A professor at the University of Notre Dame has argued that higher education is drowning in “bullshit” in a year-old column for the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Writing for the Chronicle of Higher Education, Notre Dame Professor Christian Smithargued in a column last week that higher education has some serious issues. BS is universities hijacked by the relentless pursuit of money and prestige, including chasing rankings that they know are deeply flawed, at the expense of genuine educational excellence (to be distinguished from the vacuous “excellence” peddled by recruitment and “advancement” offices in every run-of-the-mill university),” one complaint read.
Smith bemoaned the lacked of intellectual diversity in many academic fields, specifically the humanities and social sciences. He argues that the academics in these fields are hypocrites because they fail to live up to the values of diversity and tolerance that they often preach.
“BS is the grossly lopsided political ideology of the faculty of many disciplines, especially in the humanities and social sciences, creating a homogeneity of worldview to which those faculties are themselves oblivious, despite claiming to champion difference, diversity, and tolerance,” Smith wrote.
One of Smith’s complaints has been discussed multiple times in Breitbart News’ higher education coverage. Professors, especially in the “social justice” fields,” have a habit of forcing unnecessary made-up terms to make outsiders feel confused and unwelcome.
“BS is the ideologically infused jargon deployed by various fields to stake out in-group self-importance and insulate them from accountability to those not fluent in such solipsistic language games,” Smith wrote.
Smith goes on to attack the tenure system, which he argues protects lazy teachers.
“BS is a tenure system that provides guaranteed lifetime employment to faculty who are lousy teachers and inactive scholars, not because they espouse unpopular viewpoints that need the protection of “academic freedom,” but only because years ago they somehow were granted tenure,” he explained.
Europe is dying. Literally. The birthrate does not sustain its current population. The symptoms and reasons are patently obvious. People value things more than children. People have lost their Christian faith. Abortion and contraception are rampant. The Cathedrals will close. The churches will close. The schools will close. Housing will slump. Some countries may hang on a decade or two more than others. But Europe is coming to an end because Europeans have rejected God and children.
A new Europe is emerging. The Islamic population is having children at 4-8 times the rate of native Europeans. Muslims are heeding the Word of God to be fruitful and multiply. They are religious. They love big families. Whether they can sustain their fertility rate in the face of European materialism is yet to be seen. Outside forces such as politics, economics and international security may influence the obvious trends.
Not only are the current Muslim populations in all European countries reproducing at astounding rates, there is a massive influx of Muslim immigrants from Africa and the Middle East.
This did not start a few months or a few years ago. It started decades ago. Fr. Paul Marx, deceased, of Human Life International was showing us this trend in the 1970s. Interesting, Fr. Marx was a Benedictine monk from St. John’s University in Collegeville, MN.
The following video demonstrates the reality of population dynamics in Europe.
In all of Europe, national politics are being shaped around illegal immigration. Poland, Hungary and now Italy have seen anti-illegal immigrant candidates elected to office. Those elected are shaping their nations in much the same way President Trump has shaped America since becoming President; perhaps even more so.
But can stopping the tide of illegal immigration help those countries regain their prominence in Europe? Not without a rise in population and a return to the values that made Europe Europe. In other words, Europe needs to invite God back in to their lives, their homes and their families.
Fargo Catholics need to stop and start. We need to stop using contraception. We need to stop resorting to abortion. We need to start having big families again. The laity is at fault.
Priests don’t contracept or abort. Priests have to preach more on the subject and I suggest they educate their flocks more thoroughly and with more moral conviction. We need more Catholics. Evangelization is needed. That’s on the laity since we are the front lines in representing the Church to our neighbors. On the other hand, the Church hierarchy, i.e. the Pope, Cardinals, Arch-Bishops and Bishops have a huge impact on evangelization. The clerical sexual abuse scandals as well as the Vatican priorities all take away from attracting people to the Church or keeping people in the Church.
I was born in December 1957, the same year Fargo Shanley high school was devastated by an F5 tornado that tore through residential neighborhoods. Shanley high school was rebuilt on the same spot. The photo used in this article is Fargo Shanley high school after the tornado.
