“Why Syracuse Can’t Attract the Students It Needs to Pay the Bills” (WSJ) covers the financial slide at this Rust Belt school pretty well, but doesn’t dig into the product. Let’s pick a few professors at Syracuse and see what a $100,000/year customer might learn from they/them.
Scholar-activist, Professor Kishi Animashaun Ducre:
“The Black feminist spatial imagination and an intersectional environmental justice”, “Katrina as Postscript to Racialized Spaces in Louisiana.”, and “Addressing Environmental and Food Justice toward Dismantling the School-to-Prison Pipeline: Poisoning and Imprisoning Youth”
Professor PJ DiPietro (she/they, her/them, hers/their):
engages decolonial thinking, hemispheric Latinx studies, and critical theories of race, gender, transgender, and sexuality
“The Coloniality of Gender”; “Trans of Color is an Oxymoron. Humans, nonHuman Animals, and the Bodies Beneath Animals”; “Co-Creating Transdisciplinary Decolonial Curricula”; “Hallucinating Knowing: (Extra)Ordinary Consciousness, more-than-human Perception, and other Decolonizing Remedios within Latina and Xicana Feminist and Queer Theories”
Here’s a department that acknowledges that the university is on stolen land, which it refuses to give back and won’t pay rent on:
What they promise students will be able to do after forking over $400,0000 and four years away from the AI Klondike:
Integrate feminist and queer theory and practice to challenge social relations, representations, knowledges, institutions, and policies.
Model feminist and queer competencies of collaborative learning that embrace cooperation and mutual aid.
From Professor Eunjung Kim, a member of this department:
Kim, E. (2010). How Much Sex Is Healthy? The Pleasures of Asexuality.
Kim, E. (2024). Asexual Kinship: Capitalism, Reproduction, and an Imperiality of Asexuality.
(At least 14 years of studying people not having sex.)
Update: I posted this on X and so far (a day later) it is up to 434,000+ views. One X comment, “This is scary! If true.”, inspired me to visit the Syracuse.edu web site again. This time, I picked the Syracuse School of Education and then picked the first faculty member from an alphabetical list: Professor Barbara Applebaum. She has a “research focus” of “critical whiteness studies; epistemic injustice; feminist philosophy” (Wikipedia: “Epistemic injustice occurs when an individual or group is wronged in their “capacity as a knower”, meaning that their ability to produce knowledge is called into question.”) Prof. Applebaum teaches a full semester course on “Critical Whiteness”:
Her book Being White, Being Good: White Complicity, White Moral Responsibility, and Social Justice Pedagogy promises to “help white students understand and acknowledge their white complicity”. Some Amazon reader review excerpts:
Included are Applebaum’s ideas on how to indoctrinate others to accept this insane ideology that seeks to, at its core, tear down society and “liberate the oppressed” into the Communist utopia that awaits if they could only be “woke” enough to see it! Utter garbage. Stay away.
I am using this work as a foundation of my dissertation. I really don’t know where I would be without this important piece of work.
Whatever ones personal views may be it is a disgrace that Syracuse University would employ this author as a academic professor. This book deposits ideas that are simple anecdotal opinions based of off no scientific data and tries through the use of word salad to push them off as facts deliberately attempting to manipulate data to deceive its intended audience knowing full well that the audience it is targeting does not have a sophisticated understanding of statistical analysis or historical awareness. … [the book] no business in a place of higher education and the author should seek psychological intervention for her racist presuppositions and destructive methods of solutions to her paranoid delusions.
This book helped me understand that most white people aren’t ignorant, but just have a different kind of knowledge that’s based on ignoring racism. And that this is a very active thing that they do (even if it’s unconscious).
It might be a challenge figuring out how to adapt this work to improve the pedagogy in an aeronautical engineering class…
WSJ has been really great about providing rage bait for both sides recently.
There is no Archimedes at this Syracuse
Sad decline of a venerable institution.
https://lilith.org/articles/the-graffiti-wars/
If we are going to require a land acknowledgement, how about one for Adam and Eve, the OG’s of humanity? Syracuse acknowledges we are all Adam and Eve’s direct descendants and worship Mother Judaism above all else . . .
