Durham Uni Philosophers' struggle with reality

[Charliethefeminist]

Has anyone seen what's going down there? They've sacked the PhilSoc ed for knowing women don't have dicks, and replaced him (?) with someone who thinks they do.

Kwame Anthony Appiah Apparently is super-bright, which makes the article so much worse.

How in holy hell do they imagine life operating outside of university?

On this topic - no differently.

Virtually everyone speaking the truth has been silenced/threatened/sued/doxed. Policies are being written and enacted to support gaslighting and lies. Policies that endanger children and women. And anyone who disagrees is evicted, silenced or ignored.

This seems to be a rare case where the transmad hordes have found a male victim. So it's evidently not quite always women who suffer!

Omg what would Plato have made of this?
Surely we can tell a priori that women do not have penises.

Policies are being written and enacted to support gaslighting and lies.

Sadly true, I've seen/heard of it in many employers. I wish my TU would produce a statement on it that branches could work from.

I wonder if it's possible to trace the spread of queer theory and later TRA activity through universities - like a virus (or, hey, a social contagion!), via student unions and philosophy departments? There are some obvious hubs like Goldsmiths, Manchester, Edinburgh and now Durham (and two of those sadden and enrage me on a personal level). There was a list of the not-mad departments doing the rounds lately - how have they resisted? It would make a fascinating study and might possibly reveal interesting links.

Leeds!
Sally Hines & many of her doctoral students, who have gone on to teach elsewhere.
PhD history student Florence Scott who is bff of Aimee Challenor.
PhD history student Kit Heyam who played a key role in transing Anne Lister

Sally Hines went on weird singing rant on twitter once, repeating over and over TWAW. Really odd.

Isn't she social sciences something something

Sally Hines was part of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies at Leeds.

At the same time she worked there, that Centre also had another figure whose names has popped up before on fem chat: Zowie Davy.

It saddens me to say, as an academic, that in the last nine months I've come to realise that some academics can have a very dangerous impact on the most vulnerable in society.

Looks like the humanities departments have a lot to answer for....

It saddens me too, namechange18.

I started to feel something was very off about five years ago. The rigour just wasn't there anymore. I saw monographs and research conclusions in the social sciences get published without challenge that were just batshit (and some wildly offensive). One particular piece by an academic argued that a specific historically-colonised people's modern attitude to the nationality that had colonised them was a function of racism, rather than the performance of collective memories of injustice. This was tantamount to saying that colonised people had no justifiable right to anger over their lack of self determination.

That kind of shit is dangerous.

I left academia two years ago.

Looks like the humanities departments have a lot to answer for....

I’d say it’s more the social sciences than humanities, but certainly there are issues in the humanities too.

PackingSoap - I completely agree. I’ve recently noticed that the struggle with critical thinking that we’ve observed in students for a while is now starting to emerge into the younger end of the academic profession. I also see awful Twitter behaviour from some of them, throwing out abuse like “TERF”, and refusing to engage intellectually. I envy you for having left academia. I would love to, but feel completely stuck at the moment.

Also what bothered me was the resistance to governmental pressures that state-funded research (through research councils) had to be disseminated more widely, have measurable impact (I can't remember the terminology used) and filter into teaching.

That's when it became clear that some of my colleagues believed that their role as academics was merely to generate ideas for other academics and that the whole thing should be a closed shop (almost like a private club) as though they were medieval scholars in a symposium discussing how many angels chould dance on the head of a pin.

The futility of it all astounded me.

Yes, I’ve felt the futility of it all for a while. What has been the last straw is seeing the active danger some of these people pose. The problem with the impact agenda is that it fails to realise that some academics should be kept in the ivory tower and not let loose on the public to wreak havoc in vulnerable people’s lives.