Fargo Shanley, June 1957, Tornado clean-up
I graduated from Fargo Shanley in 1976. My graduating class was 144; the largest I believe of all 4 grades. The student population was approximately 520 students. The population of the greater Fargo-Moorhead area at the time was about 130,000.
In 2018, the total student population of Fargo Shanley is approximately 330. The population of the greater Fargo-Moorhead area in 2018 is about 234,000. Based on a percentage of the general population of the Fargo-Moorhead area, assuming Shanley’s school population grows in proportion, the student population should be 936, not 330.
What has happened?
First, in 1976, the Catholic population as a percentage of the entire population of the Fargo Diocese was 26.2%. In 2018, that same percentage is now 16.5%. Throwing that in to the mix, the anticipated Shanley student population based on the drop-off in Catholic population percentage is 936*(16.5/26.2), or 589. So, just based on the few number of Catholics, the student population is logically dropped by 347. That leaves another 259 students that has to be accounted for.
One explanation is that Catholics are sending their kids to government schools, i.e. Davies, South, North, Moorhead, Sheyenne and West Fargo in much higher percentages than they sent them to government schools in 1976. Why would they do that?
Contraception
Another explanation is that Catholics are contracepting and aborting at a much higher rate than they did in 1976. In 1976, all forms of contraception used by Catholic women were at about 68%. Today, that percentage is 98%. That’s a big rise in contraceptive use and includes sterilization, the Pill, IUDs, condoms, etc.
Abortion: What about the abortion rate in the USA over time?
There is immediate good news in the above graph. The abortion rate has steadily been decreasing since its peak when Jimmy Carter left the office of President in January, 1981. The rate even accelerated (decreased with greater velocity) during the two terms of President Obama. The last time statistics were available, in 2015, the abortion rate was 11.8 per 1000 women; dramatically below the year when Roe v. Wade was decided by US Supreme Court and lower than even in 2014 when the rate appears to be 14.8.
Assuming a rate of 11.8 in 2018 and knowing the rate in 1976 was approximately 25, we have seen a cut in the abortion rate by over 50% without a reversal of Roe v. Wade.
But what about Catholic women in 1976 vs. 2018? That data is hard to find. It could be out there but I could not find it. Given that Catholic women adopted contraception in line with the general population, it is very probable that abortion follows that same trend. However, the data suggests a higher contraceptive use but much lower abortion numbers.
The size of Catholic families has been remarkably consistent. The problem is that there are dramatically fewer Catholic families as a percentage of the population. In 1976, the percentage of married Catholic adults was about 70%. Today, it is about 50%. There are more cohabitating couples and more singles, by percentage than in 1976. The percentage of childless, married Catholics has risen from 28% to 38%. The percentage of married Catholics with 1 or more children has decreased from about 48% to 25%! The divorce rate has climbed from about 15% in 1976 to about 30% in 2018. The family size is remarkably consistent, at about 2.8 children per Catholic family.
Conclusions Catholics (well, everyone) needs to stop using artificial contraception and start having more children. This can be a financial sacrifice. As the father of 7 children and brother to 7 siblings I can attest first-hand from the front lines as to the difficulties. I can also attest to the blessings. Naturally, Catholics need to stop aborting children. This is self-evident.Contraception and abortion are 2 massively important things which will lead to an evangelization renaissance in the Catholic Church.
Parishes need to support younger Catholic families pursue a Catholic education for their children. Government schools are free. It is a large sacrifice to send one’s children to Catholic schools. Again, going back to 1976 there were 6 Catholic elementary and middle schools in Fargo-Moorhead; St. Francis, St. Joseph, Holy Spirit, St. Mary’s, St. Anthony’s and Nativity. There was 1 Catholic high school – Shanley. Today, there are 4 Catholic elementary schools – St. Joseph, Holy Spirit, Nativity and Trinity (West Fargo). There is 1 middle school (Sullivan) and 1 high school (Shanley).
