Professional Conservative Whiners
Posted by
KTK
Jill, at Feministe, has a great post up about some dweeb at Arizona State University who started a “Caucasian American Men” club to combat the fact that “males are quickly becoming a minority on college campuses”. Last year’s graduating class at ASU had a white/black ratio of 25:1. What’s truly priceless is that the club was started by a woman - who isn’t even an ASU student.
The post goes on to profile Emily Mitchell, the professional conservative whiner behind the whole thing. She’s an agent of a right-wing non-profit group who travels around the country, all expenses paid, and gets $500 a shot for every reactionary group she starts on college campuses. She gets conservative students on campus to front the groups officially, but she is the one who pushes them into it and provides the ideas and impetus. She has founded abstinence clubs, anti-feminism clubs, etc., most apparently designed to be deliberately provocative rather than contribute anything substantive. (Why would you possibly need a club to not have sex? How is a group comprising 95% of the student body a “minority”? Luckily, you don’t have to make sense or speak truth if you’re a conservative.)
So, she’s a twit and he’s a jerk. Was it likely to be otherwise? They deserve each other. But what really got me in the story was this:
It was a political science class that brought [Mitchell] to the Leadership Institute. Mitchell recalls a world politics class with a professor who told her there was no way she could get a passing grade on a paper she was writing defending capitalism over communism.
“She told me there was no suitable argument,” says Mitchell.
The professor, Katherine Kaup, recalls the exchange differently.
“I remember the paper wasn’t strongly researched and I told her to rewrite it. She wasn’t happy,” she says. “I encourage them to take any view as long as they defend their argument. I’m not a socialist, either. I’m a card-carrying Republican.”
Now that brings back memories. Short-term memories, in fact, because I’m right in the middle of grading my own students’ crap-awful term papers on political philosophy and listening to the same distorted gibberish.
It’s astounding how badly students can mis-hear what you say, or misinterpret what they are told or read. I get the most unbelievable things coming back to me on papers, and every professor I know has the same experience. But in addition to that, it is an article of faith among conservatives that the academy is institutionally biased against them - that professors penalize conservative points of view and constantly try to indoctrinate their students with liberal orthodoxy. (Hint to conservative students: get over yourselves. You’re not worth indoctrinating - no one really cares what you think.) Like any faith, it has its scriptures and its dogma - stories, always vague and unverifiable, abound of professors who had a vendetta against right-wing 18-year-olds and had devoted themselves to ferreting out dissent and brainwashing them with “political correctness”.
I never understood that. None of the many campuses I’ve studied or taught at exhibited that tendency. (See the hint above for the reason why.) Most professors have more than enough of their own work to do to bother with what, if anything, goes through their students’ heads outside the classroom. But of course the stories repeat and repeat, with no grounding and no accountability (professional whiner David Horowitz has filled a book with them). In this case, however, someone actually sought out the professor and got the other side of the story - one that makes vastly more sense and dovetails perfectly with experiences I’ve had dozens of times with similar students: the student wrote a crap paper on a legitimate topic, didn’t like the criticism she got on it (even after being given a chance to improve her grade), and decided she was a victim; she then inflated a perfectly ordinary comment on a term paper into some bizarre parody of hidebound ideology - something no one would say even if they were a communist - and passed it off as her conservative victim credentials. Her professor not only didn’t say what Mitchell claims, she apparently doesn’t even hold such beliefs and is a member of a conservative, pro-market political party. We see now what it means to be “indoctrinated” by “politically correct bias” in the “liberal academy”.
Emily Mitchell has thus usefully clarified two distinct genres of whining for us: the reactionary idiot campus club and the bad-professor victim story. Both are artificial constructions whipped up for public consumption by professional conservative whiners, dressed in the truth-seeking veneer of the academy they despise, distorted with lies and falsehoods into self-indulgent martyr fantasies that are themselves the very bias and brainwashing they pretend to combat. No more evidence is required, I think. Thanks, Emily - keep up the good work!
