SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – AT 11:55 P.M. ET: 

ONE DOWN – FROM TOWNHALL:   Well, it’s official. Trump has beaten his first Democratic opponent, and I use that term generously. Creepy porn lawyer Michael Avenatti has decided he’s not running for president in 2020. BASTA! Yeah, we’ve all had enough of this clown, even Democrats—who are probably secretly fuming that he inserted himself into the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation fight with a nut job who had a totally unbelievable and completely unsubstantiated story that the judge was part of a gang rape ring in high school. The two other women who had accused Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct also had similar shoddy stories that were totally baseless. How bad were they? The New York Times refused to do stories on two of them because they couldn’t confirm anything.   So sad.  Everywhere I heard the wanting of Michael.  How often do you get such presidential talent?  Well, I guess there was Warren Harding.

GREAT MOMENTS IN EDUCATION – FROM COLLEGE FIX:   Good news for Columbia University undergraduates of modest intelligence: Your graduate instructors are being taught to let you grade yourselves.  The Ivy League university’s Center for Teaching and Learning is hosting a five-part “Inclusive Teaching Seminar” this spring, covering topics including “learning through diversity, growth mindset, microaggressions and implicit bias, trigger warnings, stereotype threat, and inclusive assessments.”  It’s intended for graduate and postdoctoral students who are “committed to creating inclusive classroom environments.”  The fourth session is titled “Inclusive Grading and Assessments,” and it says participants will learn how to reduce “stereotype threat” in their classrooms.  I'm excited.  We'll produce another generation of mature, informed students, just like the ones we see in the streets of Berkeley.

THE CRISIS OF OUR TIME – FROM COLLEGE FIX:   An a cappella group at Princeton University has temporarily stopped singing a hit Disney song after at least one student complained that it can “catalyze violent tendencies toward, and assault against, women.”  The group, the Princeton Tigertones, have stopped singing the song “Kiss the Girl” from the movie The Little Mermaid until “the members can perform it in a way that’s comfortable for the entire audience,” Inside Higher Ed reports.  That song, which in the film is sung largely by the anthropomorphic crab Sebastian, features lyrics urging a suitor to “go on and kiss the girl, kiss the girl.” At their performances of the song, Higher Ed reports, the Tigertones would pick a young woman and a young man from the audience, sing to both of them, and then urge them to smooch, “and the couple will comply, sometimes on with a peck on the cheek, sometimes briefly on the lips.”  Yet in a recent op-ed in The Daily Princetonian, sophomore Noa Wollstein argued that the Tigertones “elevate [the song] to an offensive and violating ritual.”  “The song launches a heteronormative attack on women’s right to oppose the romantic and sexual liberties taken by men, further inundating the listener with themes of toxic masculinity,” Wollstein writes, claiming:  “The fervor with which the all-male Tones press the man to kiss the female subject eerily amplifies the song’s assertions of toxic masculinity.”  There was a time when college students were fighting World War II.

December 4, 2018