Talk about a motor mouth on this video! But my daughter, nearly 25 years ago, earned a Master’s degree in English Literature from a respected university, and found what this woman finds. They don’t study or teach literature any more, for the beauty of the writing or for the insights into human nature they examine. Literature classes simply use the writings as a springboard to talk about all of the latests “isms” the left is currently pursuing. The literature itself disappears.
Yes, she speaks very quickly, but her mind is agile and bursting with ideas. God love her, I agree with and recognize everything she says. Sadly, this cultural cancer has infiltrated the entire Humanities curriculum. It is not just literature. It’s an enormous loss. Students minds are being corrupted, and molded to ignore the beauty in our human arts, with everything cast through the prism of victimhood. It is a tragedy.
The young in need of schooling are “in need”, why? Due to ignorance, one might say. Yet the choice to be made of schooling is frequently a “choice” placed in the decision of this very same person in need — again — in need due to ignorance. So an unfortunately ignorant “choice” is made.
Trust will often have a role. Trust in a repute, for instance.
Notice anything about the popularity of electives in education? Time was no such thing existed (right?) since by definition this “election” is to be made by the very same ignorant one in need of an education. Seems a rather silly premise upon which to cast a foundation to life altering decision making. Or, as we’ve been told: “Ya pays yer money, ya takes yer chances.”
There might be a better way.
TheTruthFits sportswear shares a video of
a Georgia teen and her mother sporting “XX/XY” T-shirts who were censored (or else forced to leave) a Georgia Fever WNBA basketball game. “Chromosomes are Offensive. We Have Reached Peak Stupidity” says Brandi Kruise.
I learned just yesterday that a love for epic poetry is to be equated with racism, fascism, and toxic masculinity.
I’ve loved epic poetry and have been reading it all my life, since I read children’s versions of the Homeric epics when I first learned to read. I study epic poetry now and, relatedly, the literature of ancient/extinct languages. I’m in the process — I really am, I’m not just saying this — of writing an epic poem set in Bronze Age Greece and Anatolia. It sucks to be me, I guess.
I’m also deeply interested in the history of Rome. So, I guess I’m hopelessly toxic.
I’m mildly embarrassed to admit that earned a BA in English Lit. A worthless degree, and if I could do college over again, I wouldn’t — I’d go to trade school. That, or I’d go the STEM route. I hated most of the books in the English Lit curriculum. I could go on and on about this, but I’ll spare you the pain it will inflict upon you. I hated most of my instructors, the professors and TAs, who were (almost all of them) radical leftists who never lost an opportunity to ventilate their leftist ideological views. Which they often did, in lieu of actually teaching literature. And which, I suppose, made sense to them, given that they clearly hated English literature and the civilization that produced it.
This was in the late sixties-mid seventies, so the whole thing has been going to rot for a very long time.
Rant concluded. I feel better now.
deleted
If you want a normal speaking cadence, set the playback speed to 0.8.
My guess is she accelerated the speech to meet an algorithm bias against longer YouTube videos.
Yes I have read that take about Mansfield Park being about slavery, slavery, slavery and not about Fannie and families (and wicked aunties).
From my experience at the college I taught everything was pretty normal in the English department until about 2000. Then the change started happening. With new hires, post modernism took hold then the marxists came in and voila..no more literature. The Education department was taken over first, but it and English were the advanced troops.
@IrishOtter49:I’d go to trade school. That, or I’d go the STEM route.
It’s entirely possible you’d have not done much better. Maybe fifty years ago you might have, certainly not today.
Trade schools are often as much a poor investment as a BA in pre-barista studies. Partly because many trades can be learned without going to “trade school”, and partly because while the trades themselves are hugely profitable for people who own the business they are less so for the people who do the work, and sometimes there are unions in between people and jobs. The median salaries of people in various trades are the kind of thing you can look up: for example accountants’ median salaries are about $20K higher than plumbers’. (Most of the talking heads who are talking up the trades as good careers are not seeking them for their children, but for yours…)
STEM, on the other hand, is its own tough row to hoe. Only some STEM fields are in high demand outside academia or research, it is often a barrier to advancement to management (if that’s your desire), and you are up against a worldwide pool of talent thanks to the abuse of H1-B and similar programs. Academia and research is plagued by the DEI issues as much or more so than non-STEM fields and white males starting out are last considered for such positions.
Eh, things are tough all over, and there’s no longer any magic bullet to doing well, if there ever was.
The generation that believes it is the intended culmination of everything that came before it is now and has for some time been in the education racket. It analyzes (if that is a word that can accurately be used to describe its pedagogy) everything through its solipsistic lens. It disregards anything like historical context and interprets all that has gone before as being either irrelevant or useful only to promote its narrow and ahistorical view of the world and its inhabitants. So a three thousand year old Greek epic poem is useful only to decry the current state of race relations and sexual mores.
Technology has given us the equivalent of a Community of Scholars times n, while the actual historical descendant institution has degraded into a sorting device for young adults who have learned how to avoid cancellation as they do their time.
Several generations now have experienced the BS, setting the stage for some sort of dramatic change.