[…] KTK at Lean Left shares his thoughts on the myth(?) of liberal indoctrination at universities: It’s astounding how badly students can mis-hear what you say, or misinterpret what they are told or read. I get the most unbelievable things coming back to me on papers, and every professor I know has the same experience. But in addition to that, it is an article of faith among conservatives that the academy is institutionally biased against them - that professors penalize conservative points of view and constantly try to indoctrinate their students with liberal orthodoxy. (Hint to conservative students: get over yourselves. You’re not worth indoctrinating - no one really cares what you think.) Like any faith, it has its scriptures and its dogma - stories, always vague and unverifiable, abound of professors who had a vendetta against right-wing 18-year-olds and had devoted themselves to ferreting out dissent and brainwashing them with “political correctness”. […]
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Professional Conservative Whiners…
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Trackback 5/30/2007
KTK,
Research your facts. White males did not make up 95% of the graduating class. There were 7000 grads and 283 were black. The rest were not all white males. In fact less than 33% of the student population is white male and the numbers are decreasing each year.
You state that “It’s astounding how badly students can mis-hear what you say, or misinterpret what they are told or read.”
Well, if they are being taught to read and interpret data the way that you and the person in the article did, how can they be expected to do any better?
Comment 5/30/2007
KTK, at least you aren’t a professional liberal whiner. You whine for free.
Comment 5/30/2007
Watch out! The hate patrol is out in full force!!!
Comment 5/30/2007
My own personal troll!
Comment 5/30/2007
Your wife must’ve said that to you this morning…
Comment 5/30/2007
Big U:
Research your facts.
Good advice.
You’re right that whites are not 95% of the student body - they’re just below 90%. The discrepancy is due to the presence of about 8% Asians and Pacific Islanders, which I left out of the calculations and which, frankly, I am surprised is that high.
Just over 75% of students enrolled at ASU are white non-Hispanics, according to recent statistics; however, statewide, nearly all Hispanics classify themselves as single-race white, “Hispanic” being a question of origin, not ethnicity. If that’s true for ASU students as well, the combined percentage of white non-Hispanics and Hispanics is over 88% of all students for whom ethnicity is known. In addition, the percentage of white non-Hispanics, and presumably of whites overall, is 5-8% higher at ASU than in the state of Arizona as a whole. Blacks are under 4% of the student body; black males - the group the “Caucasian American Men” club was formed specificially to mock - are 1.6%, meaning that the ratio of enrolled whites to blacks almost 23:1, and of white men to black men over 26:1, similar to the statistics for last year’s graduating class.
You get “less than 33%” only by classifying all Hispanics as non-white - almost the absolute reverse of the truth - and by classifying all students for whom race was not reported as non-white. It also includes males only. In fact, white non-Hispanic men are over 36% of students for whom race was reported, all white men are about 42% of students, and all whites of both sexes are, as stated above, close to 90% of the student body.
Cry me a river, race martyr.
Comment 5/30/2007
Big U:
Even assuming your 33% number is correct, it would still make white males the second-largest demographic group on campus, behind only white females, and many times larger than the next-largest group. Based on the latest stats I can find, which don’t differentiate by gender, if your 33% number is accurate, it would still be more than three times the number of Hispanic students of both genders. To call white males a “minority” in the sense they’re using is to divorce all meaning from the term “minority.”
Comment 5/30/2007
“divorce all meaning from the term “minority.””
Yes, we know that minority can only apply to non-white subgroups or other approved subgroups. How dare anyone think that “minority” means “less than the majority”?
Comment 5/30/2007
KTK > Either learn to write properly or find a way to create a new math.
The club started was for “Caucasian American Men”.
It was started to deal with the fact that white males are becoming a minority on campus.
Then you ask how a group comprising 95% of the student body consider itself a minority.
According to Arizona State University itself, there is a difference between Hispanics, Blacks, Non-White Hispanics and Non-Black Hispanics. If the university itself makes those distinctions why do you not? Oh that’s right. It doesn’t fit your preconceived race notions. To come to your conclusions, one must make the assumption that anyone who is not black is white. (So much for people of Asian, Indian, Middle Eastern etc. descent.
Comment 5/30/2007
KTK:
I think part of the disconnect between you and Big U is the gender. The club is for Caucasian-American Men, and you’re including all Caucasians in your figures, irrespective of gender. In that very limited sense, Big U has a point. Of course, even when you correct for that, the rest of what he’s arguing is still crap, as I’ve pointed out.
Fred:
Arguing devoid of context; how typical. By your reasoning, white males all throughout the US could fairly describe themselves as a “minority,” since they make up less than half of the population. Except that almost no one, including most conservatives, uses the term “minority” in that sense.
Whether or not a racial group qualifies as a minority has nothing to do with what race that is, and everything to do with the number of people in the group. In South Africa, whites are decidedly a minority, and you’d get no quarrel from me if you qualified them as such.
