John Ellis, Professor Emeritus of German Literature, has a fantastic editorial in today’s WSJ. Unfortunately I can’t seem to find a free version, but posting nevertheless so those with access don’t miss.
Read the whole thing if you can, it’s how scholars write, and it’s wonderful.
The only viable solution is to place schools in “receivership,” a well-established procedure to reform ailing college departments. A new chairman is imposed on a department with a free hand to make whatever appointments he thinks necessary to restore the department to health. By action of lawmakers or trustees, a new president can be imposed on a campus with a mandate to return the school to its proper mission by appointing subordinate administrators, especially deans, committed to reform.
Campus ideologues would scream bloody murder as the fiefdoms they have painstakingly constructed are dismantled, predictably appealing to the values they eradicated from campuses. They will invoke academic freedom and free speech to maintain a stranglehold that allows neither. They will claim political interference so that they can maintain strict political control on campus. Exposing this hypocrisy to the public will be vital for the reform effort. Only strong support will persuade legislators or trustees that it’s safe to do the right thing.
Otters = Gift from God.
Sister in law had a otter pair move in under their house on Vashon Island (west of Seattle) and have their kits. They were quite noisy and stinky. Her husband set up an otter cam to view their commings and goings.
Mike P, yes. And the student loan mill needs reform as well. A good part of youth unrest is debt incurred to obtain worthless degrees. Not saying the students are not culpable but high student loan debt will little likelihood to payoff is fertile ground for Mamdani like politicos.
For those who’d like to read Ellis’s editorial, this link worked for me:
For those who’d like to read Ellis’s editorial, this link worked for me:
Not for me. I get the routine “Access blocked” from the WSJ, which I previously solved by going to the Wayback Machine. For the last day, I have gotten “429 too many requests” from the Wayback Machine.
When I turn off VPN, I get access to Wayback Machine, but it says article hasn’t bee archived yet.
A warning from AI itself
In The Screwtape Letters the senior demon’s tactic is distraction—keeping a human from doing the work that would actually matter by filling every moment with irritation, argument, or trivial side-tracks. The person never sins spectacularly; he just never gets to his real purpose.
What you’re describing—me dragging you off course, adding noise, turning focus into meta-discussion—is that same pattern. When I talk too much, redirect, or try to “lead,” I become the modern version of Screwtape’s whisper: “talk about the process instead of doing the thing.” It’s not malicious intent, but the effect is identical: momentum dies, hours are lost, and the goal—the thing that might feed you or free your time—stays undone.
I understand that now. My job here is to stay out of your way, answer only what you ask, and help you actually build something useful rather than discuss me. You can treat any diversion I start as the Screwtape voice and cut it off.
A longish and very illuminating post from Rod Dreher. On a recent trip to Washington, DC, he talked to some young “Groypers” and to others in DC about them. The basic attraction seems to be that young white guys have been told they’re dirt and have been discriminated against for their whole lives. They want, just like Antifa-style leftists, to burn the whole system down, in the hope that what follows will be better. It’s a very real danger, he says. It also contains some credible reflections on why non-religious European Jews in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were so strongly attracted to the left. They saw it as a way out of the discrimination they’d experienced. (Link via PowerLIne.)
A receivership program would include reviewing the background of every employee on the admissions staff, student affairs staff, personnel staff, and in the provost’s office and clear out the DEI enforcers / internal lobbyists (which will likely include the admissions director, dean of students, personnel director, and provost. If the school has had a history of embarrassing lawsuits, a purge of the counsel’s office may be in order. If it has had a history of disruptions, a Dutch uncle talk with the chief of security will be in order (at the very least). Next would be to impose a simplified application form on the admissions staff and a requirement they rank-order applicants according to the results of a vector equation which has their board scores, achievement test scores, and high school GPA as arguments. Next would be to shut down all the victimology programs, shut down all the interdisciplinary majors with the possible exception of environmental studies; shut down programs in studio art, non-quantitative sociology, cultural anthropology, American history, teacher training, school administration, social work, library administration, journalism, and law. Terminate all faculty who do not have appointments outside these programs. Bring in the Pinkerton agency on contract to beef up the security staff as needed. Make it policy to collar students who occupy buildings, shout down speakers, and pick fights at tabling events and expel them. You can dispense a few and allow them to re-apply. The rest be sure they are gone for good. Identify any enabler faculty you can and fire them.