IMO humans are rapidly approaching a period of dramatic change like nothing they can currently visualize. AI is the primary driver.
The Black Friday 1929 and the followiing bank failures that left the middle class with no money is something in recent history that can be used as an example. AI seems likely to leave the middle class with no money. IMO things will work out, but it will be a very challenging period.
Nick summarized.
It is entirely possible that life has unexpected turns.
How did that PhD turn out? As expected?
Ummm… Did Columbia change its English curriculum and/or the department’s underlying pedagogy (or whatever you would call it) over the summer before her enrollment? I doubt it. This stuff has been all over the Internet for a long time. She, as well as her parents, should have done some basic research.
Talk Radio host Vince Coglianese said today that “non-DSA Democrats” support the same things that “Democratic Socialists” do, but they just won’t admit it.
Reminds me of the “mostly peaceful protests” where the “peaceful protesters” provide a screen and distraction for the Antifa brick-throwers.
Watt:
I think she’s in her late thirties, and went to college about twenty years ago. The sort of thing she describes was newer then. I would imagine at that time that one could do research and see a list of courses that sounded conventional, with conventional titles like “The Work of Jane Austen” without realizing what was the deeper content of the course. Plus, there was less reason to be suspicious in the first place, back then.
Before selling our business and retiring, I employed union electrical lineman-operators whose starting wage was around $30/hr if they had a CDL. At over 55 hours per week, a guy with a couple years in the field and no special training beyond that OJT won’t see less than $120,000 per year, provided he makes himself in demand. (We had zero female field employees.) After five years or so, we’d pay those who could run a crew Journeyman scale. (More like $150,000/year.) If you were a #1 boom trucker or a driller (we did T-line foundations), Jouneyman scale as well. The employeers pension contribution is 25% of wages. And we gave bonuses. The top field employees pulled around $200,000 in wages and bonus.
We had many employees who worked for us for their whole careers. Some retired employees still meet for breakfast every first Thursday.
There are still very good opportunities like that to make a very good—a superior—living, without a college degree. It’s not an easy life, though. It’s hard work, with a lot of nights out of town.
That Third Temple is getting closer, it seems. Jews allowed to openly take prayer books up on the Temple Mount yesterday, for the first time.
If you want a normal speaking cadence, set the playback speed to 0.8. — om
Ha! A+ for enthusiasm. An enjoyable listen.
I’m less facile with fast talkers than most people, but I found her easy to understand because she separates her words well, and she enunciates well.
A quote from the video:
Even on the first day of freshman orientation, something was off. I mean this was August 2015. I don’t know if you guys remember, this was the GOP primaries. Trump was just starting to gain prominence. And there was also this new buzzword on campus around that time and that was political correctness.
Well… All of us are challenged by what we don’t know. But, PC wasn’t a new thing in 2015. I think it was in the 1980’s (or the 70’s?) when I was reading Newsweek mag. and they had a little sidebar commentary that was in nearly every issue. What was PC this week and what was anti-PC. What the hell is PC, I wondered?? Political Correctness. Oh. Really? So now the media is into the shaping of mass opinions through social pressure, I thought. Or maybe it was more than just the media? (It was. And I’d say wildly successful.)
Meanwhile the art establishment is doing a great job of hating art and beauty.
It’s hard to see how this changes, not in the near-term anyway.
Neo:
There was enough information out there at the time, apparently:
That’s not my point. It’s not that there wasn’t information if you were already suspicious and dug and dug (and by the way, the internet wasn’t as often-used back then as later on). It’s that what was going on in colleges wasn’t well-known and most people did not suspect the problem, and cursory research didn’t uncover it. Most people assumed things hadn’t changed.
For example, my child was in college in the late 1990s and early 2000’s, and although I knew there was a bit of a problem I hadn’t a clue how bad it had gotten. And the ONLY reason I know was that I had gone back to graduate school in the mid-1990s, and so I was exposed to it a little bit myself.
Neo:
Ok, then after the first semester or two you figure it out and transfer, if you really love English literature.
TommyJay:
I didn’t hear her say 2015. I’m not saying she didn’t say it, but I just didn’t hear it. I heard her say she was 18 years old, and somewhere else (maybe another video I watched) I thought she indicated she’s now 38. That’s why I assumed it was 20 years ago that she went to school.
But I’m not going to watch the whole thing again to find that part 🙂 . But I see, looking it up, that she is 28 years old. So you are correct. It was a little over 10 years ago that she went to Columbia. Things had changed a lot by then, but for whatever reason she wasn’t aware of it. I’ve always read that 2014 to about 2020 were the years of more extreme transition.
Watt:
See my comment to TommyJay, right above this one.
I thought she said she was 38, but she’s 28 and started school in 2015. So – as I explain in the above comment – it’s more strange that she didn’t realize what was going on in Columbia by then. But IMHO, not all THAT strange; a lot of people were unaware.
However, I doubt transferring would have done all that much good, since by then this approach had pretty much taken over all the English departments everywhere. I suppose she could have tried Hillsdale. She did later drop out of her PhD program and became an internet figure.
