Saturday, December 19, 2020

Update to the previous: Joseph Epstein doubles down on the condescension, gathers a doofus follower

 Briefly, because I don't want to give this much more house room: 

Some critic at the National Review, AKA a man with a lot of opinions and little information, took Dr. Jill Biden to task for her dissertation. Did he play the Yale card? Yes, of course he did. Did I not say it's the National Review, home of William S. Buckley, author of God and Man at Yale? 

Anyway, it didn't go well: https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/national-review-critic-flunked-reviewing-201608730.html.

 And then The Chronicle of Higher Education, which I gave up reading (and subscribing to! I actually subscribed for a number of years) a while back for good reasons, has given him leave to explain his views, and folks, it's not pretty:

  • Conservative tut-tutting about kids these days? Check.

  • Ditto about grade inflation AND misogyny AND a racist theory to boot: "Those evaluations helped lead to rampant grade inflation (“somehow the grade of C jumped up to B”). “At the school where I taught, a proudly left-wing teacher was said to give black students automatic A’s as an act of reparation." Check.

  • Too much political correctness ruining the university? Check. 

  • And I refer you to my previous post about the ubi sunt lament that extremely privileged white men like to indulge in about the good old days. I think I should sue him for plagiarism, don't you? "Don’t get him started on college presidents today. Back in Epstein’s time, that office was occupied by scholars of stature like Robert F. Goheen at Princeton or Alfred Whitney Griswold at Yale. Now he can only dimly recall that “the president of Harvard is a woman, or was a woman until recently.” I can only assume he thinks that is some kind of sick burn. 

    The thing I don't  understand is why everyone is giving him house room, AKA responding to him on Twitter, FB and everywhere else after he's done the sh*t-stirring that he obviously set out to do. We corrected him, but like a certain person in the White House, he just feeds on it and sows more chaos. We should be ignoring him--but then again, what am I doing but giving this attention? 

    < Apparently one of his books is called Narcissus Leaves the Pool. No, kiddo. Narcissus is still at the pool, gazing at his own reflection and terrified that others might be able to gain a place at it.  

 


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