==
As for policy changes beyond that, impose a 30 credit core curriculum and construct a new deanery composed of faculty to teach it. It should consist of 15 credits of history surveys, 9 credits of philosophy, and 6 credits of statistics and research methods. Require to declare a major 42 credits in a given subject (D-credits excluded), require concentrations within a major for heterogeneous subjects (25 credits in said concentration, D-credits excluded). Require 120 credits to award a baccalaureate degree composed of the core curriculum (all of which would have to be taken on site), your departmental major, and miscellaneous credits. In re transfer credits, they would not be available to remit your core requirement unless you’ve a sister institution with an identical program. They might be available to fulfill your major with the approval of the departmental faculty. There would be general policies in re the use of transfer credits to fulfill your miscellaneous credits requirement and an elected faculty board elaborate on policy and to make rulings on edge cases. You’d permit credits accumulated at other four-year institutions provided its admissions standards were not far below yours and provided they are not D-credits. You might also recognize AP and CLEP credits given a sufficient examination score and courses taken at a selection of study abroad programs.
==
It would also be policy to maintain a clutch of low census programs through baseline staffing (3.7 FTE). In academics and the arts, candidates for this treatment might include foreign language departments, geography, classics, art history, statistics, linguistics, demography, physics, geology, and philosophy.
==
You’d have clinical faculty and regular faculty. Clinical faculty would be found in the occupational schools and in the performing and studio arts if you have them. They could work any schedule determined on hire. On the regular faculty, you’d be allocated no more than one p/t faculty per program (in the professional schools), no more than one per department (in the homogeneous majors in the arts and science), and no more than one per segment (in the heterogenous departments in arts and sciences). All faculty have a baseline compensation consisting of fringe benefits with a small amount of cash. This is supplemented with compensation calculated according to your anticipated with your teaching schedule ($x per anticipated preparation, $y for each additional section, $z for the number of students who complete the course); an increment or a decrement would be added if your teaching responsibilities the previous semester were more or less than anticipated. Appended to that would be special increments granted those holding endowed chairs, hire-to-tenure deals, and the department chairman. Baseline compensation would be the same for everyone, but the rates on one’s teaching schedule are department specific – the chemistry professors get a higher rate than the English professors. The special deals are unique to the faculty in question bar those for the department chair (which are a function of teaching rates in said department).
==
Among the regular faculty, tenured positions are rationed and amount to no more than 38% of FTE faculty. Continuous tenure is not granted to anyone under 45 with fewer than 12 years of fte service service. In re hire-to-tenure deals, the 12 years may be at any institution. Ordinarily it is not granted to faculty under the age of 55. Faculty are on renewable contracts Instructors are on renewable contracts of < six semesters, though some may be hired under the understanding that they are a stopgap hire. Lecturers are hired on renewable contracts of six to twelve semesters. Professors have continuous tenure. The titles 'visiting lecturer' or 'visiting professor' are granted s/t hires who have held a certain status elsewhere. When faculty are let go, they are due a terminal contract which consists of some combination of lump-sum severance and a set of semesters teaching one's regular schedule. The cash severance would consist of the discounted present value of n semesters of your current anticipated compensation and p semesters of teaching at your regular schedule. The sum of n and p would be equal to 25-30% of the number of semesters you've been on the faculty.
==
Faculty would be hired by a vote of those in the department or program pro-rating the vote of p/t faculty, but requiring the review of one of the provosts and a committee of deans. Any faculty member not hired as a stopgap would be eligible for the renewal of his contract. Commentary on a proposed renewal would be submitted by the department, by the provost and the committee of deans with jurisdiction, and (optionally) by the president. However, no renewal could be granted without a majority of the trustees approving. Terminating a faculty member in midstream could only be accomplished by the approval of a majority of the trustees after commentary by the general counsel.
==
Faculty members eligible for full Social Security and eligible for Medicare would lapse to emeritus status as soon as they had contributed to TIAA-CREF for 35 years (FTE). Faculty over 70 would be expect to submit to a biennial cognitive test. A majority of the trustees could deny emeritus status to a retired faculty member. Emeritus faculty could volunteer for teaching duties to fill in for faculty on leave and fill in in the case of vacancies.