Wow after reading nik I realize I ruined my life going to engineering school in my mid-30s and getting a good job with a now-comfortable retirement. What a waste! I wish you had been around then to set me straight nik.
@FOAF:Wow after reading nik I realize I ruined my life going to engineering school
I think you must have me confused with another commenter. I’m certain you wouldn’t deliberately lie about what I wrote. I didn’t think IrishOtter49 needed to regret his English degree, because there’s so much more to it than that. The grass is always greener somewhere else.
I went the STEM route, had to make a career outside of STEM, and have no regrets about doing it, but there are plenty of people with BAs in English Lit who make more than I do: some of them were VPs I reported to. That’s as it is, because things other than degrees have so much to do with how things turn out. I studied what I loved, but had to make big changes in order to earn a better living, and the things I studied made me far more effective at some things than most people who do what I do.
If I had to do over again I’d probably tweak around the edges but I wouldn’t try for as radical a change as English Lit. There’s no golden road to a comfortable life. Things like your college major are just one element along with hard work, luck, networks, and market forces.
My daughter got her BA in Eng. Lit. from UNC – Chapel Hill in 2005. She was able to choose classes taught by the older cohort of professors who still actually taught literature. In grad school at a different school, 2005-2006, she discovered there were no profs teaching literature; it was all feminism, colonialism, gay/lesbian studies, and so on. This was ten years before the featured video here. To what school should the student in 2015 have transferred? The field was wrecked.
Related:
Our mission is to EDUCATE OBFUSCATE…and INDOCTRINATE.
On STEM: Only about 5% if our majors ever went on in physics/astro. Vast majority went to engineering grad school where they were picked over upgrad engineering students due to their more extensive analytical training and their often double major in math. Those who did such are very successful. A few went the medical route where once again were taken over the usual chem/bio majors and have also done well. A couple headed to MBAs and did analytics.
Shortened Nick.
I made the right choices and I would make the right choices if I had to do it over, because, I’m me!
Those skilled trades and technical folk, who knows? Do they think about what they do, or come to love their work? Again, who knows?
(sarc x 11)
My daughter might have been an English major, but could see that there were too many courses she’d have to take that were hyper-politicized. She was able to find a few classes that were actually about literature and managed a minor in English. She started college in 2019 when the rot was obvious.
@Bauxite
“Lee Jae-myung (Lee Jae Myung), who has been president since June 4, 2025, favors engagement, dialogue, tension reduction, and eventual peaceful coexistence with North Korea, while treating full denuclearization as a longer-term goal rather than an immediate precondition.”
So Trump is helping him with his goals. Spin that top.
After 30 seconds I stopped the video. Too fast. I’ll try the speed changing trick. Here is her blog: https://www.pensandpoison.org/
Her blog is worth perusing. I didn’t watch the video long enough to tell, but from the written blog you could read that she started Columbia circa 2015.
My exposure to English teachers and professors long predated the politicization of the classroom. Nonetheless, from ninth grade on, I loathed English classes. My objection was their using literary criticism as vehicle for teaching composition. (My best memories of high school English were being assigned a composition to write in class—a composition that had nothing to do with literary criticism.)
As Junior Literary Critics, we were pushed to find symbols, metaphors etc. Unfortunately, we were pushed into making conjectures—into faking it. It felt very uncomfortable making those symbolism etc. conjectures. Years later, I had a discussion on this with my sister. She also did not like being forced into the Junior Literary Critic role.
As an older college student, I took a Shakespeare class. Remembering that a classmate in 11th grade English had Aced the Julius Ceasar test by reading the play twice, I read each play twice. We had good classroom discussions, and I got the only A I had ever gotten for a semester grade in English. Decades later, my book club read a book that had won a Pulitzer Prize. The author was a graduate of the college where I had taken the Shakespeare course. I called my old professor to find out if she had the Pulitzer Prize winner as a student. She hadn’t, but her ex had.
physicsguy, the son of a family friend was a physics major who applied his knowledge. He was a ham radio operator, and built us a TV from parts. He got hired as an engineer with his BA in Physics. Back then, a lot of future engineers or physicists were ham radio operators. He ended up heading up a DeVries trade school.
My husband was the only physics major in our year NOT to go into academic physics in graduate studies. He got an MSEE, and found he could handle the material much better than the students who had engineering undergrad degrees. The rigorous physics training helped enormously in his professional career. It taught him to analyze problems and find solutions.
Over time I developed a deep loathing for postmodern literary criticism. The kind promulgated by the likes of Jacques Derrida, Stanley Fish, Paul De Man, Michel Foucault, Georges Bataille, and so on. John Searle once said the Derrida’s work “gives bullshit a bad name.” I couldn’t agree more, and I think Searle’s remark applies to all the others in my list — to postmodern literary theory practitioners overall. They took over the English Lit departments and in doing so killed English Lit as a worthwhile and enjoyable academic pursuit. Gerald Graff wrote a pretty good book about this phenomenon titled “Literature Against Itself.” The title says it all. As it turned out, however, Graff was almost as bad as the others in this regard.
