11 Comments

Captures the meaninglessness, bureaucracy, greed, depraved, empty hunger for power, narcissism and sociopathy of (corrupt) higher education perfectly.

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This explains why the humanities have moved to YouTube and Substack, while all the action in hard sciences occurs in startups.

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Best essay I've read in a very long time about the bleakness at the very foundation of academic life during the 2010s.

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I have been in public higher ed for a decade; this was spot on. I am currently planning my escape plan, hoping to exit sometime within the next few years. Every semester that clicks over I feel more and more that I am polishing the brass on the Titanic. The greed, the abuse, the careerism, the institutional apartheid between the Tenured brahmins and the adjunct sudras, the abusive workloads, the lowering standards, the cancer and distraction that is DEI, the Title IX kangaroo courts, the woke union -- it will all bring the largest public university system to its knees. I hope something better rises from its ashes.

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Both strands of the story are so sad. In different ways. Kathy’s was tragic.

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Does anyone in Wesley Yang's substack community know of the earliest evidence of the strategy of organizations on the left to carefully and methodically persuade Americans that the movement for LGBTQ+ rights (and all other groups deemed marginalized today) is equivalent to the Civil Rights Movement and thus to inherit or appropriate the goodwill most Americans feel toward the Civil Rights movement? Maybe something that exposes that they knew this was a tendentious argument but where they were nonetheless public about that and pointed out it would be rhetorically effective.

I vaguely remember that there may have been some publicized internal documents from major LGBTQ advocacy organizations detailing such a strategy as far back as 2014. I feel like Wesley has discussed this topic surely or maybe I've heard it more concretely somewhere else?

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It will be a long time before I forget this story.

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