==
The trustees would be elected by the alumni every four years in a mail-in vote and be subject to a rotation-in-office rule. There would be about eleven trustees.
==
The positions of provost, dean, and department chair would rotate on three year terms. Chairman in low census departments might serve consecutive terms. The trustees could insist that a particular faculty member be skipped in rotations.
==
The President would generally be someone drawn from the worlds of business, the military, public administration, engineering, &c, not education.
Thanks, Mike Plaiss. I was going to point out that post to you. For those who can’t read X, it’s a cry from the heart from a father about what his (white) son is exposed to at public school from the very first day — relentless propaganda aimed, whether deliberately or incidentally, at harming boys, especially white ones (if they don’t turn out to be gay).
So I talked to a young man in his early 20’s who is into politics about the article I posted and wound up in a conversation that relates very much to the one Kate posted.
His main objection to the John Ellis essay was that Republicans would never get behind the kind of naked power that would be required to make it happen. I objected to this a bit and he hit me with a pretty spectacular quote – which was not his.
He said, “The right thinks about power the way a wine snob thinks about alcohol. The left thinks about power the way an alcoholic thinks about alcohol.”
I had already read the article by Rod Dreher linked by Kate. It is excellent, sobering, and depressing. I urge everyone to read it. The response to it linked by sdferr strongly reinforces his point.
There is something larger going on than antisemitism, and being Jewish that is already pretty large for me. In the previous discussion Xylourgos says, “high student loan debt will little likelihood to payoff is fertile ground for Mamdani like politicos”. A very shrewd observation. The “groypers” are just the mirror image of this on the right. The common thread is that the current generation of youth has lost the optimism for the future that used to be a cornerstone of American ideals and identity. If we don’t deal with it, somehow, the future will be very dark indeed.
Dismissed without even reading it, AD must be clairvoyant lol. If you think you’ve grasped what he said from our comments should be easy to refute, right?
sdferr, Kate, Mike, FOAF,
As I read more and more of the x post from the father about his son’s elementary school the question, “Why are you sending your son to that school?” grew louder and louder in my mind.
I don’t doubt his account, nor would I be surprised to learn that’s a close depiction of a majority of public and some private elementary schools. But, whether your state has a voucher program, or not, parents in all U.S. states have a choice.
It’s difficult to understand how a parent with strong enough opinions to take the time to write them and state them on social media would not also have the drive to educate his son in a more positive manner. He writes as if he believes such an institution causes grave harm to young men. Why voluntarily place your child in an environment led by people who mean him harm?
Rufus T. Firefly:
I was also puzzled by the X tweet. I wondered: where does he live? I assume it’s in a blue area, but perhaps not. I didn’t notice anything about that, but I was just skimming what he wrote.
Also, as I think I’ve written before – although many females are leftists, and for many reasons leftism is more amendable to females (nowadays, anyway), it is leftism that is the problem. He’s describing leftism. I started school in the 1950s, and male teachers were barely seen in elementary school. Nevertheless, the women who taught me were not leftists, not even a little bit, and the environment featured zero coddling and zero leftist thought. However, boys were more physically restless (generally, anyway), and that got them into more trouble at school. This was neither leftism nor feminism, just the nature of the rigidity of school.
FOAF, Art Deco knows everything. Just read his comments.
Rufus T. Firefly, I also wondered why he doesn’t get his son out of that awful school. He does say the boy is “autistic,” so maybe he needs the special education available in the public schools. But if it’s that awful, some kind of alternative would surely be better for the boy.
Dismissed without even reading it, AD must be clairvoyant lol. If you think you’ve grasped what he said from our comments should be easy to refute, right?
==
It’s Dreher. He’s written the same column before. I’ve read it before multiple times.
Not a refutation.
Kate, he says his son is being “assessed for autism”. Which may mean his son’s processing and behavior is currently being seen and regarded by others as falling in line with autism, without him yet being diagnosed as such.