I did take several postgraduate-level courses in Irish literature, and I thoroughly enjoyed those. But I enjoyed them because the study of Irish history is foundational to Irish literature foundation, which suited me just fine. The fact that so many Irish literary figures were so very colorful was a bonus.
Fortunately postmodern literary criticism played no part in my study of Irish literature, at least in my experience.
U of Washington dropout due to divorce. 33 years at The Boeing Company, many interesting computer related jobs. Spent much of my career doing whatever I felt like until something went tango uniform and then into the fire I would go. Three space mission patches including both the first and last flight of the Challenger. No patches for the classified missions as it was a secret that IUS was aboard.
Regrets? Many.
I read a lot, but I don’t do what are called the great books. Found them boring and only abnormal characters jazzed them up some. I’ve always favored normal people facing difficulties. That’s for fiction, I should say. The great philosophers are like Aesop only with more words. What formed western civilization is ordinary people pushing, hard or casually, toward what they want, with Classical Greece and Judeo Christion values in the atmosphere, so to speak. There are classics, in a sense. You read Horatius and wonder, even if briefly, what if it’s me at the bridge? Wouldn’t go looking for it, but neither did Horatius and his buddies. SO…? For what it’s worth, I was exposed to these in college as part of our reqirements. American history and associated literature. Western history and associated literature. Went into Jane Austen, my Mom liked that, couldn’t get going.
Still, using the venue to pitch anti-western ideas is stupid and nearly criminal.
I try to read a couple of “great books” every year, mainly ones I’d missed in school, but a few repeats. I find them (well, most of them) not boring at all. I’m a big fan of English lit in particular. Over the past couple of years I read “Vanity Fair,” “Tale of Two Cities,” and “Jane Eyre.” Loved all of them. Right now I’m reading “Middlemarch,” which is a bit of a slog, though still enjoyable. Austin, Dickens, Forster (I’ve read “Howards End” three times) are all great. Early to mid-20th Century American lit is also mostly great (I’ve never quite gotten Hemingway). I read some contemporary stuff too, but find most of it literally forgettable. As in, six months later I couldn’t tell you what the book was about. Philip Roth is an exception.
It’s really a shame what has befallen our education system.
Re South Korea and Trump, Bauxite writes on the downgrade in allied exercises. , “Tough to spin this one”.
It’s not spin to say that the President’s gotten better cooperation from, Rocket Man than new Far Left goon squad in South Korea.
The message there is the obvious one.
@ Richard Aubrey > “The great philosophers are like Aesop only with more words.”
I haven’t ever seen a characterization expressed that way, but I think you are correct!
English major here. Never got Hemingway either. Except ‘The Short Happy Life Of Francis Macomber’.
Years after reading it I became acquainted with a man who told me the story was about his parents. Since he was a respectable and well known person I saw no reason to doubt him.
Rereading Raymond Chandler’s ‘The Big Sleep’ right now – my candidate for the 20th Century’s great American novel. Pretty sure I’ve figured out who killed Owen the chauffeur, too.
• Instead, Wasserman Schultz jumped into the primary for a neighboring district in Broward County, where a handful of prominent African American leaders were already vying to represent an area that is more than 40 percent Black.
• “She’s been an ally, but suddenly it’s feeling more like she’s using the familiarity she’s built against us,” Shearer said. “With the landscape of all that, somebody who says they’re our friend decides: ‘Hey I’m in trouble, and I’m going to take yours.’”
It’s not difficult to discern pathways to improving higher education, but state legislators and governors do nothing. The critics of higher education don’t think outside a particular box.
==
Camille Paglia has been saying for thirty years that the study of literature in the hands of faculty has decayed into cut rate sociology. Which is to say that it’s raison d’etre has evaporated at one institution after another. There is one thing for conscientious trustees to do: shut down the English and comparative literature departments and discharge their faculty en bloc. In public systems, the governor and state legislature can mandate the dismissals.
==
Please note that liberal education is education for leisure. You have the natural sciences, mathematics, computer science, statistics, economics, the quantitative wings of sociology and geography, and patches of psychology. You have archeology. You have the study of history at its best. You have the study of foreign languages. Tell the rest that they’re expendable.
==
As for the occupational faculties, social work and library administration ought to be eliminated and teacher training completely revamped.
@IrishOtter49: May I suggest this essay by Maurice Black?
I was acquainted with Jacques Derrida, having served as his editor for several of his books and their translations into English. US English departments are not really dealing with Derrida, whose thinking was subtle and generous and anything but anti-Western. They are talking about a “Derrida” largely of their own invention, one imported into the US culture wars through misreadings and bad-faith commentators with agendas of their own. No one since Freud has been so severely and so wrongly “Americanized.”
As for Liza Libes, I am familiar with her Substack posts. I consider her a reactionary philistine intent on turning personal resentment and a closed mind into an online brand.
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Talk about a motor mouth on this video! But my daughter, nearly 25 years ago, earned a Master’s degree in English Literature from a respected university, and found what this woman finds. They don’t study or teach literature any more, for the beauty of the writing or for the insights into human nature they examine. Literature classes simply use the writings as a springboard to talk about all of the latests “isms” the left is currently pursuing. The literature itself disappears.
