Who is going to expose the academic rot?" You, Janice are doing a stellar job of it, but the minds of students have been disabled before the end of high school. I just listen to my grandchildren who receive sound wisdom at home but come home from school and say things that demonstrate the power of indoctrination and peer power over sound parenting. However, this not new. I think my grandchildren will pull through, but only because their parents are fully engaged. Sadly, they are a tiny minority.
Who runs the schools? Folks who were trained in university faculties of education. Faculties of education, every weak on real academics, are almost everywhere the most radical and ideological of faculties.
The federal government, by doling out cash with strings attached, to school districts that, on paper, are under local control, has managed to inflict conformity to an incoherent ideology nationwide. Local school boards should observe and emulate the ways that private schools manage to provide superior education for a fraction of the per-student expenditures of public schools. Then they could confidently turn down the federal cash and provide what the kids need - reading, writing and arithmetic (also more hands-on skills, kids of the computer era are reaching adulthood with a worrying lack of fine motor skills necessary for many important jobs, such as surgeons).
At California State University, East Bay (based in Hayward, CA) they had (pr maybe still have) a program to "eradicate whiteness". They were paying staff $1200 stipends to participate in thiat racist program. They also have optional separate race graduation ceremonies for Blacks, Hispanics and Asians - but not Whites.
Thank you. Worse still is the fact that the State of California Civil Rights Department didn't reply to me, after I brought this hate to their attention.
Nah, if you look at the totality of the situation, in the longer run (per Hazlitt, "Economics in One Lesson"), mixing politics with money leaves you with only politics at the end. Politicians reduce the overall wealth of nations... even though they personally do quite well from it.
DEI is a trojan horse, first and foremost because the United States IS diverse. So what's the push to make "diverse" what already IS diverse?
I'm tail end of the baby boom and even when growing up in a suburb of Chicago, there were "diverse" people in our milieu that represented their overall percentage of the population. They were NOT "marginalized" either, unless you consider making two black students our Prom King and Queen a form of "marginalization."
I have numerous anecdotes on various DEI blunders that I've witnessed over the years, fodder for my Substack. Here's a piece that infers why no one told Claudine Gay to get rid of the plagiarism before she submitted her dissertation:
Another "offensive" story involves the diverse restaurant where I served pizza in the 80s, which traded its Mexican busboys for black kids from the Projects, with disastrous results. It's actually quite funny -- they practically paid the Mexicans' airfare to return after the black kids from the Projects debacle.
It's unfortunate, because I believe we all want to see people succeed, but the crux of DEI is to let some people get by with piss poor performance, in all too many cases, which isn't helpful to the "diverse" in any way, shape, or form. It merely teaches them that mediocrity is good enough, that skin color is merit enough, which perpetuates a true inability to compete.
The irony of DEI is it will destabilize and ultimately destroy multicultural societies all the quicker. They are certainly creating very deep resentment among white men, the group that actually built the first world and maintains it. That is dangerous, as we are now finding out.
My perception is that so far, the response of white men (all men) is remarkably free of resentment. I'll never forget watching a huge group of mostly young white male students at a Milo Yiannopoulos event at De Paul University (probably around 2015) at which some BLM protesters caused a ruckus, preventing Milo from speaking, even mildly assaulting Milo on stage. I couldn't believe the patience of these allegedly privileged, 'arrogant' fellows. Most sat quietly, a little bemused. I was similarly struck by the geniality and open-mindedness of most young men, white and non-white, in my classes, listening all day to propaganda at uni about how dangerous and disgusting they were. I wouldn't be as slow to anger, as sincerely curious, as hopeful of a good resolution.
I agree. That is a European trait, and is especially present in Northern Europeans.
They are slow to anger. The Finns are the slowest. So much so they appear very accommodating.
But everyone has a threshold. And our cultural enemies are poor students of history. When Northern Europeans do snap things change rapidly. This is the flip side of reasonableness. When you have been very gracious, and then abused, you are not forgiving. This is what I fear is coming in Europe and North America.
This is my fear. The War on Men is hot right now and still we patiently stand by. Its as if the narcissistic demand for attention being unmet will demand even greater provocation. left to their own devices, men will be "fine" (not actually fine but WAY better than women are doing right now) and can ride it out, but this very forbearance is "provoking" more and more draconian measures by feminists.
Janice, unfortunately I share your bleak prognosis. DEI is deeply entrenched, far more dearly loved by most academics than the abstract principles of merit and objectivity that guided universities since the Enlightenment. This is because DEI becomes a personal mission, providing existential life meaning for its adherents. I foresee no possibility of large scale repudiation of DEI until its lies and inconsistencies lead to massive social consequences that can no longer be hid. By that time, it is an open question whether anything of our heritage will remain to be saved.
"DEI becomes a personal mission, providing existential life meaning for its adherents."
Brilliant point about hidden psychological forces. Assuaging the guilt about one's abundance is accomplished by a sanctimonious decrying of the "oppression" supposedly by the successful ones. Defending that mental crutch becomes existential to preserve the fairytale, lest the painful guilt returns.
I think it is even worse than that. The late professor Noel Ignatiev was quoted as saying, "If you are a white male, you don't deserve to live. You are a cancer, you're a disease, white males have never contributed anything positive to the world!"
Yes, in my experience a fair fraction of the U.S. faculty and their students hold that opinion. They intimidate everyone else from offering a different point of view. So you get Claudine Gay who is simply the current visible example.
Another 10-star analysis by the esteemed Janice F. Her skepticism about the predicted end of DEI is solidly grounded in an unsurpassed understanding of the academic mindset.
Yes, I think that's true, but he does go out of his way in his Twitter statement to deplore anti-white racism and anti-male prejudice, and even downplays the anti-Israel issue that first piqued his interest, so I admire that in his statement.
That is his right. He can be most concerned about what is most important to him. However, the counter to that is the women University heads came across as being very stupid. They couldn’t think on their feet and gave canned answers they thought would get them through their ordeal. In fact the canned answer that calling for genocide is against the rules depending on the context is absurd. This drew attention to their other liabilities. In Claudine Gay’s case her lack of academic chops.
Israel wasn't "criticised," it suffered an attack featuring extreme atrocities, a pogrom comparable to the worst in Eastern Europe of old and the Muslim world. American and Canadian students and professors celebrated, and attacked Jewish students. Maybe that is all fine with you, Megan, so just pretend it has not been happening.
Oh please spare me, Gaza is a concentration camp, IDF soldiers shoot children, and the IDF has mass murdered 10,000 women and children in the last 3 months. Has it ever occurred to you the reason people who support Zionism are literally hated by billions of people around the world is your serial atrocious genocidal ethno-nationalist behavior?
My advice to Zionists stop being land thieving genocidal monsters, and learn to live in peace with your neighbors within your recognized under international law 1967 green line borders unless you want tragic history to repeat itself and this time no one comes to rescue you!
Do you understand in any way WHY you are deeply hated in the world? It's the giant concentration camp in Gaza and laughing, smirking and trying to hand wave away the mass murder of women and children with small hat propaganda no one believes anymore. You aren't the victims you are horrible aggressive mass murdering land thieves, and everyone knows it now, you no longer control the media!
Nice crass barely sentient school yard taunts, you are legit retarded aren't you?
If you like the mass murder of women and children to steal land so much, leave my country immediately and move to Isra-Hell. I do not support one American soldier dying or spending one American dime to pay for Israel's genocide. If you must support the monstrosity of mass murder of women and children to steal their land like literally Hitler did, do it on your own dime, and with some skin in the game living in the country commiting that genocide. Do not do it in a cowardly fashion from an ocean away and picking my pocket to pay for your people's war crime.
I'm sure the Israelis, who have a documented and archaeological proven presence in the Levant of about 3000 yrs, are quaking in their boots at your childish threat of rape, torture, murder and kidnapping.
Most Levantine Arabs are recent interlopers, or remnants of mediaeval Mohammedan invasion.
Concentration camps are not self governing, like Gaza under Hamas.
Good one Khzar Turk, everything you say is pure projection you fake "Semite." The irony is the Palestinians are much more closely related to the Jews of the old testament, than you are East European interlopers are. Stop lying about everything and mass murdering women and children to steal land, it isn't a good look I assure you.
Check out my four deeply researched books on the subject. When you have the chutzpah, staying power, and intellectual acumen to distinguish fake videos from real data and to write a book after several years of meticulous study and experience in the field, then get back to me. Meanwhile, hold your gasses. At present, you are not a serious interlocutor.
Fake videos LOL, the IDF is known for lying, that's why you lost at the IJC and the country you shill for was told to stop commiting genocide immediately. Your certificates in a fake system mean nothing to me. The people who pushed the poison shots on us had all kinds of meaningless certifications as well. Take your fake certificates and shove them up your ass genocide advocate.
Even if what you say is perfectly true, it doesn't justify mass murder of innocent civillians with high explosives, and collective punishment of those who remain through starvation and terror.
Hamas is entirely responsible for the hell that it has brought down on the people it is supposed to govern. Hamas exacerbates the side effects of warfare by using the Gazan population as human shields, refusing the let them leave combat areas, even shooting those who try to leave. In spite of Hamas's dirty deeds, the fatality rate of the civilian population is much lower than in most wars, because Israel makes every effort to spare the civilian population, something it does better than any army in the world. https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20343/gaza-civilian-deaths
Repeating Israeli propaganda does not make it true. By "hell" I suppose you mean the bombs, shells, bullets, and lack of food and water, which are all entirely within Israel's control.