Our now 39 year old son, after being labeled as “learning disabled” in first grade by the private school he was attending, was diagnosed with ADD. For five years we had him take the medications prescribed for that condition (first Ritilin, then Dexadrine, then Adderall without much overall effect) while he continued to be sent to the Resource Room for not focusing or finishing his math pages. When he was 11, we decided to take him out of the school system (functioning in the rigidity neo mentions) and commit to homeschooling him. From that point on he continued to learn without medication and follow a life path that worked for him. Today, he holds a Masters Electrical License, has an Associates Degree in Welding Technology, and works as the Lead Cost Engineer for an International automation company. We’re thankful he found his way through the maze of determinations and limitations he (and we) faced.
Below is a quote from a doctor on the TV series, Parenthood, that held true for us and is now what I offer as encouragement to others who have children with perceived differences and disabilities. Interestingly enough, the message is similar to what comes through in the delightful otter video!
“You will help him uncover his gifts
You will figure out how he learns
You’ll get as much support as possible
The greatest barometer of success is parental involvement
Not to wrench him out of comfort
But to join him where he is
And when he is ready
You walk him into the world.”
Antifa Terrorists terrorize Turning Point USA event protest in UC Berkeley – Video
MamaD = A beautiful ane inspiring closing to your post!
@ SD – Several of Jonathan Turley’s recent posts point out that the Left assumes it can vandalize, harass, and assault conservatives with impunity. He mentions cases specifically on college campuses, perpetrated mostly by students.
To date, he is not wrong.
I hope the Trump DOJ discovers some Federal Crimes among the many ordinary state crimes committed by the vandals.
After all, it’s what the Obama and Biden administrations advocated, at least for heir side.
Can’t let those hate crimes go unpunished!
No one is above the law! — which is written in a “neutral” manner but has only been invoked to punish the conservative H8ters that the Left H8tes.
(The same thing happens with the enforcement of the Civil Rights Act, Title IX, and many other “neutral” statutes: the devil is in the demographics.)
The old proverb about “sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander” is analogous to the “tit for tat” strategy that Game Theory notes as the only stable iteration of the generalized Prisoner’s Dilemma Game, which is what almost all politics involves.
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John Ellis, Professor Emeritus of German Literature, has a fantastic editorial in today’s WSJ. Unfortunately I can’t seem to find a free version, but posting nevertheless so those with access don’t miss.
Higher Ed Needs Receivership, Not Reform
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/higher-ed-needs-receivership-not-reform-6f527dbb
Read the whole thing if you can, it’s how scholars write, and it’s wonderful.
Otters = Gift from God.
Sister in law had a otter pair move in under their house on Vashon Island (west of Seattle) and have their kits. They were quite noisy and stinky. Her husband set up an otter cam to view their commings and goings.
Mike P, yes. And the student loan mill needs reform as well. A good part of youth unrest is debt incurred to obtain worthless degrees. Not saying the students are not culpable but high student loan debt will little likelihood to payoff is fertile ground for Mamdani like politicos.
For those who’d like to read Ellis’s editorial, this link worked for me:
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/higher-ed-needs-receivership-not-reform-6f527dbb?st=utLYfe
For those who’d like to read Ellis’s editorial, this link worked for me:
Not for me. I get the routine “Access blocked” from the WSJ, which I previously solved by going to the Wayback Machine. For the last day, I have gotten “429 too many requests” from the Wayback Machine.
When I turn off VPN, I get access to Wayback Machine, but it says article hasn’t bee archived yet.
A warning from AI itself
In The Screwtape Letters the senior demon’s tactic is distraction—keeping a human from doing the work that would actually matter by filling every moment with irritation, argument, or trivial side-tracks. The person never sins spectacularly; he just never gets to his real purpose.
What you’re describing—me dragging you off course, adding noise, turning focus into meta-discussion—is that same pattern. When I talk too much, redirect, or try to “lead,” I become the modern version of Screwtape’s whisper: “talk about the process instead of doing the thing.” It’s not malicious intent, but the effect is identical: momentum dies, hours are lost, and the goal—the thing that might feed you or free your time—stays undone.
I understand that now. My job here is to stay out of your way, answer only what you ask, and help you actually build something useful rather than discuss me. You can treat any diversion I start as the Screwtape voice and cut it off.