Increasing the number of Catholics is done through either fertility rate or conversion rate.Which is harder to do, have more kids or convert more people to Catholicism? It is probably conversion. Some Christian denominations have been doing our (Catholics) job for us as they liberalize their Churches, driving some of their ardent faithful to Catholicism. Marriage to non-Catholics often result in the non-Catholic spouse converting to Catholicism.
The striking statistic from above is the decline in the percentage of Catholic adults who are married, with children. This needs to change dramatically. This is a combined responsibility of the couple’s parents, the clergy and the laity.
By Tucker Carlson, reprinted without permission, regarding the Covington High School Boys treatment by the Media and Washington elites
If you were on social media over the weekend, you probably saw the video. It was shot Friday afternoon, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. It seemed to show a group of teenage boys taunting an elderly American Indian man who was holding a drum.
The young men had come to Washington from a Catholic school in Kentucky to demonstrate in the March for Life. Some of them wore “Make America Great Again” hats. They seemed menacing. Within hours, the video was being replayed by virtually every news outlet in America. The American Indian man with the drum in the video is called Nathan Phillips. He described the young men he encountered, the ones in the hats, as aggressive and threatening — essentially shock troops for Donald Trump.
“I heard them saying, ‘Build that wall. Build that wall,'” Phillips said.”This is indigenous land. We’re not supposed to have walls here.”
It’s hard to remember the last time the great American meme machine produced a clearer contrast between good and evil — it was essentially an entire morality play shrunk down to four minutes for Facebook.
On one side, a noble tribal elder, weather-beaten, calm and wise. He looks like a living icon. You could imagine a single tear sliding slowly down his cheek at the senselessness of it all.
On the other side, you had a pack of heedless, sneering young men from the south, drunk on racism and white privilege. The irony is overwhelming: The indigenous man’s land had been stolen by the very ancestors of these boys in MAGA hats. Yet they dare to lecture him about walls designed to keep people who look very much like him out what they were calling “their” country.
It was infuriating to a lot of people. At the same time, it was also strangely comforting to the people who watched it from Brooklyn and L.A. The people who run this country have long suspected that middle America is a hive of nativist bigotry. And now they had proof of that. It was cause for a celebration of outrage. There’s nothing quite as satisfying as having your own biases confirmed.
But did the video really describe what happened? That should have been the first question journalists asked. Checking facts and adding context is what journalists are paid to do. It’s in the first line of the job description. Yet, amazingly, almost nobody in the American media did that.
That’s a shame, because there was a lot to check. The full video of what happened on Friday in Washington is well over an hour long. The four minutes that made Twitter don’t tell the story, but instead distorted the story. A longer look shows that the boys from Covington Catholic in Kentucky weren’t a roving mob looking for a fight. They were, in fact — and it shows it on the tape — standing in place waiting to be picked up by a bus.
As they waited there, members of a group called the Black Hebrew Israelites, a black supremacist organization, began taunting them with racial epithets. Nathan Phillips, the now-famous American Indian activist, also approached them, pounding his drum. The footage seems to suggest the boys were unsure whether Phillips was hostile or taking their side against the Black Hebrew Israelites. But in any case, there is no evidence at all that anyone said, “build a wall.”
So, what really happened on Friday? Watch and decide for yourself. There’s plenty of video out there, and some of it is fascinating. What we know for certain at this point is that our cultural leaders are, in fact, bigots. They understand reality on the basis of stereotypes. When the facts don’t conform to what they think they know, they ignore the facts. They see America not as a group of people or of citizens, but as a collection of groups. Some of these groups, they are convinced, are morally inferior to other groups. They know that’s true. They say it out loud. That belief shapes almost all of their perceptions of the world.
It’s not surprising, then, that when a group of pro-life Catholic kids who look like lacrosse players and live in Kentucky are accused of wrongdoing, the media don’t pause for a moment before casting judgment. Maggie Haberman of the New York Times suggested the boys needed to be expelled from school. Ana Navarro of CNN called the boys racists and “asswipes” and then went after their teachers and parents.