Comment 5/30/2007
Tgirsh > Years ago, white males made up well over 50% of the student body. At this time at ASU, they make up 33% and that % seems to be dropping year by year. The person attacked in the article never said they were a minority, but rather that they were quickly becoming a minority. Big difference.
Comment 5/30/2007
Most colleges and universities have white male clubs. They are called fraternities.
Comment 5/30/2007
“everything to do with the number of people in the group.”
Make up your mind. Which is it? A minority group of males is not a minority, but based on the number of people in a group they are a minority. That really makes sense.
Comment 5/30/2007
Ted,
I realize that you’re joking, and the joke as some truth to it, but not as much as you might think.
Where I went, RPI, sure few students were minorities (though the ratio of whites to non-whites dropped nearly to one if foreign students were included), and even fewer minorities were in fraternities, but the only fraternities that had as their stated purpose or as their known reputations a preferment of a single race or ethnicity were those which selected minorities. Moreover, there were plenty of particular cases of minority members in the mostly-white fraternities, whereas I think there was only one analogous example in the minority fraternities.
If this is some sort of mirror of “affirmative action”, then like that now-odious practice, it has outlived its utility.
Comment 5/30/2007
Big U:
Yeah, but so what? What, then, is the purpose of the group? Also, see my comment to Fred about white males in general. I’d guess that the white male population of ASU is actually fairly close to reflective of the white male population of the country. So it’s not that white males are somehow becoming under-represented at ASU, but that past discrimination and so forth caused white males to be over-represented in the past. But again, the larger question is, what’s the point of even having such a group? I think KTK is right on about that — the conservative movement loves to describe itself in the language of victimhood (especially true of religious conservatives), and this plays right in.
Fred:
I notice that you selectively quoted me, and left out that I was specifically talking about racial minorities. Had you left that part in, it would have been clear that your “point” was nonsense, and there would have been no point in even posting it.
Dan M:
While I have plenty of reservations about affirmative action, I seriously doubt that it has “outlived its utility.” But that’s a discussion for another time.
Comment 5/30/2007
Tgirsch,
I’m pretty sure some of what has made up affirmative action has outlives its utility (e.g. racial quotas), and I bet you even agree with me on that. I’m also pretty sure some of it hasn’t (e.g. racial scholarships).
In particular, if racial and ethnic fraternities are in effect a kind of affirmative action, they’re now making any remaining problem worse.
Comment 5/30/2007
Stepping away from the fracas about statistics for the moment and getting back to “indoctrination,” I remember that during the time I was working as an aide in the polisci department of a community college, I overheard a professor talking with a student about a paper she was to write.
She wanted to do it on the political debate over health care in the US, but he said that was too broad a topic.
“Do it,” he said, “on ‘Why Socialized Medicine Can’t Work.’”
I’m sure David Horowitz could find some way to argue that a conservative professor not only assigning a conservative topic but pre-determining the conclusion it would reach is an example of liberal bias, but I admit I’m not sure how.
(And before anyone jumps, yes, I did hear enough of the conversation - I was working at my desk on the other side of a partition - to know that the young lady in question was not looking for advice on choosing a conservative topic; she actually wanted to take a neutral approach.)
Comment 5/31/2007
Tgirsch > “the conservative movement loves to describe itself in the language of victimhood (especially true of religious conservatives)”
I’ve seen far less use of the idea of victimhood from religious conservatives than I have from virtually any other group. The difference is that when a religious conservative group is victimized, everyone says they need to suck it up because they’ve had the privileges for so long they don’t have the right to feel victimized.
Comment 5/31/2007
“I notice that you selectively quoted me, and left out that I was specifically talking about racial minorities.”
I get it now. A minority is only a minority if it is a racial minority. Now it makes sense.
Comment 5/31/2007
Fred:
I swear, you have to TRY to be that stupid. You really have to try. It’s not that “A minority is only a minority if it is a racial minority,” it’s that I happened to be talking about racial minorities at the time, a context you conveniently ignored. But I swear, you’d rather walk into a tranny bar and pay for a lap dance than ever admit you’re wrong about anything.
Comment 5/31/2007
Big U:
Give me a break. James Dobson in particular is great at the whole “Christians are a persecuted majority” shtick, despite the fact that they’re generally among the freest, wealthiest and most privileged people on the planet.
Comment 5/31/2007
Tgirsch> you may want to actually take a real look at what happens to Christians in countries outside of North America. that being said, I hear WAY more whining and complaining about how victimized people are from other groups than I ever do from Christians.