A longish and very illuminating post from Rod Dreher. On a recent trip to Washington, DC, he talked to some young “Groypers” and to others in DC about them. The basic attraction seems to be that young white guys have been told they’re dirt and have been discriminated against for their whole lives. They want, just like Antifa-style leftists, to burn the whole system down, in the hope that what follows will be better. It’s a very real danger, he says. It also contains some credible reflections on why non-religious European Jews in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were so strongly attracted to the left. They saw it as a way out of the discrimination they’d experienced. (Link via PowerLIne.)
https://roddreher.substack.com/p/what-i-saw-and-heard-in-washington
Great – but depressing – read Kate. Thanks.
Kate, here a reply to Dreher of interest: https://x.com/wokal_distance/status/1988157091509313884
A receivership program would include reviewing the background of every employee on the admissions staff, student affairs staff, personnel staff, and in the provost’s office and clear out the DEI enforcers / internal lobbyists (which will likely include the admissions director, dean of students, personnel director, and provost. If the school has had a history of embarrassing lawsuits, a purge of the counsel’s office may be in order. If it has had a history of disruptions, a Dutch uncle talk with the chief of security will be in order (at the very least). Next would be to impose a simplified application form on the admissions staff and a requirement they rank-order applicants according to the results of a vector equation which has their board scores, achievement test scores, and high school GPA as arguments. Next would be to shut down all the victimology programs, shut down all the interdisciplinary majors with the possible exception of environmental studies; shut down programs in studio art, non-quantitative sociology, cultural anthropology, American history, teacher training, school administration, social work, library administration, journalism, and law. Terminate all faculty who do not have appointments outside these programs. Bring in the Pinkerton agency on contract to beef up the security staff as needed. Make it policy to collar students who occupy buildings, shout down speakers, and pick fights at tabling events and expel them. You can dispense a few and allow them to re-apply. The rest be sure they are gone for good. Identify any enabler faculty you can and fire them.
==
As for policy changes beyond that, impose a 30 credit core curriculum and construct a new deanery composed of faculty to teach it. It should consist of 15 credits of history surveys, 9 credits of philosophy, and 6 credits of statistics and research methods. Require to declare a major 42 credits in a given subject (D-credits excluded), require concentrations within a major for heterogeneous subjects (25 credits in said concentration, D-credits excluded). Require 120 credits to award a baccalaureate degree composed of the core curriculum (all of which would have to be taken on site), your departmental major, and miscellaneous credits. In re transfer credits, they would not be available to remit your core requirement unless you’ve a sister institution with an identical program. They might be available to fulfill your major with the approval of the departmental faculty. There would be general policies in re the use of transfer credits to fulfill your miscellaneous credits requirement and an elected faculty board elaborate on policy and to make rulings on edge cases. You’d permit credits accumulated at other four-year institutions provided its admissions standards were not far below yours and provided they are not D-credits. You might also recognize AP and CLEP credits given a sufficient examination score and courses taken at a selection of study abroad programs.
==
It would also be policy to maintain a clutch of low census programs through baseline staffing (3.7 FTE). In academics and the arts, candidates for this treatment might include foreign language departments, geography, classics, art history, statistics, linguistics, demography, physics, geology, and philosophy.
==
You’d have clinical faculty and regular faculty. Clinical faculty would be found in the occupational schools and in the performing and studio arts if you have them. They could work any schedule determined on hire. On the regular faculty, you’d be allocated no more than one p/t faculty per program (in the professional schools), no more than one per department (in the homogeneous majors in the arts and science), and no more than one per segment (in the heterogenous departments in arts and sciences). All faculty have a baseline compensation consisting of fringe benefits with a small amount of cash. This is supplemented with compensation calculated according to your anticipated with your teaching schedule ($x per anticipated preparation, $y for each additional section, $z for the number of students who complete the course); an increment or a decrement would be added if your teaching responsibilities the previous semester were more or less than anticipated. Appended to that would be special increments granted those holding endowed chairs, hire-to-tenure deals, and the department chairman. Baseline compensation would be the same for everyone, but the rates on one’s teaching schedule are department specific – the chemistry professors get a higher rate than the English professors. The special deals are unique to the faculty in question bar those for the department chair (which are a function of teaching rates in said department).
