I really fucking hate when leaders of Black spaces/places use that term. 
Itās bad enough that itās a common trope for white politicians, leaders, or what have you to use itā¦ itās unconscionable for Black leaders to do so. Andre Dickens (ATL mayor) used it to discuss the cop city protesters. I lost pretty much all respect for him after that.
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When the spring semester began, Southwestern College professor Elizabeth Smith felt good. Two of her online classes were completely full, boasting 32 students each. Even the classesā waitlists, which fit 20 students, were maxed out. That had never happened before.
āTeachers get excited when thereās a lot of interest in their class. I felt like, āGreat, Iām going to have a whole bunch of students who are invested and learning,āā Smith said. āBut it quickly became clear that was not the case.ā
By the end of the first two weeks of the semester, Smith had whittled down the 104 students enrolled in her classes, including those on the waitlist, to just 15. The rest, sheād concluded, were fake students, often referred to as bots.
āItās a surreal experience and itās just heartbreaking,ā Smith said. āIām not teaching, Iām playing a cop now.ā
The botsā goal is to bilk state and federal financial aid money by enrolling in classes, and remaining enrolled in them, long enough for aid disbursements to go out.They often accomplish this by submitting AI-generated work. And because community colleges accept all applicants, theyāve been almost exclusively impacted by the fraud.
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I have not seen that over hereā¦ I guess itās another thing to be on the look out forā¦ 
[ETA] Not exactly related, but sort of?
I wonder what his angle isā¦
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āIf any of us want to do the things that we want to do for our country,ā Vance said, āand for the people who live in it, we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.ā Or, as conservative activist Christopher Rufo put it in a New York Times piece exploring the attack campaign, āWe want to set them back a generation or two.ā
Well, there you goā¦
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Exactly. Cowardly appeasement and compliance of the sort that Columbia has so famously and shamefully demonstrated will not work.
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Exactly. All it got them was more demands without restoring the grants withheld. I like to think this played a part in Harvardās decision, and the Big 10 collegesā mutual defense pact, but I guess we shall see.
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I have some real issues with his analysis of what is wrong with the academyā¦ Iām not sure he mentions the proleterianization of faculty, for example. More of us working longer hours, teach more students, and struggle more to pay the bills, in part because we donāt have a stable position.
He also seems to be arguing that postmodern theory ignores the material conditions of life, privileging culture instead. He seems to poo-poo intersectionality for example, although he seems to like Foucauldian turn.
It also seems to treat this stuff in a top down kind of way, rather than considering things are webs of interaction, with some people having more power than others.
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Got it, sounds like itās not at all worth watching. 
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Holy fucking shit.
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Why do say that?
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Me? Itās just a whole new bad thing I didnāt know about.
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Yeah, he is passionate, and he does make some good points, but if people canāt take intersectionality seriously, then Iām also inclined to 
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Okay, I just listened to the first ten minutes and I see now what youāre saying (if not, still, why the video is worth sharing). To me, itās another very broad attack from a class-based position that as you say, considers other forms of oppression irrelevant at best. I think also that while identity-based analysis can indeed fail to take capitalism into account, he in effect denigrates a lot of colleagues who do take āclassā into account; CRT analysis, for example, tends to assume that āstructural racismā immiserates POC, that is, oppresses them in both race and class terms! Ugh.
And yeah, in at least one case where he is partially right ā when he says that other academics are careerist and just follow insular rules in order to jump up the tenure ladder ā he himself, ironically enough, fails to account for the ever declining working conditions for acdemics ā what a great (not) Marxist! They often are motivated, especially early on, mostly by the desire to get a job in a ridiculously tight labor market, and then by trying to get tenure. But by and large thatās not because they stupidly fail to focus exclusively on labor/class issues (which again often IS part of their analysis), nor because they ONLY care about āwokeā āidentitarianā issues.
Blech, enough. It must be horrible to work alongside this dude. He thinks heās a fearless, enlightened maverick, denouncing the entire factory in which he himself occupies (Iād guess) a cushy seat, but heās really just an asshole.
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Yeah, good analysis, I generally agree with thatā¦ 
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Here is some good news out of a universityā¦
This is great!
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Presumably Melanie DeMore will be a resource for them.
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Probably soā¦
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