The “$3 million per named chair” leaps off of that image. The charges to students are on par with real universities, but that is quite the profit for the “faculty” in this grift
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That’s…not a field. Pretty sure entrepreneurship is just something you do on top of actually making use of a field of study. Then again, I’m sure a LOT of the target demo think “I want to start a company” before deciding what that company should even do.
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That’s the basis of so much of the managerial class.
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So, an MBA, only more so.
“Applied History”. Nothing ominous about that, no sir. Of course, I’d be more worried if anyone involved showed any signs of knowing any history, let along of being capable of learning from it.
I suspect rather that they mean the art and science of rewriting and weaponising history for political ends: the Native Americans wanted to migrate to the other end of the continent and then quietly die. The Antebellum South wasn’t as bad as people say, and many black folk didn’t even want to be free. The Alamo was exactly as depicted in that Disney movie and the Texas school curriculum. Laissez-faire totalitarian capitalism is the best of all possible systems. And so on.
If the Dean of the History department isn’t named O’Brien, they’re missing an opportunity.
“How to serve your masters by teaching the next generations to accept their place.”
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Sounds familiar.
The aide [Karl Rove, probably] said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ […] ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. 'We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.
A fair number of neoCon intellectuals were former Trotskyites. Statements like the above make me suspect they made the switch to conservatism less because they hated communism and more because they secretly loved Stalinism.
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I realize that this is being pitched against a hysterical misconception of colleges as places where anyone who can’t prove intersectionality in at least 4 minority statuses that wholesome small town Americans hate and another 4 that they don’t even believe in gets hauled off for mandatory queer theory and gender studies indoctrination; but it seems especially pitiful when there are plenty of options, at actually rigorous schools, to get an education that all but the most theocratic right-wingers would describe as ‘apolitical’ just by making a few choices when signing up for classes.
If you are looking for something that aligns with their ‘doers’, it’s…not exactly a challenge…to line up an engineering or CS major with just a handful of distribution requirements which can be easily enough filled by Canonical Dead White Guy Lit or Classical Philosophy to Drape on Your questionable Opinions; and doing an entire humanities or social science degree that focuses on safely non-woke areas is also eminently doable; it’s not like the classics have fallen off the syllabus, it’s just that some people have had the temerity to mention that there may be other things potentially worth reading and offered some classes on those.
The only bits of “PC culture” that are often at least nominally mandatory(enforcement is, um, deeply uneven) are the ones that you pretty much have to admit you are a terrible person to have a problem with; like the notion that ‘coeds’ are actually your fellow students rather than nubile sex toys for you and your bros.
I know that my education, until it was unfortunately cut short on medical grounds, was pretty solidly rigorous dead white guys and greco-roman; along with some forays into math and science; and I didn’t have to seek out “forbidden courses” or hang out with unaccredited cranks. I was exposed to the fact that, while we would be sticking more or less to the canonical curriculum, this was because it was a choice rather than because it was the only thing worth knowing/that actually happened; and my American history was…not universally flattering; but I’d bet money that I covered the western-european-enlightenment-philosophy-into-american-constitutionalism pipeline at least as well as these jokers propose to; and with teachers and professors who were actually respectable and graded harder.
I guess they just need a safe space.
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Then what is George Mason University?
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Sure, but those are just more facts that don’t matter, right?
Like Liberty U, the very existence of this new one will help to validate the wingnut conception of regular colleges and universities as “hotbeds of indoctrinating cultural Marxists,” simply by being a supposedly valid option. And more than that, a supposedly preferable one.
It’s all too easy to imagine that as much or more than “educating” students, the primary goal here is to enable further demonization of truth-purveying colleges and universities, places that don’t foster and peddle the kind of oligarch-serving bs that this place will.
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Student body will be made up of the perpetually scam-able.
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Their biggest problem is that they might actually be successful.
That is, that they might accidentally create a real university, where real critical thought happens, and then they’re in all kinds of trouble.
I’m thinking in terms of the Modernist Heresy of the late 19C, where the Catholic Church felt besieged by people who read the bible and did things like textural critical analysis to it, and found all sorts of threads which, when pulled, started to make the thing look a bit threadbare. So there was a push to use these techniques to support the bible, to use archaeology and critical analysis to prove that the Church is right.
So they trained a bunch of folk up in modern techniques, and let them loose.
The results were… not what the Church Hierarchy wanted, to the point that it was declared a Heresy and shut down hard.
Of course, what they want is more like Liberty U or Bob Jones University, which aren’t Universities in any meaningful sense, more “university-shaped objects”.
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all of the likes for that quote.
i guess it’s also somewhat telling all the spelling and writing errors her tweets had: “and now and i are free”? “teaching methid”?
maybe it’s just a version of trumpian random caps. but you’d think someone promoting their new university might try a bit harder
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Think of it less as a university and more of a Nigerian Prince scam and everything clicks into place.
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A real university attached to various think tanks of ill repute?
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So this is All Souls College for right wingers who are too mediocre to get into Oxford?
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There’s every chance that with a Republican congress and administration, they would be “qualified,” despite their lack of accreditation.
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How much does it usually cost to endow a chair? The idea is that you are basically providing enough money up front to fund a professor in perpetuity, right?
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Funny you should mention that. One of their directors went there. no, misread that. Still, what a horrible person.
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Ferguson is problematic in a lot of ways, but “stupid and/or desperate enough to join this clown show and scuttle his academic reputation” isn’t one of them.
That’s also the reason that wealthy conservatives who understand the ROI of a credential from an accredited (and preferably prestigious) university will never waste their money and their kids’ time on this “school”. It’s strictly for the rubes.
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Depends. Usually the school still pays salary to an endowed chair, and the endowment provides additional funds. As this seems to be a grift, I’m guessing that this is a way to sell having their names attached to the school for the low cost of $3M which the school will use to subsidize exorbitant salaries for a few famous academics in exchange for the air of legitimacy having them on the faculty provides. Which could in turn allow them to grift future marks
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