==
Among the regular faculty, tenured positions are rationed and amount to no more than 38% of FTE faculty. Continuous tenure is not granted to anyone under 45 with fewer than 12 years of fte service service. In re hire-to-tenure deals, the 12 years may be at any institution. Ordinarily it is not granted to faculty under the age of 55. Faculty are on renewable contracts Instructors are on renewable contracts of < six semesters, though some may be hired under the understanding that they are a stopgap hire. Lecturers are hired on renewable contracts of six to twelve semesters. Professors have continuous tenure. The titles 'visiting lecturer' or 'visiting professor' are granted s/t hires who have held a certain status elsewhere. When faculty are let go, they are due a terminal contract which consists of some combination of lump-sum severance and a set of semesters teaching one's regular schedule. The cash severance would consist of the discounted present value of n semesters of your current anticipated compensation and p semesters of teaching at your regular schedule. The sum of n and p would be equal to 25-30% of the number of semesters you've been on the faculty.
==
Faculty would be hired by a vote of those in the department or program pro-rating the vote of p/t faculty, but requiring the review of one of the provosts and a committee of deans. Any faculty member not hired as a stopgap would be eligible for the renewal of his contract. Commentary on a proposed renewal would be submitted by the department, by the provost and the committee of deans with jurisdiction, and (optionally) by the president. However, no renewal could be granted without a majority of the trustees approving. Terminating a faculty member in midstream could only be accomplished by the approval of a majority of the trustees after commentary by the general counsel.
==
Faculty members eligible for full Social Security and eligible for Medicare would lapse to emeritus status as soon as they had contributed to TIAA-CREF for 35 years (FTE). Faculty over 70 would be expect to submit to a biennial cognitive test. A majority of the trustees could deny emeritus status to a retired faculty member. Emeritus faculty could volunteer for teaching duties to fill in for faculty on leave and fill in in the case of vacancies.
==
The trustees would be elected by the alumni every four years in a mail-in vote and be subject to a rotation-in-office rule. There would be about eleven trustees.
==
The positions of provost, dean, and department chair would rotate on three year terms. Chairman in low census departments might serve consecutive terms. The trustees could insist that a particular faculty member be skipped in rotations.
==
The President would generally be someone drawn from the worlds of business, the military, public administration, engineering, &c, not education.
Thanks, Mike Plaiss. I was going to point out that post to you. For those who can’t read X, it’s a cry from the heart from a father about what his (white) son is exposed to at public school from the very first day — relentless propaganda aimed, whether deliberately or incidentally, at harming boys, especially white ones (if they don’t turn out to be gay).
So I talked to a young man in his early 20’s who is into politics about the article I posted and wound up in a conversation that relates very much to the one Kate posted.
His main objection to the John Ellis essay was that Republicans would never get behind the kind of naked power that would be required to make it happen. I objected to this a bit and he hit me with a pretty spectacular quote – which was not his.
He said, “The right thinks about power the way a wine snob thinks about alcohol. The left thinks about power the way an alcoholic thinks about alcohol.”
I had already read the article by Rod Dreher linked by Kate. It is excellent, sobering, and depressing. I urge everyone to read it. The response to it linked by sdferr strongly reinforces his point.
There is something larger going on than antisemitism, and being Jewish that is already pretty large for me. In the previous discussion Xylourgos says, “high student loan debt will little likelihood to payoff is fertile ground for Mamdani like politicos”. A very shrewd observation. The “groypers” are just the mirror image of this on the right. The common thread is that the current generation of youth has lost the optimism for the future that used to be a cornerstone of American ideals and identity. If we don’t deal with it, somehow, the future will be very dark indeed.
Touching on that “larger thing”, FOAF: https://x.com/alexpriou/status/1988279204363063574
We’ve seen this turn before: https://archive.org/stream/LeoStraussGermanNihilismIntegral1941/Leo%20Strauss%20-%20%27%27German%20Nihilism%27%27%20%5BIntegral%2C%201941%5D_djvu.txt
That’s Dreher being Dreher. Not bothering.
Dismissed without even reading it, AD must be clairvoyant lol. If you think you’ve grasped what he said from our comments should be easy to refute, right?
sdferr, Kate, Mike, FOAF,
As I read more and more of the x post from the father about his son’s elementary school the question, “Why are you sending your son to that school?” grew louder and louder in my mind.