Yes, she speaks very quickly, but her mind is agile and bursting with ideas. God love her, I agree with and recognize everything she says. Sadly, this cultural cancer has infiltrated the entire Humanities curriculum. It is not just literature. It’s an enormous loss. Students minds are being corrupted, and molded to ignore the beauty in our human arts, with everything cast through the prism of victimhood. It is a tragedy.
The young in need of schooling are “in need”, why? Due to ignorance, one might say. Yet the choice to be made of schooling is frequently a “choice” placed in the decision of this very same person in need — again — in need due to ignorance. So an unfortunately ignorant “choice” is made.
Trust will often have a role. Trust in a repute, for instance.
Notice anything about the popularity of electives in education? Time was no such thing existed (right?) since by definition this “election” is to be made by the very same ignorant one in need of an education. Seems a rather silly premise upon which to cast a foundation to life altering decision making. Or, as we’ve been told: “Ya pays yer money, ya takes yer chances.”
There might be a better way.
TheTruthFits sportswear shares a video of
a Georgia teen and her mother sporting “XX/XY” T-shirts who were censored (or else forced to leave) a Georgia Fever WNBA basketball game. “Chromosomes are Offensive. We Have Reached Peak Stupidity” says Brandi Kruise.
Photos and video commentary here https://x.com/xx_xyathletics
H/T Instapunfit
LINKED TO https://x.com/JonnyRoot_/status/2089188991224393877?
I learned just yesterday that a love for epic poetry is to be equated with racism, fascism, and toxic masculinity.
I’ve loved epic poetry and have been reading it all my life, since I read children’s versions of the Homeric epics when I first learned to read. I study epic poetry now and, relatedly, the literature of ancient/extinct languages. I’m in the process — I really am, I’m not just saying this — of writing an epic poem set in Bronze Age Greece and Anatolia. It sucks to be me, I guess.
I’m also deeply interested in the history of Rome. So, I guess I’m hopelessly toxic.
Sadly, she is spot on.
Tough to spin this one:
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-orders-major-cut-us-south-korea-drills-north-korea-ramps-up-missile-tests
I’m mildly embarrassed to admit that earned a BA in English Lit. A worthless degree, and if I could do college over again, I wouldn’t — I’d go to trade school. That, or I’d go the STEM route. I hated most of the books in the English Lit curriculum. I could go on and on about this, but I’ll spare you the pain it will inflict upon you. I hated most of my instructors, the professors and TAs, who were (almost all of them) radical leftists who never lost an opportunity to ventilate their leftist ideological views. Which they often did, in lieu of actually teaching literature. And which, I suppose, made sense to them, given that they clearly hated English literature and the civilization that produced it.
This was in the late sixties-mid seventies, so the whole thing has been going to rot for a very long time.
Rant concluded. I feel better now.
deleted
If you want a normal speaking cadence, set the playback speed to 0.8.
My guess is she accelerated the speech to meet an algorithm bias against longer YouTube videos.
Yes I have read that take about Mansfield Park being about slavery, slavery, slavery and not about Fannie and families (and wicked aunties).
From my experience at the college I taught everything was pretty normal in the English department until about 2000. Then the change started happening. With new hires, post modernism took hold then the marxists came in and voila..no more literature. The Education department was taken over first, but it and English were the advanced troops.
@IrishOtter49:I’d go to trade school. That, or I’d go the STEM route.
It’s entirely possible you’d have not done much better. Maybe fifty years ago you might have, certainly not today.
Trade schools are often as much a poor investment as a BA in pre-barista studies. Partly because many trades can be learned without going to “trade school”, and partly because while the trades themselves are hugely profitable for people who own the business they are less so for the people who do the work, and sometimes there are unions in between people and jobs. The median salaries of people in various trades are the kind of thing you can look up: for example accountants’ median salaries are about $20K higher than plumbers’. (Most of the talking heads who are talking up the trades as good careers are not seeking them for their children, but for yours…)
STEM, on the other hand, is its own tough row to hoe. Only some STEM fields are in high demand outside academia or research, it is often a barrier to advancement to management (if that’s your desire), and you are up against a worldwide pool of talent thanks to the abuse of H1-B and similar programs. Academia and research is plagued by the DEI issues as much or more so than non-STEM fields and white males starting out are last considered for such positions.
Eh, things are tough all over, and there’s no longer any magic bullet to doing well, if there ever was.
The generation that believes it is the intended culmination of everything that came before it is now and has for some time been in the education racket. It analyzes (if that is a word that can accurately be used to describe its pedagogy) everything through its solipsistic lens. It disregards anything like historical context and interprets all that has gone before as being either irrelevant or useful only to promote its narrow and ahistorical view of the world and its inhabitants. So a three thousand year old Greek epic poem is useful only to decry the current state of race relations and sexual mores.
Technology has given us the equivalent of a Community of Scholars times n, while the actual historical descendant institution has degraded into a sorting device for young adults who have learned how to avoid cancellation as they do their time.
