{"id":47341,"date":"2019-03-14T03:00:46","date_gmt":"2019-03-14T07:00:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=47341"},"modified":"2022-03-30T13:43:34","modified_gmt":"2022-03-30T17:43:34","slug":"life-in-the-modern-academic-paradise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2019\/03\/14\/life-in-the-modern-academic-paradise\/","title":{"rendered":"Life in the modern academic paradise"},"content":{"rendered":"

At Rotten Chestnuts<\/em>, Severian<\/a> recounts his time in the idyllic Ivory Tower of modern academia:<\/p>\n

Imagine you\u2019re some kind of Gulliver-type explorer, and you reach an island of perfect bliss. Clear air, gentle breezes, balmy temperatures, and all the delicious food you can eat. And the natives! They live to serve you, completely unconstrained by anything so antiquated as Western sexual morality. Limitless 5G internet. Anything you want to eat, drink, watch, read, do, say, insert, or have inserted, it\u2019s all yours at the snap of your fingers. Got it?<\/p>\n

Now imagine that the rulers of this little slice of paradise do nothing but sit on the side of the road all day, smashing their own toes with ball-peen hammers.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s<\/em> life in a college town. The Left run everything. They set the admissions requirements. They have unlimited budgets, and since they do, the entire commercial ecosystem exists only for them. All cuisine is \u201cfusion,\u201d you have to drive to the next burg over to find milk that comes from cows, and every single item of public culture \u2014 from sidewalk graffiti to public radio to experimental theater troupe \u2014 does nothing but flatter them. There is no fetish so outre, no practice so bizarre, that you can\u2019t find at least one other enthusiastic participant. It\u2019s intersectional genderfluid heaven\u2026.<\/p>\n

\u2026. and every single person in it is miserable. I\u2019m serious \u2014 if it\u2019s not too far out of your way, drive down to your nearest college town, and just watch the faces. You might glimpse a grinning undergrad or two \u2014 they\u2019re too young and dumb to know better; they\u2019ll be fully reeducated by junior year \u2014 but you can spot the tenured faculty solely by their scowls. The only thing that temporarily alleviates the existential horror of their lives is getting outraged by something, which \u2014 since, again, they control everything<\/em> \u2014 means tilting at windmills is their only sport; they play it with a cutthroat intensity the football coach can only dream of.<\/p>\n

How can you not be fascinated by that? To utterly refute the view of man as homo economicus<\/em>, all you have to do is watch the facial expressions of people who are \u201cthe 1%\u201d by any measure that makes sense. It\u2019s one hell of a show\u2026<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At Rotten Chestnuts, Severian recounts his time in the idyllic Ivory Tower of modern academia: Imagine you\u2019re some kind of Gulliver-type explorer, and you reach an island of perfect bliss. Clear air, gentle breezes, balmy temperatures, and all the delicious food you can eat. And the natives! They live to serve you, completely unconstrained by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[79,53,13],"tags":[262,1020,1462,764],"class_list":["post-47341","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-politics","category-usa","tag-culture","tag-progressives","tag-severian","tag-university"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-cjz","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47341","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47341"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47341\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47342,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47341\/revisions\/47342"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47341"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47341"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47341"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}