long time coming, and is richly deserved.
How could they be adult enough? They agree with the kids.
Another great essay -- and especially delicious after having earlier today read Senor Gato Malo's piece. Thanks as well for introducing me to Inky and reminding me that William F Buckley Jr was a bit of a pompous ass.
Legacy admittance policies are one of the reasons the Ivy League schools have such large endowments. Buckley was a "man of his time" and should be judged accordingly, IMO. But why spend the money to go to an Ivy if you don't meet and associate with scions of the ruling class?
Bit? My, you understate. But in some ways he was kind of likable.
I thought he was hilarious on Johnny Carson, when I was a kid. (If I'm remembering the correct Buckley, after all these years.)
Dude did love using ten-dollar words where a two-dollar word would suffice. Hell, he loved hundred-dollar words nobody ever says.
One observation: Reading Punch, Dickens, Matthew Arnold, Tennyson, and the law may be a narrow intellectual diet, but it's still more nutritious than the slop that is currently assigned to high school and university students.
"We have the United States of America. The rest of you are just visiting."
Precisely.
Our great folly was failing to foresee the long-term consequences of allowing our universities to become colonised by a smart-arsed intelligentsia intent on ‘cleverly’ unpicking the threads that held Western civilisation together. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/the-madness-of-intelligentsias
That's not a "dark bag of ashes" you are using as a heart, Chris. You're being modest, you know you can fan those embers and roaring flame will follow.
Wait...did you write the lyrics to that Spinners song?
"There's always a chance
A tiny spark will remain, yeah
And sparks turn into flames
And love can burn once again but I know you know
"Whenever you call me, I'll be there
Whenever you want me, I'll be there
Whenever you need me, I'll be there
I'll be around, yeah"
A fave from my (distant) youth.
Always a great song!
Chris Bray—Re: "Look past the Orange Distraction." That just might become my new motto.
PS The Education of Henry Adams is one of my favorite American books of all time. Your post reminds me, I need to schedule a re-read.
Quote from the Dilettantism chapter: "The press was still the last resource of the educated poor who could not be artists and would not be tutors. Any man who was fit for nothing else could write an editorial or a criticism. The enormous mass of misinformation accumulated in ten years of nomad life could always be worked off on a helpless public, in diluted doses, if one could but secure a table in the corner of a newspaper office."
The chapter on his time at Harvard is all of roughly 4% of the book.
I read it a few years back & his description of the elite education of his day was hardly better than today’s — just a social club for the sons of the rich
On a related note Chris, how goes the university visits with your daughter? 😃
You can maybe begin to get a sense.
Lol. I feel for you man! Put five kids through the university mill (I tear up a little when I think of the money as through lots of sacrifice and savings we helped them do it without incurring any debt). Only one of the five is professionally engaged related to their field of study. Knowing what I know now I would have worked hard to move them in a different direction. I read the article you referenced/linked to earlier today. It was a great piece. The days when universities bestowed credentials on someone that said they were capable of performing in the private sector are long over. Love what Palantir is doing and hope many others begin to adopt it.
My youngest did not go to college. Very high net worth for a 38 year old. He could easily never work again in his life and he and his family could live well. Second eldest did not finish high school, but got his GED. He took specialized computer training at a tech school and now is an electrician making over $100 an hour. Eldest went to university became a school teacher. BEd, a 5 year program here; BA plus a 1 year teaching program. Barely worked as a teacher. Has financially struggled. All 3 super bright. But my youngest is by far the most successful, and least formally educated.
College, in general, is a scam. Other paths, while socially discouraged or worse, can and will lead to success in life.
Our last Site Super we hired is a very competent guy. Site super on concrete high-rises where one might have 200 guys from 20 different subs on site at any time. Very skilled position. Grade 8 education. We paid him $225,000 a year. He went straight into construction at 14 and moved his way up the ladder until by 40 he was making very good money.
LOL.
Academia is full of social climbers and snobs who want to rub elbows with the rich and powerful, who are also snobs.This phenomenon is particularly prevalent at the “elite” schools.
The thing is - the whole model is basically obsolete. The schools are parodies of themselves now and we don’t need to spend $400K for a bachelor’s degree. These schools are essentially hedge funds and real estate developers with colleges attached to them. People go there to network.Their massive endowments allow them to generate billions in revenue every year through their investments. But we plebeians are supposed to subsidize these snobs’ Hamas encampments with our tax dollars.
F that.
I was going to say something similar quoting the Wolves and finance YouTuber: a hedge fund that offers classes. I recently learned that one of those classes was called culinary physics, and was taught by a chef. Apparently, you can just cobble together any old thing for an undergraduate degree.
In a biography of Woodrow Wilson that I read, the author discussed Wilson's disappointment with the caliber of academics at Princeton and his efforts upon becoming President there to make it more rigorous. The main issue was it was basically a country club for children of society... I guess there's nothing new under the sun.
Just one comment. What do the anti-censorship folks here have to say about the censorship of any criticism or critical commentary on the history of, teaching by, or current actions of Islamic leaders and those who support them. If anyone has such views they are not welcome on campus, in the media or even online at “approved “ sites. If jews or Christian students were out doing exactly what the Hamas movement is doing, they would not only be censored but rotting in jail.
I say that censorship of criticism and critical commentary of any group, be it Islamic, Judaic, Christian, atheist, or any other, should not be committed or promoted by our government.
Yes, people can deride Muhammad. Yes, they can scorn Jesus. Yes, they can condemn Israel for its genocide in Gaza, and they can dispute the story of the gas chambers.
Fights may break out, as is likely in an ethnically divided and politically polarized society. The duty of anyone in authority is to punish or forgive strictly according to the offense, and never according to who they are or what side they are on. The alternative is civil war, and the loss of our First Amendment protections.
That’s a nice scenario but can’t find anyone who is making fun of Mohammed these days. Every other religion is open game but Islam, not so much.
Only if you want to lose your head. 😱 🔪😵☠