Several generations now have experienced the BS, setting the stage for some sort of dramatic change.
IMO humans are rapidly approaching a period of dramatic change like nothing they can currently visualize. AI is the primary driver.
The Black Friday 1929 and the followiing bank failures that left the middle class with no money is something in recent history that can be used as an example. AI seems likely to leave the middle class with no money. IMO things will work out, but it will be a very challenging period.
Nick summarized.
It is entirely possible that life has unexpected turns.
How did that PhD turn out? As expected?
Ummm… Did Columbia change its English curriculum and/or the department’s underlying pedagogy (or whatever you would call it) over the summer before her enrollment? I doubt it. This stuff has been all over the Internet for a long time. She, as well as her parents, should have done some basic research.
Talk Radio host Vince Coglianese said today that “non-DSA Democrats” support the same things that “Democratic Socialists” do, but they just won’t admit it.
Reminds me of the “mostly peaceful protests” where the “peaceful protesters” provide a screen and distraction for the Antifa brick-throwers.
Watt:
I think she’s in her late thirties, and went to college about twenty years ago. The sort of thing she describes was newer then. I would imagine at that time that one could do research and see a list of courses that sounded conventional, with conventional titles like “The Work of Jane Austen” without realizing what was the deeper content of the course. Plus, there was less reason to be suspicious in the first place, back then.
Before selling our business and retiring, I employed union electrical lineman-operators whose starting wage was around $30/hr if they had a CDL. At over 55 hours per week, a guy with a couple years in the field and no special training beyond that OJT won’t see less than $120,000 per year, provided he makes himself in demand. (We had zero female field employees.) After five years or so, we’d pay those who could run a crew Journeyman scale. (More like $150,000/year.) If you were a #1 boom trucker or a driller (we did T-line foundations), Jouneyman scale as well. The employeers pension contribution is 25% of wages. And we gave bonuses. The top field employees pulled around $200,000 in wages and bonus.
We had many employees who worked for us for their whole careers. Some retired employees still meet for breakfast every first Thursday.
There are still very good opportunities like that to make a very good—a superior—living, without a college degree. It’s not an easy life, though. It’s hard work, with a lot of nights out of town.
That Third Temple is getting closer, it seems. Jews allowed to openly take prayer books up on the Temple Mount yesterday, for the first time.
https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-905658
If you want a normal speaking cadence, set the playback speed to 0.8. — om
Ha! A+ for enthusiasm. An enjoyable listen.
I’m less facile with fast talkers than most people, but I found her easy to understand because she separates her words well, and she enunciates well.
A quote from the video:
Well… All of us are challenged by what we don’t know. But, PC wasn’t a new thing in 2015. I think it was in the 1980’s (or the 70’s?) when I was reading Newsweek mag. and they had a little sidebar commentary that was in nearly every issue. What was PC this week and what was anti-PC. What the hell is PC, I wondered?? Political Correctness. Oh. Really? So now the media is into the shaping of mass opinions through social pressure, I thought. Or maybe it was more than just the media? (It was. And I’d say wildly successful.)
Meanwhile the art establishment is doing a great job of hating art and beauty.
It’s hard to see how this changes, not in the near-term anyway.
Neo:
There was enough information out there at the time, apparently:
https://www.chronicle.com/article/why-are-english-departments-still-fighting-the-culture-wars/
(Paywalled, but the first paragraph says enough.)
https://observer.com/2001/02/crisis-at-columbia-english-department-is-in-receivership/
After the first semester or two you figure it out and transfer, if you really love English literature.
Watt:
That’s not my point. It’s not that there wasn’t information if you were already suspicious and dug and dug (and by the way, the internet wasn’t as often-used back then as later on). It’s that what was going on in colleges wasn’t well-known and most people did not suspect the problem, and cursory research didn’t uncover it. Most people assumed things hadn’t changed.
For example, my child was in college in the late 1990s and early 2000’s, and although I knew there was a bit of a problem I hadn’t a clue how bad it had gotten. And the ONLY reason I know was that I had gone back to graduate school in the mid-1990s, and so I was exposed to it a little bit myself.
Neo:
Ok, then after the first semester or two you figure it out and transfer, if you really love English literature.
TommyJay:
I didn’t hear her say 2015. I’m not saying she didn’t say it, but I just didn’t hear it. I heard her say she was 18 years old, and somewhere else (maybe another video I watched) I thought she indicated she’s now 38. That’s why I assumed it was 20 years ago that she went to school.
But I’m not going to watch the whole thing again to find that part 🙂 . But I see, looking it up, that she is 28 years old. So you are correct. It was a little over 10 years ago that she went to Columbia. Things had changed a lot by then, but for whatever reason she wasn’t aware of it. I’ve always read that 2014 to about 2020 were the years of more extreme transition.
Watt:
See my comment to TommyJay, right above this one.
I thought she said she was 38, but she’s 28 and started school in 2015. So – as I explain in the above comment – it’s more strange that she didn’t realize what was going on in Columbia by then. But IMHO, not all THAT strange; a lot of people were unaware.