Even if we were to accept your allegation that Hamas militants use their own families as human shields, it still would not justify Israel's deliberate, indiscriminate murder of innocent civilians, many of them children, just to get at Hamas militants. It is akin to blowing up a bank full of hostages just to be sure of killing the bank robbers.
The atrocities allegedly committed by Hamas in this most recent conflict have a precedent in the attrocities committed by Jewish paramilitaries during the 1948 war. Israel cannot claim the moral high ground, especially since it was the dispossession of Palestinians by Zionist European Jews that initiated the cycle of violence that has now persisted for more than a century.
Israel has always been a racist colonial state since it was founded on the dispossession of the Arabs, and continues to support the expansion of illegal Jewish settlements. No amount of lies and spin will alter that fact.
You have memorized the Palestinian narrative well. Most of it is lies, and the rest is the consequences of their own choices. Remember when, after Israel turned Gaza entirely over to the Palestinians, it was going to become the Singapore of the Mediterranean? Instead it chose to be the Islamic State of the Mediterranean. Bad choices lead to bad results.
Much like how the Jews fabricated their story concerning the holocaust. There's literally zero evidence to corroborate this event. And those who questioned jt are incarcerated.
What 'Palestinian narrative'? I arrived independently at my conclusions by studying history and travelling through Israel/Palestine to better understand the perspectives of Israelis and Palestinians. The heart of the ongoing conflict is the injustice perpetrated by European Jews on the Arabs in the name of Zionism, a racist colonial ideology. Gaza is what it is because Israel turned it into an open-air prison, which provided ideal conditions for Hamas to flourish. Can you not understand why Palestinians are angry and some are bent on revenge? Would you like to be indefinitely confined to a prison simply because of your race? Israel stubbornly refuses to take responsibility for its actions, hiding behind its Jewish identity in order to claim victim status whenever it is challenged. If you think Israel can keep playing the victim card for all eternity to excuse its persecution of the Palestinians then you are mistaken.
The main stumbling block to peace is the Jewish victim complex, by which I mean the failure of many Jews to understand that they can just as easily be oppressors as victims. The same moral failing is common to every individual who chooses to engage in identity politics.
Coincidentally, I was just reading some information on the history of the Van Diemens Land Company in Tasmania two centuries ago and they used similar language to justify the genocide of Tasmanian Aborigines.
I think DEI will destroy itself. It doesn't need helped along.
By its nature diversity as a focus creates the conditions for its own downfall. Claudine Gay is a case in point. Aside from the plagiarism, she was by any measure a total nonentity, someone who shouldn't even be at a community college never mind a leading university. When you remove competency as a factor, as diversity hiring always does, other factors come in to play. Different kinds of people get on. Gay quite literally wouldn't have been there had she not been black. She represents failure of diversity, and a very visible one.
So the diversity hires themselves, like Claudine Gay, will act as the poster children for the whole debacle. The university professors can cling to it all they like but most of the world looks at them like the morons they clearly are, being left behind by the competent and the able. The world laughs as the West lets the lunatics destroy the asylum.
Yes, but what terrible destruction of a heritage that deserved to be cherished. It can be rediscovered in time, perhaps, but a great deal of damage will have been done.
I do not believe we can prevent the destruction now. The midwit class are firmly in place in academia, the civil service and the professional classes. They are today's influencers and decision makers. And enough of them accept the mantra or at least go along with it.
They of course will be destroyed along with the rest of us. But that is what happens to civilizations. Only the strong survive. Feminism is an example of the whole. Trash the people you rely on for protection, decry them as primitive violent brutes, then watch as the men walk away, abused and beaten, then real primitives appear on the horizon. This is already happening. It is self-destructive, but probably necessary. No one thinks Muslim immigrant will uphold feminist principles, for example, yet feminism is silent.
Hey Spiff, I'm with you. We can be concerned about our civilization past our own individual expiration dates. In fact, we must be, as our civilization was built by generations of people sharing that concern.
Turning up the flame of DEI until it consumes itself is the only solution I can foresee. Let’s encourage their every bad idea and call for, no, demand, an even more diverse hiring agenda. Intellectual Diversity hasn’t been properly addressed. The entire bell curve must be proportionally represented! Perhaps bad ideas need to be let to run their course. Like you said, the private universities and online courses can take on the mantle of actual education. Let the Marxist DEI extremists spiral into interracial chaos while serious people get on with building a functioning society.
I am a fan of this pseudo-accelerationist approach. Crank it up to 11. Where are the Afro-Mongolian dwarves? Why are there any testicles in this room? White women must be purged from all public spaces etc.
I think the current internal "war" of feminism, between Trans and Terf, illustrates this. As the debate grows to include "multiple genders" and ever greater "intersectionality" the Alice in Wonderland absurdities become more apparent. In a real sense the very success of feminism and its offshoots has been the lack of awareness of its idiocies beyond Universities and the "elite" they supply. The wider public simply accepting that such things are about being nice to women or "minorities" up till recently. In a way the success and attempts to spread this into schools and work has exposed far more people to the reality of an ideology that actually hates ordinary everyday folk. In a sense the "woke" have started to awaken the wider public. I suspect many "donors" had trundled along thinking their Alma Mater was still the place they knew, until this issue exposed the reality of diversity appointments, and double standards.
I think this is very insightful. Most accept feminism, anti-racism and all the rest because their experience of it is largely the PR-driven aspect. Being nice to women, not abusing minorities etc. Things most people approve of.
But I am seeing growing signs people see the reality. And this has a double whammy effect. If you bought into the being nice aspect, it is even more of a shock to be on the receiving end of the hate. Here in the UK we definitely see the feminists take it too far and even women are pulling away. Just as common are immigrants jumping on the anti-white bandwagon and trashing the country that game them a home. People find that especially hard to stomach, the lack of gratitude of foreigners on the dole whose kids we feed and clothe.
We need much more exposure of the actual agendas at play.
One example of this, here in greater Manchester, is private hire taxis. There has been a huge influx of private hire taxis registered in Wolverhampton. Generally in the UK Taxis and their drivers are registered and can ply their trade by and in the local authority area. Wolverhampton has registered over 12% of its local population (90 miles away from Manchester) it is clearly unlikely 12% of any borough's population will be taxi drivers, and the sheer numbers suggest the supposed checks to be registered are likely to have been perfunctory. Net result local Taxi drivers face competition from "asian" drivers flooding the local market, who they know have not met the standards required of them and are using a "loophole" abetted by a Council in the midlands. Even our PC Labour Mayor has highlighted this, though carefully avoiding mentioning the very obvious ethnicity issue.
is interesting. I can't help think that the triumph of feminism, now a part of the school curriculum and effectively the orthodoxy of the establishment, will be its undoing. For rather than simply being nice to women, with the details of the ideology confined to the Universities and Public Services changing laws and policy relatively unseen by the public. Now every schoolboy is exposed to the idea that they are by birth tainted by an original sin that requires they collude with applying arbitrary discrimination against themselves including draconian measures for "looking" or "unwanted compliments". Added to the very public civil war within feminism about Trans and Terf. and one can see the former cloak of just being about being nice to girls and women is looking less and less tenable. Not that this will affect the bumbling old farts, whose misplaced chivalry and hopelessly rosy view of female human nature I'm sure was nurtured in Public schools far from the reality of actual teenage girls in all their viciousness ,as they continue to white knight. But younger generations of young men will increasingly at least see the uncompromisingly hostile nature of feminism to them and their aspirations in life. Which still are basically, get a good job/trade/profession, attract a mate and form a family with a nice home, holidays and some treats. All attitude surveys still show both sexes aspire to much the same, though each time the feminists demand women are "educated" out of such reactionary ideas (as usual they are completely uninterested in what young men think).
I spent a few years on the Twitter TERF threads. The TERFs are as misandrist and deranged as the trannies. They honestly blame men for it all. I was in the LGB community as many FtMs were demanding "acceptance" and straight and gay men who did not comply were vilified. The gaslighting by these so called sane (still marxist) feminists (going on about the gender pay gap IS just plain old economic, not even cultural, marxism) showed me they were no different, and had simply been the first major camp of lefties to get bit by their own antiscience, communists BS.
While “purging DEI” may indeed be daunting and distant, that still may be the easy part, because once the diversity crowd has been shown the door, whom do you replace them with?
This project has been going full steam for, as Janice says, at least two generations, really a full adult human lifetime or more. It’s not like there are masses of well-trained scholars out there working other jobs or in cryosleep pods that we can just slide into place once sanity returns.
Intellectual continuity going back centuries has been severed. There’s no manual on how to fix this, and the situation continues to worsen every year as legitimate scholarship fades further from living memory.
While DEI has certainly hurt the hard sciences and retarded their progress, I think they can recover. But how to restore a university history department, when there are no longer real historians? – same question for art history, English, sociology.
I know it’s not as black and white as that, but I don’t think people appreciate how deep the hole we’ve dug, and are still digging, is.
Yes, so much the case. When I was at the U of Saskatchewan in the early 2000s (where, despite what I've said above, there were many fine people), one of my beloved colleagues talked about this problem. He tried to see the humorous side, talking about how there was a whole generation supposed literary scholars who had lost touch with the canon of great literature (which had already then been dismantled). He was noticing some young scholars trying to figure out who these writers were: hey, there's this interesting poet, John Dryden, or this interesting novelist, Samuel Richardson. So much would have to be started over from scratch. What a waste; how much has been stolen from us in the name of liberation.
