Tony – you may not have caught the fiasco at U. Delaware (covered here at PJM previously), but the faculty and staff there have achieved that very redefinition of victim in the context of “re-educating” students and forcing them to conform to progressive notions of victimhood. And yes, this is at an institution where students’ parents are paying for them to get an education.
IMHO we desperately need to graduate from this occasional nit-picking about specific instances of this sort of thing. I know it’s (still) very much the nature of blogging and new media to react, essentially, to what appears in the mainstream media. But the problems that underly these outrageous incidents are pervasive and ultimately destructive to our culture and social fabric. Simply reacting to the occasional outrage that’s absurd or blatant enough to make it into the 24-hour news cycle isn’t really improving anything.
Academics, and the bureaucrats in academia who support their adolescent ideologies, have become far too comfortable with their utter lack of accountability. They’ve now turned that circumstance on its head – demanding accountability, and now apparently seeking compensation, from those who dare to disagree with their idiotic notions or who call them on their incompetence as teachers. This is handily and publicly demonstrated in the case of Ms. Venkatesan, but it’s happening at most academic institutions at one level or another, under the public radar. Unfortunately, unlike this particular instance which made the news, the peer pressure typically sides with the ‘victim’.