Comment 5/31/2007
Tgirsch,
That’s a fantastic mental image. Especially for those of us who like trannies.
Comment 5/31/2007
Big U:
Again, you might have a point if Dobson and his ilk were ever referring to anything other than American white Christians. The other difference is that a lot of the whining and complaining you hear comes from people who actually are victimized in some way.
Comment 6/1/2007
Tgirsch > “other difference is that a lot of the whining and complaining you hear comes from people who actually are victimized in some way.”
So based on your comment:
Being excluded from jobs or other opportunities because of race is not a type of victimization in your books.
Being excluded from jobs or other opportunities because of gender is not a type of victimization in your books.
Being openly ridiculed because of your religious beliefs is not a type of victimization.
Being stereotyped and labelled because of any of the above is not a type of victimization.
Good to know where you stand.
Comment 6/1/2007
“Being excluded from jobs or other opportunities because of race is not a type of victimization in your books.”
Not according to liberal dogma. Only approved minorities can be victims of discrimiation.
Comment 6/1/2007
Big U:
Being excluded from jobs or other opportunities because of race is not a type of victimization in your books.
Being excluded from jobs or other opportunities because of gender is not a type of victimization in your books.
How does that even remotely follow from what I wrote? What I wrote is that most of the groups who complain about “victimization,” such as the ones you listed above, actually have a legitimate complaint to make. Generally speaking, however, this isn’t true of the conservative Christians who complain of “victimization.” It’s vanishingly rare to find a Christian in America who has legitimately been denied opportunity or otherwise wronged strictly because of his or her religious beliefs. There’s a big difference between not being able to get a home loan because of your race, and not being able to make an organized sectarian prayer part of a public high school football game. Conservative Christians in America routinely describe stuff like the latter as “oppression,” however, and that just cheapens the term.
Moving on:
Being openly ridiculed because of your religious beliefs is not a type of victimization.
Being stereotyped and labelled because of any of the above is not a type of victimization.
Actually, they are a type of victimization. But even here, Christians get off a hell of a lot easier than other groups, and generally speaking, they’re the ones dishing it out rather than taking it. And when American Christians cry “oppression,” it’s often after they’ve been called out for pushing their religious views on others in an inappropriate way. That’s while you’re far more likely to hear that some Christian preacher is saying that a vote for Romney (a Mormon) is a vote for Satan; or to hear an argument from Christian conservatives that congresspersons should swear in on the Christian Bible, even if they’re Muslim; or to hear about some Christian general publicly equating Islam with idolatry. What’s worse about this is that in each of these cases, conservative Christians cried and whined about “anti-Christian” bigotry and bias, not because their opportunities were unfairly limited, but because they were criticized for making the remarks. Sorry, but that’s not oppression: it’s false victimhood.
To be clear, if someone is denied a job simply because they’re a Christian, that’s every bit as wrong as denying someone a job simply because they’re black. I’m not saying (as Fred seems to want to imply) that discrimination is discrimination only when it targets “approved minorities.” I’m saying that discrimination against Christians because they’re Christians almost never happens in America, no matter how much the Dobsons of the world like to spout off about it.
Comment 6/1/2007
“it’s that I happened to be talking about racial minorities at the time,”
You do realize that white men are a racial minority, don’t you? LOL And you call me stupid.
“Christians get off a **** of a lot easier than other groups,”
Finally, you admit that Christians are victimized sometimes. That’s a step forward for you. However, your insistance that they shouldn’t squawk about it because they are in the majority is plainly bigotry on you part.
Comment 6/1/2007
Fred, again, you’ve either misunderstood or misrepresented Tgirsch’s remarks. He admits that christians can be victims, and agrees that they should get the same remedies as anyone else when they are. He also points out that most of the public figures that talk about christians being victims are lying when they do so, and that they should stop lying, and that the public needs to see through those lies. Whether a lie or a mere falsehood, it is wrong to claim that an inability to impose a religious doctrine on the public is victimization.
Comment 6/2/2007
“He admits that christians can be victims,”
I know. That’s what I said. I wrote, “Finally, you admit that Christians are victimized sometimes.”
Having trouble with your reading comprehension again?
Comment 6/2/2007
Fred:
You do realize that white men are a racial minority, don’t you?
You do realize that gender (male or female) is not part of your race, and that it is therefore stupid to describe white men (or white women, or black men) as a “racial minority.” (And, for what it’s worth, according to 2005 estimates, whites still make up between 75% and 80% of the US population, depending upon whose numbers you believe — this hardly qualifies as “racial minority” status…)
Finally, you admit that Christians are victimized sometimes.