I was at a conference once, and a graduate student about 10 years my junior expressed her dissatisfaction with the destruction of the canon, and one of my Marxist colleagues sneered at her and suggested that her attitude was responsible for untold suffering. This was a man who had received a classical education in Scotland and then came to Canada and wrecked it all in the name of "decolonization" and "Indigenization." The fact is that if one isn't taught it, it's very difficult (not impossible, but difficult) to teach oneself.
It's about the envious destroying what they can never come close to equaling rather than the non-envious appreciation of genius. "Well Mr. Shakespeare, you are dead and I am here teaching a course on your work. We will see who comes out on top."
I don't know if the institutions where DEI has flourished need to be replaced with similarly large and static institutions. Thanks to technology, much of the information that one formerly had to physically access by going to archives is readily available online. Also, tech companies report they have to train fresh college graduates from the ground up, since what they acquired at college is already out-of-date (professors don't have to keep up with the latest innovations, especially if they have tenure). These institutions had had their enrollments bloated for decades because employers demanded unnecessary credentials, leading to many middle class kids going to college not for the learning but for the piece of paper.
We might end up with education and job training being more decentralized. Maybe someone would spend a couple of months on intensive focus on cutting edge technology instead of 4 years where 1/4 of the courses are required to be outside one's major.
Withdrawing is an option, too. There's plenty of money to be made fixing things plumbers, electricians, carpenters, etc., are in short supply, in part due to generations of parents seeing college as their kid's ticket to a bright future.
On your last point, in this country (UK) the gap you identify in your last paragraph was filled by men from Poland and the Baltic republics from 2008. So as our number of Universities ballooned the skills gap was filled by importing hundreds of thousands of skilled men, from the former soviet bloc in the EU. The pandemic and "brexit" reopened this gap. Now of course there is panic as the increasing prosperity in Eastern europe means many men went home and the UK seems less attractive. Of course the logical course, promoting these professions to boys and young men and training them, is closed by DEI because what we have to do is spend money promoting them to girls. A complete waste because such has failed for decades (way back in 1975 when I left school there was a huge campaign to get girls into these trades and professions under a Labour government "Rosey the rivetter" and of course this has continued since. Yet still females are a tiny proportion in the industries (and usually not in the "coal face" jobs). Result significant skills shortages!
Sadly, I fear Janice is right about the staying power of DEI. The reality is that the idea of judging people by group membership is very ancient and persists despite the bloodshed of the US Civil War and the wisdom of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr's Dream of a colorblind society. The reason the Democrat party fell so naturally into this way of thinking is that it was the core that allowed their believe in slavery and Jim Crow to exist. Their dominance in the academic system has doomed academia to be on the wrong side of history as surely as if it was flying the confederate battle flag from every campus. I saw this within my own heavily academic family with the election of Barack Obama in 2008. These good liberal Democrats were practically having a religious experience at the election of a black president, as if it somehow had absolved them of all the sins they perceived they had been carrying. My response that Obama was not the first black candidate I voted for for president and that I had NOT voted for him because his racist ideology and policies were contrary to achieving Dr. King's Dream, was incomprehensible to them. Unlike most of these folks, I had grown up in a biracial and multicultural family and had long discarded the liberal white guilt that the rest of my family desperately sought divine intervention to relieve. Watching them it finally occurred to me that none of them is really about equality or achieving Dr. King's Dream. It's about feeling good about themselves and absolution from their perceived sins. This is why virtue signaling is so important to them...even if it comes at the expense of actually achieving something concrete on the issue in question.
So how does academia recover? Sadly, I think the whole thing may need to burn to the ground and be fully replaced with new institutions with entirely new employees. Certainly there are a small number of competent academics who have stood true to the mission of academia who could be brought into new institutions. The majority, however, are either too tainted to be salvaged or have demonstrated they are too self absorbed, self motivated or just too timid to be given any sort of position in the reformed/new institutions. A big way to accelerate this transition would be to completely defund academia due to its legacy of DEI hiring. That means no more federal or state funds for campuses, loans/financial aid for students or research grants. Reserve those resources fro the new institutions which would have to be built from entirely new hires. Thoughts?
I think that DEI might be a sort of last-straw that sparks massive change - change that is necessary not only because of the incoherent engine of conflict that is DEI, but also the bloat that has resulted from decades of enrollment being inflated by people who seek not education but credentials to get jobs that clearly do not require that level of education.
Technology may also force change, as tech companies find they have to start their training of fresh college graduates from scratch, because what's taught at university is not cutting edge. Tech also allows people to access information easily that once required physically going to where documents were stored.
While I was poking around the internet this morning to see what enrollment trends are like at woke vs. non-woke institutions, I was surprised to find that there has been a long trend of declining enrollment at US colleges dating back to 2009. Perhaps colleges will go the way of Bud Light and their poster-boy Dylan Mulvaney.
I thinks some of this may indeed be in the works. The working class of all ethnic groups is thoroughly disgusted by what it is going on and are increasingly willing to push back. Academia is the taxpayer funded play/training ground of the elites. Perhaps it is time to kill the beast that sullies the golden eggs. That will mean not just abstaining from attendance of those institutions, but creating new institutions to meet the actual societal needs. It also means defunding the current institutions...and frankly, reclaiming their physical and fiscal assets for their original purposes. Imagine how much good could be done by liquidating Harvard's endowment?
I think there may never be a full replacement of these institutions, since the bloat began before the DEI as middle class kids went to college for diplomas to get them jobs that didn't require 4 years of education.
I think the replacements for universities will be far more flexible and less centralized, as a lot of the information that used to require physically accessing archives is now available online. Perhaps there will be small education options focused on short-term high intensity studies on the latest tech or equipment, instead of an expensive 4 year sojourn, but also 1/4 of courses being outside one's major, filling the student's time and slowing their accumulation of knowledge in their desired field.
Perhaps, but the idea that new models of education will magically be able to duplicate face to face instructional formats have been floated many times without really making the grade. This is why on-line education remains a fad but is not really a serious replacement for most academic training.
I don't think we necessarily need to duplicate to replace, nor do we need one unified replacement.
How one receives an education might be tailored to the use the education is intended for. If it's for work, it might be done by the employer, rather than the employer getting recruits trained at a school prior to applying for a job.
Face-to-face education is already being done by tech companies that currently have to train recent college grads from the ground up. Elon Musk has expressed interest in skipping the 4 years at college and just starting with training as things are done at Tesla.
Face-to-face training has always been the way in the trades - electricians, plumbers, carpenters, etc., learn via apprenticeships.
America also has a tradition of adult education and educational lectures that were entirely outside of the academic structure, just for personal edification. For example, companies in the mill towns in Massachusetts would offer classes and lectures to the young girls who worked in their mills. Lecturers and debaters would travel the country, appearing on stages in all sorts of communities.
Livestreams are probably not appropriate for grade school kids, but for adults who share an interest in, say Bronze Age mythology, or fractals, could unite people of shared interests in dispersed locations.
By assuming that academia is the best or only way to educate the youth, we give academics and administrators too much power.
Becoming a kindergarten or primary school teacher certainly doesn't require an undergraduate degree. And in secondary school it's probably only maths and the hard sciences that require a high level of knowledge from a teacher.
With trans and DEI, and climate alarmism, the dear little wokelings have played all their trump cards. They have nothing left after that, whereas the rest of us have hardly started playing our strongest cards.
I got to read your thoughts about AI etc. You are correct in your reference to the credentialing role of universities being out of control and subject to some economy rocking reform. I do not agree with the rest however. The underlying constraint on the technology of learning remains the basic nature of the human animal and how we were built and designed to learn. That system developed over 100,000's of years of evolution and has not changed much even since the evolution of the printed word. There is no reason to believe that having AI has done more than increase the size of the library available to us to inquire of. Without basic understanding of what to ask and how to incorporate that knowledge in a meaningful way, the size of the library really has little impact.
To give a real life example. I have been going to the gym following guidelines from books and websites for many years and have basically held my own. When a friend got personally involved and began to guide me and provide example and encouragement, I have seen major gains in a short time. No AI is going to have that ability any time soon I suspect.
I am now reading “Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System That Rules the World” by the great Serbian economist Branko Milanović. In it Milanović distinguishes between what he calls Liberal meritocratic capitalism, which he argues has prevailed in the US and Western Europe in the early 21st century and what he calls political capitalism, of which the People’s Republic of China is the best example, but would also include such diverse countries as Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Algeria and Tanzania. His book was published in September 2019, so it was a little surprising that even at that time he makes not a single reference to DEI, and can use the word “meritocratic” to describe North American capitalism in the 21st century without snickering. The political capitalist regimes he contrasts the US with all tend to be more corrupt than the United States and less democratic, but I suspect none of them have been contaminated by DEI in the same way or to the same extent as the US. This is perhaps part of the reason that they have, with the exception of Algeria, shown impressive growth rates in average GDP per capita between 1990/1991 and 2016, Of course, most people probably wouldn’t prefer to move to any of these countries rather than live in the US or Canada, although even this is now a matter for debate. Brock Eldon’s novella “Ground Zero in the Culture War” describes his frustration completing a Master’s degree in literature at a major Canadian university, and how he found happiness in Vietnam, a political capitalist country where DEI has not contaminated the society. Good luck to him, his lovely Vietnamese wife and their young daughter.
Thanks for this, very interesting. As you say, it is getting to the point that some men are willing to move to these countries.
