The progression of this academic fascism was from 60s activism to alternative culturalism, to making multi-culti mainstream, and now to multi-culti left wing mainstream dictatorship.

This should scare the living hell out of every parent planning on college education for their children. It should also scare everybody else because it is spilling out of college campuses into everyday life.

these deconstructionists are verbal imperialists! the math department should sue them for demeaning their language and culture!

She comes off as half a bubble off center.

It’s worse than that: they’re not implying it, they’re stating it outright.

If science posits the concept of “facts” and “empiricism,” and there weren’t any women around to assist in formulating these concepts, then they’re by definition “patriarchal,” and the patriarchy has one goal only: the savage suppression of women.

Ergo, “facts” and “data” are tools of patriarchal oppression, and it’s the feminist’s duty to subvert and undermine these tools, thus to empower women.

Postmodern linguistics asserts that all cognition is moderated by language. In other words, you can only comprehend what you can express linguistically, so they who best understand language (surprise! linguists and literary theorists) become the Grand High Priests of What Is And What Ain’t.

Their concept of how language relates to reality is similar to the thought experiment where you shoot an arrow toward the wall, and first it travels half the distance, then half the distance again, and because you can halve the distance infinitely, the arrow never reaches the wall. In theory, anyway.

But academics never seem to get that the arrow does in fact reach the wall and even pierces it, thereby rendering the thought experiment null and void. They go to the grave insisting that the arrow doesn’t reach the wall, you rednecked ignoramus, and you would know it didn’t if you had attended an Ivy League school and read Derrida.

They create Escher sketches with words, and can’t understand that their linguistic worlds are the distortion, while reality marches happily on without them.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a3/Escher%27s_Relativity.jpg

Anyway, what it amounts to is that feminists and Leftists figure that The Patriarchy and Evil Conservatives and whomever else they’ve demonized have been using “facts” and “data” and “science” for lo these many centuries to oppress The Other, so turnabout is fair play. They think that their opponents dress up their arguments in the cloak of objectivity and truth (which doesn’t exist) to intimidate and bully others, so they go ahead and play fast and loose with facts and studies and empiricism as a way to fight back.

The Narrative Must Be Served, after all. They’re fighting the battle of Competing Narratives, while the rest of us just want to know what’s actually going on.

Poor deluded fools. Us, I mean. Those who actually think that it’s possible to know something without having learned it in college.

So what I gather from this story is that it is unacceptable for her students to question her knowledge or to be skeptical etc…because being such is unthoughful, but it is perfectly ok for her to tell them, essentially, that they were behaving like fascists?

…Interesting…I wonder if any of them went to the doctor for mental anguish about that. I somehow doubt it.

http://dartmed.dartmouth.edu/summer07/html/bio_venkatesan.php

My Amazon and Google searches have turned up empty.

Thus it is not the physical world that’s important, but man’s reaction to it that counts. There would be no universe if man were not here to observe it, and since there can be no absolutes in the system, then every possible mode of observation must be equally valid.

Interesting enough if you want to impress your liberal arts friends at a cocktail party, but Lord help me if I ever have to cross a bridge designed by someone who believes the modulus of elasticity of structural steel is nothing more than a social convention.