If by “sometimes” you mean “almost never (at least in America),” I agree. You seem to miss the difference between it being hypothetically possible and it actually happening with any regularity.
However, your insistance that they shouldn’t squawk about it because they are in the majority is plainly bigotry on you part.
I’ve never said they shouldn’t squawk about it because they are in the majority. I said they shouldn’t squawk about it when they’re full of shit and falsely claiming “oppression” where there is none — which is most of the time, by the way.
This isn’t to say that there are never cases of Christians being unfairly discriminated against in this country. In fact, a large majority of the church/state separation cases in the US are brought before the court by Christians (usually against other Christians). That’s the beautiful irony of the whole thing: in those few cases where Christians are legitimately being discriminated against, they’re almost always being discriminated against by other Christians.
Comment 6/3/2007
Since we never stay on topic anyway, I don’t feel guilting in quibbling over a minor point here.
TG: gender (male or female)
Actually, male and female are sexes, not genders. Masculine are feminine the two most common genders.
Seriously, the efforts by GLBT activines have succeeded a bit too much, while mixing badly with America’s prudish nature. We’ve come to just replace the word ’sex’ with ‘gender’, when the two are quite distinct, and only loosely correlated.
Comment 6/3/2007
Dan, ‘gender’ has more than 1 definition, and Tgirsh’s use is correct
Comment 6/3/2007
For your consideration:
http://www.saysuncle.com/archives/2007/06/04/indoctrinate_university/
Comment 6/4/2007
Ted,
That usage of ‘gender’ is correct as a neologism, and one that serves to muddy the distinction that the broadened use of the word was intended to promote.
I must admit, you’re correct that the use of ‘gender’ to denote physiological dimorphism is a valid current use. I should have claimed not that it was incorrect, but that it’s bad, because it reduces clarity, especially when ‘gender’ needs to be used for its meaning that pertains to psychic predilections.
Comment 6/4/2007
Dan M:
You’re correct, of course. I have the same problem with people who misuse the word “unique” to mean “unusual” or “uncommon,” instead of its traditional meaning (”unlike any other”). Those have become acceptable uses, and because of this, we now need a new word to mean what “unique” used to mean!
Comment 6/7/2007
Heh, I just wish we could come up with a short, unoffensive word for “homosexual” that didn’t mess with kids reading Tolkien.
And since Fred is bleeping out the word “hell”, I’m curious why it is that people think that fine old Anglo-saxon words are so dirty and wrong. I’m inclined to believe it’s because, as such succinct and forceful words, they have more coarse power than anyone feels comfortable with in the mouths of children — the same as how people tell their kids not to say they “hate” someone/something. By which hypothesis, Fred’s just that much more childish, as it were.
Not to diverge from the actual topic, but after 30 comments the cycle’s generally built too thick for progress anyway.
Comment 6/8/2007
Can we stop quibbling over vocabulary issues and get to what is real and important here?
1. College teachers can and should express their views, whether or not those views may differ from the views of some of their students. Such expressions do not “oppress” or “victimize” the students, but simply expose them to divergent views and challenge them to defend their own views — if they can — with facts and reasoned arguments.
2. I have attended five major universities and taught at two, and have never witnessed a teacher criticizing or downgrading a student for taking a partcular position, so long as the student could, as noted above, defend that position with facts and reasoned arguments. I have often witnessed, however, students criticized or downgraded for making statements or taking positions that they could not support with facts and reasoned arguments — as they should have been, since the whole purpose of an education is to develop the ability to think clearly and to make arguments that are supported by fact and reason. It is no surprise that “conservative” students today (true conservatives, who were motivated by a sense of justice, compassion, and concern for the good of socieety, must be spinning in their graves to see this label applied to the current right wing in America) are thus often criticized or downgraded in an educational setting, since they commonly champion ideas which they simply cannot defend. Rather than admitting to the weakness of their position, or searching for a stronger argument in support thereof, they cry “oppression” and “indoctrination.” This is part due to laziness, in part to an unwillingness to consider the possible validity of anything that goes against their rigid dogmas. In fairness, rigid people on the left suffer from the same problem.
3. So: the choice is simple — if you want to learn how to think, and thus to have the chance to become a fully functioning adult and citizen, take responsibility for your views and see if they can really be defended. If they can’t, have the courage to let them go rather than claimimg that you’ve been “victimized” by your teachers.
Comment 2/3/2008