I know a brilliant astrophysicist who left his native Australia because he realized that unless he professed DEI zealously (and even then, as a white man, it might not be enough), he would never have anything more than part-time work at any Australian university. He went to China and, as far as I can tell (he is terse in his emails), finds it far better for him than Australia. It is not a free society by any means, but he is relatively free to do his work without worrying about failing to genuflect to a DEI shibboleth, or being accused of harassment. I assume that criticism of the Chinese Communist regime is entirely off-limits, but other than that, ideology is not really an issue. He has been there now for over 5 years. He still occasionally sends me women-only job advertisements in Physics and Astronomy in Australia and the United States.
And of course another is being "educated" out of Islam by a system of rededication camps. Pioneered in reeducating Tibetan Buddhists. The communists being fervent believers in all being the same.
A second comment: I appreciate your admission that YOU yourself were a Diversity Hire. Affirmative Action-ish kinds of programs def started in the 1980s. I recall when I graduated from McGill in 1988 looking at the jobs board, where companies would advertise jobs for new engineering grads, most of the major companies explicitly stated they were hiring young women only, which meant every girl in the programs (maybe 5-20% depending on the discipline) had automatic jobs. In some sense, this may have worked against them, as when you make life too easy for someone, its dulls their abilities. Those of us who had to work hard to get jobs actually obliquely benefited, as it made us great job searchers, which actually has helped many of us for our entire careers.
Wow, as early as that. My friend Steve Brule remembers being at Dow Chemical in 1984 when they announced their new affirmative action policies. He remembers everyone being in disbelief, half-wondering if it was even legal. Everyone thought it would be for only a couple of years. So much for that!
In his extraordinary book *The Pursuit of Division: Race, Gender, and Preferential Hiring in Canada* (1998), Martin Loney traces it back into the 1970s. That's a full two generations of men, and white men in particular, shut out of opportunities--and expected to take it. And they mostly have, even looking on the bright side, as you've done.
Yes, its all true. That said, in my professional life I have seen plenty of white men rise in management (along with lots of women also), so its not all men who have been shut out, although things have gotten worse with time. The long term key to staying valuable is to keep learning and growing a genuine and legit base of skill and technical expertise, whereby one can become a consultant. Often enough its the middle management, without technical experience who become too expensive and get laid off early because their value is diminished, whereas by remaining technical you can consult forever.
Yes and no. I am not being a Pollyanna. Its more of being an aggressive male-style problem solver, and taking matters into one's own hands. Not in all places for sure, but its clear that in the more political and less productive professions and sectors, so-called 'white-males' are at a genuine disadvantage in 2024, so what can you do? What you can do, as a matter of self-preservation minimum, is to gain real skill in various difficult disciplines where one may already have a temperamental advantage. In my particular case, while observing the writing on the wall even 35 years ago, this meant working hard in numerous sectors doing the hard work and details of technical engineering. Result? Never rose into management (decided not to go that route) but made great money over a long period and more importantly, became an engineering expert in many domains, deep and wide, and thus am highly employable for the rest of my life.
Yeah, anti-fragile is the right word. I would say it basically consists of solid quantitative-level math and physics at a minimum, but coupled with decades of practical experience in industry. Nothing can replace that.
For the record, the current level of, lets say, 'demoralization' that is directed toward young men today (that Janice has documented in her various works of the past five years) isn't good, and frankly, for many boys, probably hard to deal with. Putting roadblocks in someone's way (counterintuitively) helps - to a point, but too much results in learned helpless, depression and inaction. We are seeing that manifested in real life today, in some cases.
Yes, if it were only the material roadblocks (only!), it could be bearable. But when it is combined with a constant psychological assault of shaming and delegitimization--and added to that the awareness that one can be accused and destroyed by a false allegation, lose one's family and children--it is certainly debilitating.
Yeah. I recall one of your videos from close to ten years ago maybe, shot at Queens I think, where you gave a talk, and this incensed French-Canadian feminist woman professor gave you a hard time from the audience. In that video one young man (or maybe a few) got into some public self-flagellation about bad he was (they were), from their place in the audience, it was pathetic and embarrassing and I could ask myself 'What have things come to where a young man would act like that? Have you no self-respect or has it been beaten out of you?'.
I was watching a couple of videos this week about boys and the trans movement from the somewhat recent Genspect conference in Denver. One male detransitioner in particular was talking about how the shame inducing ideas of toxic masculinity and rape culture severely affected his life. There was also talk about how these ideas are contributing to boys becoming trans and stigmatising trans boys as sick autogynephiles. And then there's the feminists who support males transitioning because they see it as a form of male castration and a way to get rid of some of that toxic masculinity.
I had a tenant in my basement who graduated with an MBA IN 1995. A bad year for MBAs. She was one of only 3 in her class who got a job offer. Out of 105. She told me this getting her mail. She said ‘i have no idea why I was so lucky’. As she said that she bent over in front of me to pet her dog, and she looked up. She had big big boobies. She was wearing a low loose top, no bra, and her very large breasts swung back and forth unimpeded while she chatted with me. I think I know why she got the job! (To be fair she was bright and funny and was top ten in her class). I think she was actually poking fun at it all.
Thanks, great anecdote. I knew many women in the engineering sector (I was mainly in aerospace) who didn't take all the 'affirmative action stuff' too seriously, were great engineers and great professionals, but there was always a cohort of aggressive aggrieved types, who were often humorless and ambitious, who used it as a political tool. On a side note, I was seriously considering doing an MBA at Harvard in the early 90s (I had the grades, etc) and in the end I didn't, and remained technical and am REALLY glad I did. Harvard. Wow, did I dodge a bullet there.
A tremendous essay, Janice. Getting rid of DEI will take a while, if indeed anybody who could make that happen really wants to get rid of it. When I was looking for academic jobs in the late 70s and 80s I often heard "we had to hire a woman," a DEI refrain before DEI itself. If there is any hope, I would see it in the general decline of the college-university complex, which long ago dropped the serious business of teaching people to think and analyze and articulate. As colleges shrink, so will the influence of the professoriate. Socratic teaching was too adversarial for the profs, especially for women and feminist men. It was unacceptable to see one view as better or worse than another. Somebody's feelings might be hurt! As this rot set in, higher education swelled its administration and increasingly relied in evaluation-sensitive part-time teachers. College became very expensive. At the same time, its effectiveness was diluted. Then people discovered that in a good job market a degree was not needed, and that in a poor one it was little help. The business world saw the uselessness of higher ed and set up their own training programs. The ed market has slowly been getting the message. In the future, one can hope, there will be fewer profs and academic administrators telling the world what to think and do. No need to mourn the English major, for it died a long time ago and will not be missed.
Janice, you are in a battle of wits with the unarmed! Those not hired on the basis of merit have no means of recognizing it. That's why DIE is a ratchet that goes in only one direction; it always degenerates. Things degenerate slowly at first, and then suddenly. Like everything, it will bottom out and a crisis will necessitate as reorganization. I don't think we will recognize the turning point until it is well behind us. I hope not to be around by the time the crisis hits.
I saw this happen very rapidly in the 1990s. I worked in a council that for years had a reputation as frugal but efficient. It was "humming" with a public service ethos. A change in political leadership brought in a series of "diversity hires" , they in turn hired "their own", in a shockingly short time (3 years) the council was wildly overspent, one diversity hire was on "gardening leave" another "let go" due to incompetence and some services in "special measures" . And the public service ethos was gone in favour of "mind your back" because if course the incompetent have to defend their failures by blaming all around them.
Who is going to expose the academic rot?" You, Janice are doing a stellar job of it, but the minds of students have been disabled before the end of high school. I just listen to my grandchildren who receive sound wisdom at home but come home from school and say things that demonstrate the power of indoctrination and peer power over sound parenting. However, this not new. I think my grandchildren will pull through, but only because their parents are fully engaged. Sadly, they are a tiny minority.
Yes, indeed. the public school system is just as bad. What a shocking abuse of power.
Who runs the schools? Folks who were trained in university faculties of education. Faculties of education, every weak on real academics, are almost everywhere the most radical and ideological of faculties.
The federal government, by doling out cash with strings attached, to school districts that, on paper, are under local control, has managed to inflict conformity to an incoherent ideology nationwide. Local school boards should observe and emulate the ways that private schools manage to provide superior education for a fraction of the per-student expenditures of public schools. Then they could confidently turn down the federal cash and provide what the kids need - reading, writing and arithmetic (also more hands-on skills, kids of the computer era are reaching adulthood with a worrying lack of fine motor skills necessary for many important jobs, such as surgeons).
At California State University, East Bay (based in Hayward, CA) they had (pr maybe still have) a program to "eradicate whiteness". They were paying staff $1200 stipends to participate in thiat racist program. They also have optional separate race graduation ceremonies for Blacks, Hispanics and Asians - but not Whites.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/california-east-bay-eradicating-whiteness
Thank you. Worse still is the fact that the State of California Civil Rights Department didn't reply to me, after I brought this hate to their attention.
Get well soon.
Sure you were the diversity hire, Janice, the one intelligent woman in the department.
Even the diversity czars sometimes make mistakes. LOL
Lol.
When you mix politics with science, you get politics. More broadly, when you mix politics with education, you get politics.
Just so.
Well stated. And...politics and medicine gives you politics.
Yes, mix politics with policing and you get politics. Mix politics with anything and you get politics. Gresham's Law: bad currency drives out good.
Except money. Politics and Money = Money.
Nah, if you look at the totality of the situation, in the longer run (per Hazlitt, "Economics in One Lesson"), mixing politics with money leaves you with only politics at the end. Politicians reduce the overall wealth of nations... even though they personally do quite well from it.