And since we are on Haudenosaunee land, we acknowledge lacrosse as the only true sport.
The writing was on the wall by ’97. Given 2 years to rebuke Dr. Charles Murray’s “The Bell Curve”, the School of Education was reduced to a steady diet of race pandering flavored soft ice cream. served as a self licking ice cream cone. I never became a teacher and am still paying loans.
Charles Murray was second author on the bell curve. Richard Hernnstein was first author. I find it extremely odd how people drop the first author on that book. In what universe is a first author less important than a second author? I suspect it’s a deliberate decision to cover up the ethnicity of the first author.
Jim. maybe it has something to do with Richard Herrstein’s 1. not being outspoken and 2. being safely deceased by the time of “woke” age. Just curious, what is his ethnicity? I get that he is neither Richard Lionhearted nor Richard III, but do not think that his apparently, in your opinion compromised ethnicity, if confirmed, was defining him.
Disclaimer: I consider works like Bell Curve useless and waist of taxpayers money, and anything good that could have came out of it is Charles Murray’s outspoken attack on fake wokeness.
perplexed: The Bell Curve is a great and prescient book and it has almost nothing to do with IQ as a function of race. I wrote about it in
https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2004/07/16/the-bell-curve-revisited/
The Bell Curve starts out by talking about how we live in an era where people get sorted by cognitive ability into socioeconomic classes. In 14th century England if you were a peasant with a high IQ or a noble with a low IQ it didn’t affect your life, reproductive potential, or income very much. In our more meritocratic and vastly more sophisticated economy a smart kid from a lower middle class might make it to the top of a big company (cf. Jack Welch, who paid himself $680 million as CEO of GE) or at least into a $300,000/year job as a radiologist. For the authors of the Bell Curve the increasing disparity in income in the U.S. is primarly due to the fact that employees with high IQs are worth a lot more than employees with low IQs. They note that we have an incredibly complex legal system and criminal justice system. So you’d expect people with poor cognitive ability to fail to figure out what is a crime, which crimes are actually likely to be punished, etc., and end up in jail. (A Google search brought up a report on juvenile justice in North Carolina; the average offender had an IQ of 79.) If they stay out of jail through dumb (literally) luck, there is no way that they are ever going to be able to start a small business; the legal and administrative hoops through which one must jump in order to employ even one other person are impenetrable obstacles to those with below-average intelligence.
——————
In other words, the Bell Curve in 1994 predicted the explosion of envy that we began to experience 30 years later. And the sorting effect noted by the authors has gotten dramatically more extreme due to AI. The cognitively fortunate can get paid $1+ million (average!) by any of the AI companies. The rest of us will muddle through on $30,000-$100,000/year. And don’t get me started on Nvidia!
See also https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2017/03/04/protests-against-charles-murray-inadvertently-prove-the-points-he-made-in-the-bell-curve/
(Students at Middlebury, due to declining U.S. IQ, were too stupid to figure out what the book was about before they protested the book.)
Jim. One of them was a tweedy academic Central European Jew who had the decency to die before the book was published. Another is pugnacious Scotch-Irish who dared to defend his views. He is still actively posting on Twitter, averaging about 4 deep thoughts a day.
Admittedly this argument does not work for Friedrich Engels. But he was always a second author and too dogmatic to make a good Twitter poster.
“The Sleeper” Woody Allen, 1973 did predict the future:
“Luna Schlosser: Men go crazy over for me. I’m great physically. I got a Ph.D. in oral sex.
Miles Monroe: Yeah, they make you take any Spanish with that?
Luna Schlosser: What?
Miles Monroe: Well, I don’t know. I was an English major, myself. You know, Chaucer, Pope, I minored in foreplay. It’s a two credit course at NYU.”
Woody Allen attended NYU in 1953. He failed Spanish, English and almost failed motion picture production, after which NYU dropped him.
Most amusing to think Chaucer and Pope would be studied by the English department.