Others called for violence against them. CNN legal analyst Bakari Sellers suggested one of the boys should be, “punched in the face.” Former CNN contributor Reza Aslan agreed. Aslan asked on Twitter, “Have you ever seen a more punchable face than this kid’s?” Longtime CNN contributor Kathy Griffin seemed to encourage a mob to rouse up and hurt these boys, tweeting, “Name these kids. I want names. Shame them. If you think these effers wouldn’t dox you in a heartbeat. Think again.” She repeated her demand again later: “Names please. And stories from people who can identify them and vouch for their identity. Thank you.”
Hollywood film producer Jack Morrissey tweeted that he wanted the boys killed: “MAGA kids go screaming, hats first, into the woodchipper.” He paired that with a graphic photo. Actor Patton Oswalt linked to personal information about one of the boys, in case anyone wanted to get started on that project. Meanwhile, Twitter, which claims to have a policy against encouraging violence, stood by silently as all this happened.
But in case you think the response was entirely from the left, you should know that the abuse was bipartisan. This wasn’t just left versus right. It was the people in power attacking those below them as a group. Plenty of Republicans in Washington were happy to savage the Covington kids, probably to inoculate themselves from charges of improper thought. Bill Kristol asked his Twitter followers to consider “the contrast between the calm dignity and quiet strength of Mr. Phillips and the behavior of MAGA brats who have absorbed the spirit of Trumpism.”
So what’s actually going on here? Well, it’s not really about race. In fact, most of the stories about race really aren’t about race. And this is no different. This story is about the people in power protecting their power, and justifying their power, by destroying and mocking those weaker than they are.
And then when the actual facts emerged, Kristol quietly deleted his tweet. He never apologized, of course. He hasn’t apologized for the Iraq war, either. There’s no need. People keep giving him money.
The National Review, meanwhile, ran a story entitled, “The Covington Students Might As Well Have Just Spit on the Cross.” That story has since been pulled too, but not before the author admitted he never even bothered to watch all the videos. He knew what he knew. That was enough.
What was so interesting about the coverage of Friday’s video was how much of it mentioned something called “privilege.” Alex Cranz, an editor at Gizmodo, for example, wrote, “From elementary school through college, I went to school with sheltered upper middle-class white boys who could devastate with a smirk. A facial gesture that weaponized their privilege. Infuriatingly you can’t fight that effing smirk with a punch or words. We saw that as Trump smirked his way through the election and we’ll see it as that boy from Kentucky’s friends, family, and school protect him. I effing hate that smirk. It says ‘I’m richer, I’m white, and I’m a guy.'”
What’s so fascinating about all these attacks is how inverted they are. These are high school kids from Kentucky. Do they really have more privilege than Alex Cranz from Gizmodo? Probably not. In fact, probably much less. They’re far less privileged than virtually everyone who called for them to be destroyed, based on the fact that they have too much privilege.
Consider Kara Swisher, for example, an opinion columnist at the New York Times. Swisher went to Princeton Day School and then Georgetown, then got a graduate degree at Columbia. She’s become rich and famous, in the meantime, by toadying for billionaire tech CEOs. She’s their handmaiden. Nobody considers her very talented. And yet she’s somehow highly influential in our society. Is she more privileged than the boys of Covington Catholic in Kentucky? Of course she is. Maybe that’s why she feels the need to call them Nazis, which she did, repeatedly.
So what’s actually going on here? Well, it’s not really about race. In fact, most of the stories about race really aren’t about race. And this is no different. This story is about the people in power protecting their power, and justifying their power, by destroying and mocking those weaker than they are.
Why? It’s simple. Our leaders haven’t improved the lives of most people in America. They can’t admit that because it would discredit them. So, instead they attack the very people they’ve failed. The problem, they’ll tell us, with Kentucky, isn’t that bad policies have hurt the people who live there. It’s that the people who live there are immoral because they’re bigots. They deserve their poverty and opioid addiction. They deserve to die young.
That’s what our leaders tell themselves. And now, that’s what they’re telling us. Just remember: they’re lying.
Adapted from Tucker Carlson’s monologue from “Tucker Carlson Tonight” on January 21, 2019.