DEI is a trojan horse, first and foremost because the United States IS diverse. So what's the push to make "diverse" what already IS diverse?
I'm tail end of the baby boom and even when growing up in a suburb of Chicago, there were "diverse" people in our milieu that represented their overall percentage of the population. They were NOT "marginalized" either, unless you consider making two black students our Prom King and Queen a form of "marginalization."
I have numerous anecdotes on various DEI blunders that I've witnessed over the years, fodder for my Substack. Here's a piece that infers why no one told Claudine Gay to get rid of the plagiarism before she submitted her dissertation:
https://dogl.substack.com/p/a-buck-fifty-a-harsh-lesson-in-race
Another "offensive" story involves the diverse restaurant where I served pizza in the 80s, which traded its Mexican busboys for black kids from the Projects, with disastrous results. It's actually quite funny -- they practically paid the Mexicans' airfare to return after the black kids from the Projects debacle.
It's unfortunate, because I believe we all want to see people succeed, but the crux of DEI is to let some people get by with piss poor performance, in all too many cases, which isn't helpful to the "diverse" in any way, shape, or form. It merely teaches them that mediocrity is good enough, that skin color is merit enough, which perpetuates a true inability to compete.
The irony of DEI is it will destabilize and ultimately destroy multicultural societies all the quicker. They are certainly creating very deep resentment among white men, the group that actually built the first world and maintains it. That is dangerous, as we are now finding out.
My perception is that so far, the response of white men (all men) is remarkably free of resentment. I'll never forget watching a huge group of mostly young white male students at a Milo Yiannopoulos event at De Paul University (probably around 2015) at which some BLM protesters caused a ruckus, preventing Milo from speaking, even mildly assaulting Milo on stage. I couldn't believe the patience of these allegedly privileged, 'arrogant' fellows. Most sat quietly, a little bemused. I was similarly struck by the geniality and open-mindedness of most young men, white and non-white, in my classes, listening all day to propaganda at uni about how dangerous and disgusting they were. I wouldn't be as slow to anger, as sincerely curious, as hopeful of a good resolution.
I agree. That is a European trait, and is especially present in Northern Europeans.
They are slow to anger. The Finns are the slowest. So much so they appear very accommodating.
But everyone has a threshold. And our cultural enemies are poor students of history. When Northern Europeans do snap things change rapidly. This is the flip side of reasonableness. When you have been very gracious, and then abused, you are not forgiving. This is what I fear is coming in Europe and North America.
I have observed the same, slow to anger, but then white hot.
As they say, when other ethnic groups get angry they burn down their own neighborhoods. When whites get angry they have to redraw the maps.
The threshold is high, but not that high. And things are getting ridiculous.
This is my fear. The War on Men is hot right now and still we patiently stand by. Its as if the narcissistic demand for attention being unmet will demand even greater provocation. left to their own devices, men will be "fine" (not actually fine but WAY better than women are doing right now) and can ride it out, but this very forbearance is "provoking" more and more draconian measures by feminists.
Janice, unfortunately I share your bleak prognosis. DEI is deeply entrenched, far more dearly loved by most academics than the abstract principles of merit and objectivity that guided universities since the Enlightenment. This is because DEI becomes a personal mission, providing existential life meaning for its adherents. I foresee no possibility of large scale repudiation of DEI until its lies and inconsistencies lead to massive social consequences that can no longer be hid. By that time, it is an open question whether anything of our heritage will remain to be saved.
"DEI becomes a personal mission, providing existential life meaning for its adherents."
Brilliant point about hidden psychological forces. Assuaging the guilt about one's abundance is accomplished by a sanctimonious decrying of the "oppression" supposedly by the successful ones. Defending that mental crutch becomes existential to preserve the fairytale, lest the painful guilt returns.
I think it is even worse than that. The late professor Noel Ignatiev was quoted as saying, "If you are a white male, you don't deserve to live. You are a cancer, you're a disease, white males have never contributed anything positive to the world!"
I suppose you could ask them if they're smartphone and car and running hot water are not positive.
Yes, in my experience a fair fraction of the U.S. faculty and their students hold that opinion. They intimidate everyone else from offering a different point of view. So you get Claudine Gay who is simply the current visible example.
They're trying to force a square peg into a round hole.
Another 10-star analysis by the esteemed Janice F. Her skepticism about the predicted end of DEI is solidly grounded in an unsurpassed understanding of the academic mindset.
Big donors like Ackman weren't bothered by the DEI hires anti-white, anti-male messaging until Israel was criticised.
Yes, I think that's true, but he does go out of his way in his Twitter statement to deplore anti-white racism and anti-male prejudice, and even downplays the anti-Israel issue that first piqued his interest, so I admire that in his statement.
I like your writing Janice. Your old academic friends must be choked.
That is his right. He can be most concerned about what is most important to him. However, the counter to that is the women University heads came across as being very stupid. They couldn’t think on their feet and gave canned answers they thought would get them through their ordeal. In fact the canned answer that calling for genocide is against the rules depending on the context is absurd. This drew attention to their other liabilities. In Claudine Gay’s case her lack of academic chops.
Israel wasn't "criticised," it suffered an attack featuring extreme atrocities, a pogrom comparable to the worst in Eastern Europe of old and the Muslim world. American and Canadian students and professors celebrated, and attacked Jewish students. Maybe that is all fine with you, Megan, so just pretend it has not been happening.
Oh please spare me, Gaza is a concentration camp, IDF soldiers shoot children, and the IDF has mass murdered 10,000 women and children in the last 3 months. Has it ever occurred to you the reason people who support Zionism are literally hated by billions of people around the world is your serial atrocious genocidal ethno-nationalist behavior?
ENOUGH!
My advice to Hamas is, if you do not want your citizens collateral casualties of war, don't start wars and don't threaten to exterminate the enemy.
My advice to Zionists stop being land thieving genocidal monsters, and learn to live in peace with your neighbors within your recognized under international law 1967 green line borders unless you want tragic history to repeat itself and this time no one comes to rescue you!
Do you understand in any way WHY you are deeply hated in the world? It's the giant concentration camp in Gaza and laughing, smirking and trying to hand wave away the mass murder of women and children with small hat propaganda no one believes anymore. You aren't the victims you are horrible aggressive mass murdering land thieves, and everyone knows it now, you no longer control the media!
Mr. Raven <- rubs genitals while looking at this site - https://www.hamas-massacre.net/
Nice crass barely sentient school yard taunts, you are legit retarded aren't you?
If you like the mass murder of women and children to steal land so much, leave my country immediately and move to Isra-Hell. I do not support one American soldier dying or spending one American dime to pay for Israel's genocide. If you must support the monstrosity of mass murder of women and children to steal their land like literally Hitler did, do it on your own dime, and with some skin in the game living in the country commiting that genocide. Do not do it in a cowardly fashion from an ocean away and picking my pocket to pay for your people's war crime.
I'm sure the Israelis, who have a documented and archaeological proven presence in the Levant of about 3000 yrs, are quaking in their boots at your childish threat of rape, torture, murder and kidnapping.
Most Levantine Arabs are recent interlopers, or remnants of mediaeval Mohammedan invasion.
Concentration camps are not self governing, like Gaza under Hamas.
Good one Khzar Turk, everything you say is pure projection you fake "Semite." The irony is the Palestinians are much more closely related to the Jews of the old testament, than you are East European interlopers are. Stop lying about everything and mass murdering women and children to steal land, it isn't a good look I assure you.
Let's not forget that Jews invented communism and Marxism. They slaughtered millions of eastern europeans
Okay, you've made clear who you are.
As if that refutes my point. Try harder next time.
Raven, you are joking, of course. If not, one can measure the vastness of infinity by the extent of your ignorance.
Are you seriously denying the IDF shoots children? Must I dig out the endless videos of them doing so? Even literal Nazis did not do that!
Ring me up with you have anything to offer other than bare assertion ad hominems to attempt to justify genocide and land theft.
Check out my four deeply researched books on the subject. When you have the chutzpah, staying power, and intellectual acumen to distinguish fake videos from real data and to write a book after several years of meticulous study and experience in the field, then get back to me. Meanwhile, hold your gasses. At present, you are not a serious interlocutor.
Hello David. I'm part way through your interview with Mark Tapson. Looking forward to reading Crossing the Jordan.
Best wishes
Fake videos LOL, the IDF is known for lying, that's why you lost at the IJC and the country you shill for was told to stop commiting genocide immediately. Your certificates in a fake system mean nothing to me. The people who pushed the poison shots on us had all kinds of meaningless certifications as well. Take your fake certificates and shove them up your ass genocide advocate.
Even if what you say is perfectly true, it doesn't justify mass murder of innocent civillians with high explosives, and collective punishment of those who remain through starvation and terror.
Hamas is entirely responsible for the hell that it has brought down on the people it is supposed to govern. Hamas exacerbates the side effects of warfare by using the Gazan population as human shields, refusing the let them leave combat areas, even shooting those who try to leave. In spite of Hamas's dirty deeds, the fatality rate of the civilian population is much lower than in most wars, because Israel makes every effort to spare the civilian population, something it does better than any army in the world. https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20343/gaza-civilian-deaths
Repeating Israeli propaganda does not make it true. By "hell" I suppose you mean the bombs, shells, bullets, and lack of food and water, which are all entirely within Israel's control.