However, I doubt transferring would have done all that much good, since by then this approach had pretty much taken over all the English departments everywhere. I suppose she could have tried Hillsdale. She did later drop out of her PhD program and became an internet figure.
Wow after reading nik I realize I ruined my life going to engineering school in my mid-30s and getting a good job with a now-comfortable retirement. What a waste! I wish you had been around then to set me straight nik.
@FOAF:Wow after reading nik I realize I ruined my life going to engineering school
I think you must have me confused with another commenter. I’m certain you wouldn’t deliberately lie about what I wrote. I didn’t think IrishOtter49 needed to regret his English degree, because there’s so much more to it than that. The grass is always greener somewhere else.
I went the STEM route, had to make a career outside of STEM, and have no regrets about doing it, but there are plenty of people with BAs in English Lit who make more than I do: some of them were VPs I reported to. That’s as it is, because things other than degrees have so much to do with how things turn out. I studied what I loved, but had to make big changes in order to earn a better living, and the things I studied made me far more effective at some things than most people who do what I do.
If I had to do over again I’d probably tweak around the edges but I wouldn’t try for as radical a change as English Lit. There’s no golden road to a comfortable life. Things like your college major are just one element along with hard work, luck, networks, and market forces.
My daughter got her BA in Eng. Lit. from UNC – Chapel Hill in 2005. She was able to choose classes taught by the older cohort of professors who still actually taught literature. In grad school at a different school, 2005-2006, she discovered there were no profs teaching literature; it was all feminism, colonialism, gay/lesbian studies, and so on. This was ten years before the featured video here. To what school should the student in 2015 have transferred? The field was wrecked.
Related:
Our mission is to
EDUCATEOBFUSCATE…and INDOCTRINATE.https://instapundit.com/817183/
https://www.sjc.edu/about
On STEM: Only about 5% if our majors ever went on in physics/astro. Vast majority went to engineering grad school where they were picked over upgrad engineering students due to their more extensive analytical training and their often double major in math. Those who did such are very successful. A few went the medical route where once again were taken over the usual chem/bio majors and have also done well. A couple headed to MBAs and did analytics.
Shortened Nick.
I made the right choices and I would make the right choices if I had to do it over, because, I’m me!
Those skilled trades and technical folk, who knows? Do they think about what they do, or come to love their work? Again, who knows?
(sarc x 11)
My daughter might have been an English major, but could see that there were too many courses she’d have to take that were hyper-politicized. She was able to find a few classes that were actually about literature and managed a minor in English. She started college in 2019 when the rot was obvious.
@Bauxite
“Lee Jae-myung (Lee Jae Myung), who has been president since June 4, 2025, favors engagement, dialogue, tension reduction, and eventual peaceful coexistence with North Korea, while treating full denuclearization as a longer-term goal rather than an immediate precondition.”
So Trump is helping him with his goals. Spin that top.
After 30 seconds I stopped the video. Too fast. I’ll try the speed changing trick. Here is her blog: https://www.pensandpoison.org/
Her blog is worth perusing. I didn’t watch the video long enough to tell, but from the written blog you could read that she started Columbia circa 2015.
My exposure to English teachers and professors long predated the politicization of the classroom. Nonetheless, from ninth grade on, I loathed English classes. My objection was their using literary criticism as vehicle for teaching composition. (My best memories of high school English were being assigned a composition to write in class—a composition that had nothing to do with literary criticism.)
As Junior Literary Critics, we were pushed to find symbols, metaphors etc. Unfortunately, we were pushed into making conjectures—into faking it. It felt very uncomfortable making those symbolism etc. conjectures. Years later, I had a discussion on this with my sister. She also did not like being forced into the Junior Literary Critic role.
As an older college student, I took a Shakespeare class. Remembering that a classmate in 11th grade English had Aced the Julius Ceasar test by reading the play twice, I read each play twice. We had good classroom discussions, and I got the only A I had ever gotten for a semester grade in English. Decades later, my book club read a book that had won a Pulitzer Prize. The author was a graduate of the college where I had taken the Shakespeare course. I called my old professor to find out if she had the Pulitzer Prize winner as a student. She hadn’t, but her ex had.
physicsguy, the son of a family friend was a physics major who applied his knowledge. He was a ham radio operator, and built us a TV from parts. He got hired as an engineer with his BA in Physics. Back then, a lot of future engineers or physicists were ham radio operators. He ended up heading up a DeVries trade school.
My husband was the only physics major in our year NOT to go into academic physics in graduate studies. He got an MSEE, and found he could handle the material much better than the students who had engineering undergrad degrees. The rigorous physics training helped enormously in his professional career. It taught him to analyze problems and find solutions.
Over time I developed a deep loathing for postmodern literary criticism. The kind promulgated by the likes of Jacques Derrida, Stanley Fish, Paul De Man, Michel Foucault, Georges Bataille, and so on. John Searle once said the Derrida’s work “gives bullshit a bad name.” I couldn’t agree more, and I think Searle’s remark applies to all the others in my list — to postmodern literary theory practitioners overall. They took over the English Lit departments and in doing so killed English Lit as a worthwhile and enjoyable academic pursuit. Gerald Graff wrote a pretty good book about this phenomenon titled “Literature Against Itself.” The title says it all. As it turned out, however, Graff was almost as bad as the others in this regard.