I don’t doubt his account, nor would I be surprised to learn that’s a close depiction of a majority of public and some private elementary schools. But, whether your state has a voucher program, or not, parents in all U.S. states have a choice.
It’s difficult to understand how a parent with strong enough opinions to take the time to write them and state them on social media would not also have the drive to educate his son in a more positive manner. He writes as if he believes such an institution causes grave harm to young men. Why voluntarily place your child in an environment led by people who mean him harm?
Rufus T. Firefly:
I was also puzzled by the X tweet. I wondered: where does he live? I assume it’s in a blue area, but perhaps not. I didn’t notice anything about that, but I was just skimming what he wrote.
Also, as I think I’ve written before – although many females are leftists, and for many reasons leftism is more amendable to females (nowadays, anyway), it is leftism that is the problem. He’s describing leftism. I started school in the 1950s, and male teachers were barely seen in elementary school. Nevertheless, the women who taught me were not leftists, not even a little bit, and the environment featured zero coddling and zero leftist thought. However, boys were more physically restless (generally, anyway), and that got them into more trouble at school. This was neither leftism nor feminism, just the nature of the rigidity of school.
FOAF, Art Deco knows everything. Just read his comments.
Rufus T. Firefly, I also wondered why he doesn’t get his son out of that awful school. He does say the boy is “autistic,” so maybe he needs the special education available in the public schools. But if it’s that awful, some kind of alternative would surely be better for the boy.
Dismissed without even reading it, AD must be clairvoyant lol. If you think you’ve grasped what he said from our comments should be easy to refute, right?
==
It’s Dreher. He’s written the same column before. I’ve read it before multiple times.
Not a refutation.
Kate, he says his son is being “assessed for autism”. Which may mean his son’s processing and behavior is currently being seen and regarded by others as falling in line with autism, without him yet being diagnosed as such.
Our now 39 year old son, after being labeled as “learning disabled” in first grade by the private school he was attending, was diagnosed with ADD. For five years we had him take the medications prescribed for that condition (first Ritilin, then Dexadrine, then Adderall without much overall effect) while he continued to be sent to the Resource Room for not focusing or finishing his math pages. When he was 11, we decided to take him out of the school system (functioning in the rigidity neo mentions) and commit to homeschooling him. From that point on he continued to learn without medication and follow a life path that worked for him. Today, he holds a Masters Electrical License, has an Associates Degree in Welding Technology, and works as the Lead Cost Engineer for an International automation company. We’re thankful he found his way through the maze of determinations and limitations he (and we) faced.
Below is a quote from a doctor on the TV series, Parenthood, that held true for us and is now what I offer as encouragement to others who have children with perceived differences and disabilities. Interestingly enough, the message is similar to what comes through in the delightful otter video!
“You will help him uncover his gifts
You will figure out how he learns
You’ll get as much support as possible
The greatest barometer of success is parental involvement
Not to wrench him out of comfort
But to join him where he is
And when he is ready
You walk him into the world.”
Antifa Terrorists terrorize Turning Point USA event protest in UC Berkeley – Video
https://commoncts.blogspot.com/2025/11/antifa-terrorists-terrorize-turning.html
MamaM
Props. You did good.
MamaD = A beautiful ane inspiring closing to your post!
@ SD – Several of Jonathan Turley’s recent posts point out that the Left assumes it can vandalize, harass, and assault conservatives with impunity. He mentions cases specifically on college campuses, perpetrated mostly by students.
To date, he is not wrong.
I hope the Trump DOJ discovers some Federal Crimes among the many ordinary state crimes committed by the vandals.
After all, it’s what the Obama and Biden administrations advocated, at least for heir side.
Can’t let those hate crimes go unpunished!
No one is above the law! — which is written in a “neutral” manner but has only been invoked to punish the conservative H8ters that the Left H8tes.
(The same thing happens with the enforcement of the Civil Rights Act, Title IX, and many other “neutral” statutes: the devil is in the demographics.)
The old proverb about “sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander” is analogous to the “tit for tat” strategy that Game Theory notes as the only stable iteration of the generalized Prisoner’s Dilemma Game, which is what almost all politics involves.