Even if we were to accept your allegation that Hamas militants use their own families as human shields, it still would not justify Israel's deliberate, indiscriminate murder of innocent civilians, many of them children, just to get at Hamas militants. It is akin to blowing up a bank full of hostages just to be sure of killing the bank robbers.
The atrocities allegedly committed by Hamas in this most recent conflict have a precedent in the attrocities committed by Jewish paramilitaries during the 1948 war. Israel cannot claim the moral high ground, especially since it was the dispossession of Palestinians by Zionist European Jews that initiated the cycle of violence that has now persisted for more than a century.
Israel has always been a racist colonial state since it was founded on the dispossession of the Arabs, and continues to support the expansion of illegal Jewish settlements. No amount of lies and spin will alter that fact.
You have memorized the Palestinian narrative well. Most of it is lies, and the rest is the consequences of their own choices. Remember when, after Israel turned Gaza entirely over to the Palestinians, it was going to become the Singapore of the Mediterranean? Instead it chose to be the Islamic State of the Mediterranean. Bad choices lead to bad results.
Much like how the Jews fabricated their story concerning the holocaust. There's literally zero evidence to corroborate this event. And those who questioned jt are incarcerated.
What 'Palestinian narrative'? I arrived independently at my conclusions by studying history and travelling through Israel/Palestine to better understand the perspectives of Israelis and Palestinians. The heart of the ongoing conflict is the injustice perpetrated by European Jews on the Arabs in the name of Zionism, a racist colonial ideology. Gaza is what it is because Israel turned it into an open-air prison, which provided ideal conditions for Hamas to flourish. Can you not understand why Palestinians are angry and some are bent on revenge? Would you like to be indefinitely confined to a prison simply because of your race? Israel stubbornly refuses to take responsibility for its actions, hiding behind its Jewish identity in order to claim victim status whenever it is challenged. If you think Israel can keep playing the victim card for all eternity to excuse its persecution of the Palestinians then you are mistaken.
The main stumbling block to peace is the Jewish victim complex, by which I mean the failure of many Jews to understand that they can just as easily be oppressors as victims. The same moral failing is common to every individual who chooses to engage in identity politics.
Coincidentally, I was just reading some information on the history of the Van Diemens Land Company in Tasmania two centuries ago and they used similar language to justify the genocide of Tasmanian Aborigines.
It was criticised for defending itself from future attacks.
I think DEI will destroy itself. It doesn't need helped along.
By its nature diversity as a focus creates the conditions for its own downfall. Claudine Gay is a case in point. Aside from the plagiarism, she was by any measure a total nonentity, someone who shouldn't even be at a community college never mind a leading university. When you remove competency as a factor, as diversity hiring always does, other factors come in to play. Different kinds of people get on. Gay quite literally wouldn't have been there had she not been black. She represents failure of diversity, and a very visible one.
So the diversity hires themselves, like Claudine Gay, will act as the poster children for the whole debacle. The university professors can cling to it all they like but most of the world looks at them like the morons they clearly are, being left behind by the competent and the able. The world laughs as the West lets the lunatics destroy the asylum.
Yes, but what terrible destruction of a heritage that deserved to be cherished. It can be rediscovered in time, perhaps, but a great deal of damage will have been done.
I do not believe we can prevent the destruction now. The midwit class are firmly in place in academia, the civil service and the professional classes. They are today's influencers and decision makers. And enough of them accept the mantra or at least go along with it.
They of course will be destroyed along with the rest of us. But that is what happens to civilizations. Only the strong survive. Feminism is an example of the whole. Trash the people you rely on for protection, decry them as primitive violent brutes, then watch as the men walk away, abused and beaten, then real primitives appear on the horizon. This is already happening. It is self-destructive, but probably necessary. No one thinks Muslim immigrant will uphold feminist principles, for example, yet feminism is silent.
None of this can survive.
At least one generation to fix this.
Females biological clocks are hitting the wall. How time flies lol
And that means it will take a generation.
The we are all dead line is too close to nihilism for me. We are alive now and can make a difference.
But DEI cannot compete with competency. It is that simple.
Hey Spiff, I'm with you. We can be concerned about our civilization past our own individual expiration dates. In fact, we must be, as our civilization was built by generations of people sharing that concern.
Exactly. And that goes double for anyone with children.
We must look at these things squarely for what they are. Destructive. The antithesis of the longterm mentality some of our ancestors possessed.
Absolutely.
Russia took three generations to defeat Communism. And another generation to half solve the mess.
Wasn't it Keynes?
I tend not to think in terms of how long. I just see what diversity is and how it is an attempt for inadequates to claw their way up.
Turning up the flame of DEI until it consumes itself is the only solution I can foresee. Let’s encourage their every bad idea and call for, no, demand, an even more diverse hiring agenda. Intellectual Diversity hasn’t been properly addressed. The entire bell curve must be proportionally represented! Perhaps bad ideas need to be let to run their course. Like you said, the private universities and online courses can take on the mantle of actual education. Let the Marxist DEI extremists spiral into interracial chaos while serious people get on with building a functioning society.
The entire age distribution must be properly represented. The absence of two-year-olds being professors is indicative of institutional discrimination.
I am a fan of this pseudo-accelerationist approach. Crank it up to 11. Where are the Afro-Mongolian dwarves? Why are there any testicles in this room? White women must be purged from all public spaces etc.
Make it crazy and some of them will go for it.
We should assign a seeing eye dog to every airline pilot, so the blind DEI hires don't feel bad.
Or make the sighted ones wear cow bells so the blind ones know where they are at all times 🤓
Or both! Maximize the number of rules they must follow.
I think the current internal "war" of feminism, between Trans and Terf, illustrates this. As the debate grows to include "multiple genders" and ever greater "intersectionality" the Alice in Wonderland absurdities become more apparent. In a real sense the very success of feminism and its offshoots has been the lack of awareness of its idiocies beyond Universities and the "elite" they supply. The wider public simply accepting that such things are about being nice to women or "minorities" up till recently. In a way the success and attempts to spread this into schools and work has exposed far more people to the reality of an ideology that actually hates ordinary everyday folk. In a sense the "woke" have started to awaken the wider public. I suspect many "donors" had trundled along thinking their Alma Mater was still the place they knew, until this issue exposed the reality of diversity appointments, and double standards.
I think this is very insightful. Most accept feminism, anti-racism and all the rest because their experience of it is largely the PR-driven aspect. Being nice to women, not abusing minorities etc. Things most people approve of.
But I am seeing growing signs people see the reality. And this has a double whammy effect. If you bought into the being nice aspect, it is even more of a shock to be on the receiving end of the hate. Here in the UK we definitely see the feminists take it too far and even women are pulling away. Just as common are immigrants jumping on the anti-white bandwagon and trashing the country that game them a home. People find that especially hard to stomach, the lack of gratitude of foreigners on the dole whose kids we feed and clothe.
We need much more exposure of the actual agendas at play.
One example of this, here in greater Manchester, is private hire taxis. There has been a huge influx of private hire taxis registered in Wolverhampton. Generally in the UK Taxis and their drivers are registered and can ply their trade by and in the local authority area. Wolverhampton has registered over 12% of its local population (90 miles away from Manchester) it is clearly unlikely 12% of any borough's population will be taxi drivers, and the sheer numbers suggest the supposed checks to be registered are likely to have been perfunctory. Net result local Taxi drivers face competition from "asian" drivers flooding the local market, who they know have not met the standards required of them and are using a "loophole" abetted by a Council in the midlands. Even our PC Labour Mayor has highlighted this, though carefully avoiding mentioning the very obvious ethnicity issue.
This https://j4mb.org.uk/2024/01/29/financial-times-a-new-global-gender-gap-is-emerging/
is interesting. I can't help think that the triumph of feminism, now a part of the school curriculum and effectively the orthodoxy of the establishment, will be its undoing. For rather than simply being nice to women, with the details of the ideology confined to the Universities and Public Services changing laws and policy relatively unseen by the public. Now every schoolboy is exposed to the idea that they are by birth tainted by an original sin that requires they collude with applying arbitrary discrimination against themselves including draconian measures for "looking" or "unwanted compliments". Added to the very public civil war within feminism about Trans and Terf. and one can see the former cloak of just being about being nice to girls and women is looking less and less tenable. Not that this will affect the bumbling old farts, whose misplaced chivalry and hopelessly rosy view of female human nature I'm sure was nurtured in Public schools far from the reality of actual teenage girls in all their viciousness ,as they continue to white knight. But younger generations of young men will increasingly at least see the uncompromisingly hostile nature of feminism to them and their aspirations in life. Which still are basically, get a good job/trade/profession, attract a mate and form a family with a nice home, holidays and some treats. All attitude surveys still show both sexes aspire to much the same, though each time the feminists demand women are "educated" out of such reactionary ideas (as usual they are completely uninterested in what young men think).
I spent a few years on the Twitter TERF threads. The TERFs are as misandrist and deranged as the trannies. They honestly blame men for it all. I was in the LGB community as many FtMs were demanding "acceptance" and straight and gay men who did not comply were vilified. The gaslighting by these so called sane (still marxist) feminists (going on about the gender pay gap IS just plain old economic, not even cultural, marxism) showed me they were no different, and had simply been the first major camp of lefties to get bit by their own antiscience, communists BS.
Terfs v Trannies is Leninists v Trotskyites
Exactly.
This essay is like Buckley's cough mixture. It may leave a bitter taste, but it's effective.
While “purging DEI” may indeed be daunting and distant, that still may be the easy part, because once the diversity crowd has been shown the door, whom do you replace them with?