I did take several postgraduate-level courses in Irish literature, and I thoroughly enjoyed those. But I enjoyed them because the study of Irish history is foundational to Irish literature foundation, which suited me just fine. The fact that so many Irish literary figures were so very colorful was a bonus.
Fortunately postmodern literary criticism played no part in my study of Irish literature, at least in my experience.
U of Washington dropout due to divorce. 33 years at The Boeing Company, many interesting computer related jobs. Spent much of my career doing whatever I felt like until something went tango uniform and then into the fire I would go. Three space mission patches including both the first and last flight of the Challenger. No patches for the classified missions as it was a secret that IUS was aboard.
Regrets? Many.
I read a lot, but I don’t do what are called the great books. Found them boring and only abnormal characters jazzed them up some. I’ve always favored normal people facing difficulties. That’s for fiction, I should say. The great philosophers are like Aesop only with more words. What formed western civilization is ordinary people pushing, hard or casually, toward what they want, with Classical Greece and Judeo Christion values in the atmosphere, so to speak. There are classics, in a sense. You read Horatius and wonder, even if briefly, what if it’s me at the bridge? Wouldn’t go looking for it, but neither did Horatius and his buddies. SO…? For what it’s worth, I was exposed to these in college as part of our reqirements. American history and associated literature. Western history and associated literature. Went into Jane Austen, my Mom liked that, couldn’t get going.
Still, using the venue to pitch anti-western ideas is stupid and nearly criminal.
I try to read a couple of “great books” every year, mainly ones I’d missed in school, but a few repeats. I find them (well, most of them) not boring at all. I’m a big fan of English lit in particular. Over the past couple of years I read “Vanity Fair,” “Tale of Two Cities,” and “Jane Eyre.” Loved all of them. Right now I’m reading “Middlemarch,” which is a bit of a slog, though still enjoyable. Austin, Dickens, Forster (I’ve read “Howards End” three times) are all great. Early to mid-20th Century American lit is also mostly great (I’ve never quite gotten Hemingway). I read some contemporary stuff too, but find most of it literally forgettable. As in, six months later I couldn’t tell you what the book was about. Philip Roth is an exception.
It’s really a shame what has befallen our education system.
Re South Korea and Trump, Bauxite writes on the downgrade in allied exercises. , “Tough to spin this one”.
It’s not spin to say that the President’s gotten better cooperation from, Rocket Man than new Far Left goon squad in South Korea.
The message there is the obvious one.
@ Richard Aubrey > “The great philosophers are like Aesop only with more words.”
I haven’t ever seen a characterization expressed that way, but I think you are correct!
English major here. Never got Hemingway either. Except ‘The Short Happy Life Of Francis Macomber’.
Years after reading it I became acquainted with a man who told me the story was about his parents. Since he was a respectable and well known person I saw no reason to doubt him.
Rereading Raymond Chandler’s ‘The Big Sleep’ right now – my candidate for the 20th Century’s great American novel. Pretty sure I’ve figured out who killed Owen the chauffeur, too.
Jared Kushner admits Iran peace deal talks are in dire straits and warns Trump will have to be ‘very patient’
Debbie Wasserman accused of white privilege — by fellow Democrats
Angry at the Supreme Court, liberals push a slew of plans for overhauling it — “Rule of Law” = whomever controls the law gets to decide who the criminals will be…
It’s not difficult to discern pathways to improving higher education, but state legislators and governors do nothing. The critics of higher education don’t think outside a particular box.
==
Camille Paglia has been saying for thirty years that the study of literature in the hands of faculty has decayed into cut rate sociology. Which is to say that it’s raison d’etre has evaporated at one institution after another. There is one thing for conscientious trustees to do: shut down the English and comparative literature departments and discharge their faculty en bloc. In public systems, the governor and state legislature can mandate the dismissals.
==
Please note that liberal education is education for leisure. You have the natural sciences, mathematics, computer science, statistics, economics, the quantitative wings of sociology and geography, and patches of psychology. You have archeology. You have the study of history at its best. You have the study of foreign languages. Tell the rest that they’re expendable.
==
As for the occupational faculties, social work and library administration ought to be eliminated and teacher training completely revamped.
@IrishOtter49: May I suggest this essay by Maurice Black?
https://storyrulesproject.substack.com/p/how-jacques-derrida-saved-civilization
I was acquainted with Jacques Derrida, having served as his editor for several of his books and their translations into English. US English departments are not really dealing with Derrida, whose thinking was subtle and generous and anything but anti-Western. They are talking about a “Derrida” largely of their own invention, one imported into the US culture wars through misreadings and bad-faith commentators with agendas of their own. No one since Freud has been so severely and so wrongly “Americanized.”
As for Liza Libes, I am familiar with her Substack posts. I consider her a reactionary philistine intent on turning personal resentment and a closed mind into an online brand.