Academia, Love Me Back

The problem here is that you are effectively punishing students who have done nothing wrong. This is a great way to get an uncooperative class who don't really care about the work beyond the grade they get at the end.

Her post is largely vacuous and superficial. Why? Because it doesn't really provide any evidence that would help the reader understand what really happened. Most of it consists of descriptions of her feelings, uncorroborated accusations, tired ideological slogans, a pervasive self-pity, and the presumption of racism. Add to that the other interesting bits in the article such as how she demands to be recognized as an "academic" even though she isn't even a graduate student. What delusion! The topic of the essay also suggests she's been indoctrinated with the ideology of resentment, one that recently has taken on a frightening degree of irrationality on college campuses in the US. Many of these people require psychological help and should not be roaming around college campuses where they quickly find convenient scapegoats for their issues and rationalize their choices.

Also, it's not like she's going against the grain here. Academia, especially where the humanities are concerned, is overwhelmingly leftist in this country. An accusation of racism in one of these departments is socially damning. If she were a conservative Catholic arguing in defense of sexual morality during a gender studies class at one of our glorified ivy league universities or women's colleges, then I'd say she's got courage. However, this is not the case. Her choice of language indicates that she is riding briskly and blandly on the profitable coattails of the oppression gravy train. Whether it is calculated or merely the result of intellectual error upon intellectual error is another matter altogether.

Bottom line: these shows of support she's receiving are not only inappropriate, but presumptuous. This idea that we must believe what people say on their own authority, or based on their feelings (constrained by the prevailing ethos, of course), with no evidence is a worrying trend in left-leaning humanities departments.

I've come across jerk teachers myself. I have been suspected of plagiarism when my essays exceeded the average length for the class. I've had arrogant teachers presume things in ways that defy common sense. Just because some teacher is an ass (and for the purposes of this post I'll grant her that much) doesn't mean there's any reason to invoke all of that baggage. Victimization ideology is a pathological condition that's being propagated by leftist academics that does severe harm to those concerned. It's used for political gain in the Alinsky style and has the effect of entrenching poverty and cultural pathologies. Sure, upper middle class white (or occasionally black, etc) academics can generate this vile substance with no effect on them, but it does have a real affect on those whom it concerns.

This is ridiculous. I'm not at all a native speaker, but after a few years in academia, I learnt to use "hence," in that exact same way

These sort of discussions always bother me, for a few reasons

1. There's no such thing as a single reason for doing anything. Humans are too complex for that. So to frame this as a question of "she did it because of race" vs "race has nothing to do with it" is naive at best.

2. It's more or less impossible for anyone to be unaffected by race. Sociology professors are no exception. When you meet someone you've never met before, you can't (no matter how hard your try) encounter a "blank slate" of a person. Your brain would be dangerously inefficient if you didn't jump to conclusions for superficial reasons literally all the time.

Taken together, this means:

3. Clearly race had something to do with it. This shouldn't be a question. The question is exactly how much did it have to do with it.

That's a great link, thank you!