This project has been going full steam for, as Janice says, at least two generations, really a full adult human lifetime or more. It’s not like there are masses of well-trained scholars out there working other jobs or in cryosleep pods that we can just slide into place once sanity returns.
Intellectual continuity going back centuries has been severed. There’s no manual on how to fix this, and the situation continues to worsen every year as legitimate scholarship fades further from living memory.
While DEI has certainly hurt the hard sciences and retarded their progress, I think they can recover. But how to restore a university history department, when there are no longer real historians? – same question for art history, English, sociology.
I know it’s not as black and white as that, but I don’t think people appreciate how deep the hole we’ve dug, and are still digging, is.
Yes, so much the case. When I was at the U of Saskatchewan in the early 2000s (where, despite what I've said above, there were many fine people), one of my beloved colleagues talked about this problem. He tried to see the humorous side, talking about how there was a whole generation supposed literary scholars who had lost touch with the canon of great literature (which had already then been dismantled). He was noticing some young scholars trying to figure out who these writers were: hey, there's this interesting poet, John Dryden, or this interesting novelist, Samuel Richardson. So much would have to be started over from scratch. What a waste; how much has been stolen from us in the name of liberation.
I was at a conference once, and a graduate student about 10 years my junior expressed her dissatisfaction with the destruction of the canon, and one of my Marxist colleagues sneered at her and suggested that her attitude was responsible for untold suffering. This was a man who had received a classical education in Scotland and then came to Canada and wrecked it all in the name of "decolonization" and "Indigenization." The fact is that if one isn't taught it, it's very difficult (not impossible, but difficult) to teach oneself.
It's about the envious destroying what they can never come close to equaling rather than the non-envious appreciation of genius. "Well Mr. Shakespeare, you are dead and I am here teaching a course on your work. We will see who comes out on top."
Well put. Intellectuals seem quite egotistical in general.
I don't know if the institutions where DEI has flourished need to be replaced with similarly large and static institutions. Thanks to technology, much of the information that one formerly had to physically access by going to archives is readily available online. Also, tech companies report they have to train fresh college graduates from the ground up, since what they acquired at college is already out-of-date (professors don't have to keep up with the latest innovations, especially if they have tenure). These institutions had had their enrollments bloated for decades because employers demanded unnecessary credentials, leading to many middle class kids going to college not for the learning but for the piece of paper.
We might end up with education and job training being more decentralized. Maybe someone would spend a couple of months on intensive focus on cutting edge technology instead of 4 years where 1/4 of the courses are required to be outside one's major.
Withdrawing is an option, too. There's plenty of money to be made fixing things plumbers, electricians, carpenters, etc., are in short supply, in part due to generations of parents seeing college as their kid's ticket to a bright future.
On your last point, in this country (UK) the gap you identify in your last paragraph was filled by men from Poland and the Baltic republics from 2008. So as our number of Universities ballooned the skills gap was filled by importing hundreds of thousands of skilled men, from the former soviet bloc in the EU. The pandemic and "brexit" reopened this gap. Now of course there is panic as the increasing prosperity in Eastern europe means many men went home and the UK seems less attractive. Of course the logical course, promoting these professions to boys and young men and training them, is closed by DEI because what we have to do is spend money promoting them to girls. A complete waste because such has failed for decades (way back in 1975 when I left school there was a huge campaign to get girls into these trades and professions under a Labour government "Rosey the rivetter" and of course this has continued since. Yet still females are a tiny proportion in the industries (and usually not in the "coal face" jobs). Result significant skills shortages!
Sadly, I fear Janice is right about the staying power of DEI. The reality is that the idea of judging people by group membership is very ancient and persists despite the bloodshed of the US Civil War and the wisdom of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr's Dream of a colorblind society. The reason the Democrat party fell so naturally into this way of thinking is that it was the core that allowed their believe in slavery and Jim Crow to exist. Their dominance in the academic system has doomed academia to be on the wrong side of history as surely as if it was flying the confederate battle flag from every campus. I saw this within my own heavily academic family with the election of Barack Obama in 2008. These good liberal Democrats were practically having a religious experience at the election of a black president, as if it somehow had absolved them of all the sins they perceived they had been carrying. My response that Obama was not the first black candidate I voted for for president and that I had NOT voted for him because his racist ideology and policies were contrary to achieving Dr. King's Dream, was incomprehensible to them. Unlike most of these folks, I had grown up in a biracial and multicultural family and had long discarded the liberal white guilt that the rest of my family desperately sought divine intervention to relieve. Watching them it finally occurred to me that none of them is really about equality or achieving Dr. King's Dream. It's about feeling good about themselves and absolution from their perceived sins. This is why virtue signaling is so important to them...even if it comes at the expense of actually achieving something concrete on the issue in question.
So how does academia recover? Sadly, I think the whole thing may need to burn to the ground and be fully replaced with new institutions with entirely new employees. Certainly there are a small number of competent academics who have stood true to the mission of academia who could be brought into new institutions. The majority, however, are either too tainted to be salvaged or have demonstrated they are too self absorbed, self motivated or just too timid to be given any sort of position in the reformed/new institutions. A big way to accelerate this transition would be to completely defund academia due to its legacy of DEI hiring. That means no more federal or state funds for campuses, loans/financial aid for students or research grants. Reserve those resources fro the new institutions which would have to be built from entirely new hires. Thoughts?
I think that DEI might be a sort of last-straw that sparks massive change - change that is necessary not only because of the incoherent engine of conflict that is DEI, but also the bloat that has resulted from decades of enrollment being inflated by people who seek not education but credentials to get jobs that clearly do not require that level of education.
Technology may also force change, as tech companies find they have to start their training of fresh college graduates from scratch, because what's taught at university is not cutting edge. Tech also allows people to access information easily that once required physically going to where documents were stored.
While I was poking around the internet this morning to see what enrollment trends are like at woke vs. non-woke institutions, I was surprised to find that there has been a long trend of declining enrollment at US colleges dating back to 2009. Perhaps colleges will go the way of Bud Light and their poster-boy Dylan Mulvaney.
I thinks some of this may indeed be in the works. The working class of all ethnic groups is thoroughly disgusted by what it is going on and are increasingly willing to push back. Academia is the taxpayer funded play/training ground of the elites. Perhaps it is time to kill the beast that sullies the golden eggs. That will mean not just abstaining from attendance of those institutions, but creating new institutions to meet the actual societal needs. It also means defunding the current institutions...and frankly, reclaiming their physical and fiscal assets for their original purposes. Imagine how much good could be done by liquidating Harvard's endowment?
I think there may never be a full replacement of these institutions, since the bloat began before the DEI as middle class kids went to college for diplomas to get them jobs that didn't require 4 years of education.
I think the replacements for universities will be far more flexible and less centralized, as a lot of the information that used to require physically accessing archives is now available online. Perhaps there will be small education options focused on short-term high intensity studies on the latest tech or equipment, instead of an expensive 4 year sojourn, but also 1/4 of courses being outside one's major, filling the student's time and slowing their accumulation of knowledge in their desired field.
Perhaps, but the idea that new models of education will magically be able to duplicate face to face instructional formats have been floated many times without really making the grade. This is why on-line education remains a fad but is not really a serious replacement for most academic training.
I don't think we necessarily need to duplicate to replace, nor do we need one unified replacement.
How one receives an education might be tailored to the use the education is intended for. If it's for work, it might be done by the employer, rather than the employer getting recruits trained at a school prior to applying for a job.
Face-to-face education is already being done by tech companies that currently have to train recent college grads from the ground up. Elon Musk has expressed interest in skipping the 4 years at college and just starting with training as things are done at Tesla.
Face-to-face training has always been the way in the trades - electricians, plumbers, carpenters, etc., learn via apprenticeships.
America also has a tradition of adult education and educational lectures that were entirely outside of the academic structure, just for personal edification. For example, companies in the mill towns in Massachusetts would offer classes and lectures to the young girls who worked in their mills. Lecturers and debaters would travel the country, appearing on stages in all sorts of communities.
Livestreams are probably not appropriate for grade school kids, but for adults who share an interest in, say Bronze Age mythology, or fractals, could unite people of shared interests in dispersed locations.
By assuming that academia is the best or only way to educate the youth, we give academics and administrators too much power.
Not sure where the specific comment you mean is located.
Becoming a kindergarten or primary school teacher certainly doesn't require an undergraduate degree. And in secondary school it's probably only maths and the hard sciences that require a high level of knowledge from a teacher.
With trans and DEI, and climate alarmism, the dear little wokelings have played all their trump cards. They have nothing left after that, whereas the rest of us have hardly started playing our strongest cards.
I got to read your thoughts about AI etc. You are correct in your reference to the credentialing role of universities being out of control and subject to some economy rocking reform. I do not agree with the rest however. The underlying constraint on the technology of learning remains the basic nature of the human animal and how we were built and designed to learn. That system developed over 100,000's of years of evolution and has not changed much even since the evolution of the printed word. There is no reason to believe that having AI has done more than increase the size of the library available to us to inquire of. Without basic understanding of what to ask and how to incorporate that knowledge in a meaningful way, the size of the library really has little impact.
To give a real life example. I have been going to the gym following guidelines from books and websites for many years and have basically held my own. When a friend got personally involved and began to guide me and provide example and encouragement, I have seen major gains in a short time. No AI is going to have that ability any time soon I suspect.
Perhaps...we shall see what comes. I may be surprised. Time will tell.
Great blog as always, Janice.
I am now reading “Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System That Rules the World” by the great Serbian economist Branko Milanović. In it Milanović distinguishes between what he calls Liberal meritocratic capitalism, which he argues has prevailed in the US and Western Europe in the early 21st century and what he calls political capitalism, of which the People’s Republic of China is the best example, but would also include such diverse countries as Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Algeria and Tanzania. His book was published in September 2019, so it was a little surprising that even at that time he makes not a single reference to DEI, and can use the word “meritocratic” to describe North American capitalism in the 21st century without snickering. The political capitalist regimes he contrasts the US with all tend to be more corrupt than the United States and less democratic, but I suspect none of them have been contaminated by DEI in the same way or to the same extent as the US. This is perhaps part of the reason that they have, with the exception of Algeria, shown impressive growth rates in average GDP per capita between 1990/1991 and 2016, Of course, most people probably wouldn’t prefer to move to any of these countries rather than live in the US or Canada, although even this is now a matter for debate. Brock Eldon’s novella “Ground Zero in the Culture War” describes his frustration completing a Master’s degree in literature at a major Canadian university, and how he found happiness in Vietnam, a political capitalist country where DEI has not contaminated the society. Good luck to him, his lovely Vietnamese wife and their young daughter.
Thanks for this, very interesting. As you say, it is getting to the point that some men are willing to move to these countries.
I know a brilliant astrophysicist who left his native Australia because he realized that unless he professed DEI zealously (and even then, as a white man, it might not be enough), he would never have anything more than part-time work at any Australian university. He went to China and, as far as I can tell (he is terse in his emails), finds it far better for him than Australia. It is not a free society by any means, but he is relatively free to do his work without worrying about failing to genuflect to a DEI shibboleth, or being accused of harassment. I assume that criticism of the Chinese Communist regime is entirely off-limits, but other than that, ideology is not really an issue. He has been there now for over 5 years. He still occasionally sends me women-only job advertisements in Physics and Astronomy in Australia and the United States.
His one passion in life was his work, and he is able to do it there.
China has some interesting diversity policies. Some minorities, for example, were exempted from the one-child policy while it was in force.
And of course another is being "educated" out of Islam by a system of rededication camps. Pioneered in reeducating Tibetan Buddhists. The communists being fervent believers in all being the same.
Interesting, George. I wasn't aware of that.
A second comment: I appreciate your admission that YOU yourself were a Diversity Hire. Affirmative Action-ish kinds of programs def started in the 1980s. I recall when I graduated from McGill in 1988 looking at the jobs board, where companies would advertise jobs for new engineering grads, most of the major companies explicitly stated they were hiring young women only, which meant every girl in the programs (maybe 5-20% depending on the discipline) had automatic jobs. In some sense, this may have worked against them, as when you make life too easy for someone, its dulls their abilities. Those of us who had to work hard to get jobs actually obliquely benefited, as it made us great job searchers, which actually has helped many of us for our entire careers.
Wow, as early as that. My friend Steve Brule remembers being at Dow Chemical in 1984 when they announced their new affirmative action policies. He remembers everyone being in disbelief, half-wondering if it was even legal. Everyone thought it would be for only a couple of years. So much for that!
In his extraordinary book *The Pursuit of Division: Race, Gender, and Preferential Hiring in Canada* (1998), Martin Loney traces it back into the 1970s. That's a full two generations of men, and white men in particular, shut out of opportunities--and expected to take it. And they mostly have, even looking on the bright side, as you've done.
Yes, its all true. That said, in my professional life I have seen plenty of white men rise in management (along with lots of women also), so its not all men who have been shut out, although things have gotten worse with time. The long term key to staying valuable is to keep learning and growing a genuine and legit base of skill and technical expertise, whereby one can become a consultant. Often enough its the middle management, without technical experience who become too expensive and get laid off early because their value is diminished, whereas by remaining technical you can consult forever.
As the Supreme Court ruled recently, it wasn't legal. Imagine that.
Except in Canada, it still is!
That's taking the silver lining thing too far. LOL
Yes and no. I am not being a Pollyanna. Its more of being an aggressive male-style problem solver, and taking matters into one's own hands. Not in all places for sure, but its clear that in the more political and less productive professions and sectors, so-called 'white-males' are at a genuine disadvantage in 2024, so what can you do? What you can do, as a matter of self-preservation minimum, is to gain real skill in various difficult disciplines where one may already have a temperamental advantage. In my particular case, while observing the writing on the wall even 35 years ago, this meant working hard in numerous sectors doing the hard work and details of technical engineering. Result? Never rose into management (decided not to go that route) but made great money over a long period and more importantly, became an engineering expert in many domains, deep and wide, and thus am highly employable for the rest of my life.
Yeah, anti-fragile is the right word. I would say it basically consists of solid quantitative-level math and physics at a minimum, but coupled with decades of practical experience in industry. Nothing can replace that.
For the record, the current level of, lets say, 'demoralization' that is directed toward young men today (that Janice has documented in her various works of the past five years) isn't good, and frankly, for many boys, probably hard to deal with. Putting roadblocks in someone's way (counterintuitively) helps - to a point, but too much results in learned helpless, depression and inaction. We are seeing that manifested in real life today, in some cases.
Yes, if it were only the material roadblocks (only!), it could be bearable. But when it is combined with a constant psychological assault of shaming and delegitimization--and added to that the awareness that one can be accused and destroyed by a false allegation, lose one's family and children--it is certainly debilitating.
Yeah. I recall one of your videos from close to ten years ago maybe, shot at Queens I think, where you gave a talk, and this incensed French-Canadian feminist woman professor gave you a hard time from the audience. In that video one young man (or maybe a few) got into some public self-flagellation about bad he was (they were), from their place in the audience, it was pathetic and embarrassing and I could ask myself 'What have things come to where a young man would act like that? Have you no self-respect or has it been beaten out of you?'.
I was watching a couple of videos this week about boys and the trans movement from the somewhat recent Genspect conference in Denver. One male detransitioner in particular was talking about how the shame inducing ideas of toxic masculinity and rape culture severely affected his life. There was also talk about how these ideas are contributing to boys becoming trans and stigmatising trans boys as sick autogynephiles. And then there's the feminists who support males transitioning because they see it as a form of male castration and a way to get rid of some of that toxic masculinity.
https://youtu.be/ebabuB-c1Ug?si=tn6uzQcs5c5YHUFh
Relevant discussion starts at 20:00
There's also this panel discussion on the "Lost Boys" of the gender clusterf#ck, moderated by Benjamin Boyce.
https://youtu.be/0aaCIq9nd7M?si=zobbzHQ1Acy4id6P
I had a tenant in my basement who graduated with an MBA IN 1995. A bad year for MBAs. She was one of only 3 in her class who got a job offer. Out of 105. She told me this getting her mail. She said ‘i have no idea why I was so lucky’. As she said that she bent over in front of me to pet her dog, and she looked up. She had big big boobies. She was wearing a low loose top, no bra, and her very large breasts swung back and forth unimpeded while she chatted with me. I think I know why she got the job! (To be fair she was bright and funny and was top ten in her class). I think she was actually poking fun at it all.
Thanks, great anecdote. I knew many women in the engineering sector (I was mainly in aerospace) who didn't take all the 'affirmative action stuff' too seriously, were great engineers and great professionals, but there was always a cohort of aggressive aggrieved types, who were often humorless and ambitious, who used it as a political tool. On a side note, I was seriously considering doing an MBA at Harvard in the early 90s (I had the grades, etc) and in the end I didn't, and remained technical and am REALLY glad I did. Harvard. Wow, did I dodge a bullet there.
A tremendous essay, Janice. Getting rid of DEI will take a while, if indeed anybody who could make that happen really wants to get rid of it. When I was looking for academic jobs in the late 70s and 80s I often heard "we had to hire a woman," a DEI refrain before DEI itself. If there is any hope, I would see it in the general decline of the college-university complex, which long ago dropped the serious business of teaching people to think and analyze and articulate. As colleges shrink, so will the influence of the professoriate. Socratic teaching was too adversarial for the profs, especially for women and feminist men. It was unacceptable to see one view as better or worse than another. Somebody's feelings might be hurt! As this rot set in, higher education swelled its administration and increasingly relied in evaluation-sensitive part-time teachers. College became very expensive. At the same time, its effectiveness was diluted. Then people discovered that in a good job market a degree was not needed, and that in a poor one it was little help. The business world saw the uselessness of higher ed and set up their own training programs. The ed market has slowly been getting the message. In the future, one can hope, there will be fewer profs and academic administrators telling the world what to think and do. No need to mourn the English major, for it died a long time ago and will not be missed.
Janice, you are in a battle of wits with the unarmed! Those not hired on the basis of merit have no means of recognizing it. That's why DIE is a ratchet that goes in only one direction; it always degenerates. Things degenerate slowly at first, and then suddenly. Like everything, it will bottom out and a crisis will necessitate as reorganization. I don't think we will recognize the turning point until it is well behind us. I hope not to be around by the time the crisis hits.
I saw this happen very rapidly in the 1990s. I worked in a council that for years had a reputation as frugal but efficient. It was "humming" with a public service ethos. A change in political leadership brought in a series of "diversity hires" , they in turn hired "their own", in a shockingly short time (3 years) the council was wildly overspent, one diversity hire was on "gardening leave" another "let go" due to incompetence and some services in "special measures" . And the public service ethos was gone in favour of "mind your back" because if course the incompetent have to defend their failures by blaming all around them.