I'm sure what you describe happens. I'm also sure--because I've been in the classroom as student or teacher--that a lot of young white men get butthurt when the concept of white, male privilege is broached in the least way. Some guys at that point will immediately holler that they're being oppressed. As a teacher, I will be the first to admit that K-12 and college are filled with horrible, ignorant, non-thinking, reactionary teachers of all political stripes. But we've done that to ourselves. In all the states I've taught in (at the college level), K-12 teachers start out and often continue to earn at the same level as a non-experienced starting line worker in a non-union auto-plant, about $32-34k a year. You're not going to get intelligent people with that sort of cash. And then there are the "education" programs out there that teach tons of nonsense (which is only superseded by the sort of nonsense peddled by the home-schooling industry). Anyway: sure, some teachers suck and are bullies when it comes to race. But in my experience it's far more often that complaining student is a whiner. (I don't use this blunt tone in class. I prefer to slowly encourage the precious little snowflakes to think, rather than to alienate them by speaking to them like the adults they think they are.)

A lot of people don't seem to understand how tax brackets work, nor do they read closely. Mr. Anonymous Coward is a good example. Let's take a look: "I don't have a problem with someone's five-million-and-oneth dollar being taxed at 90%." If the 90% tax bracket kicks in at five million dollars, the first dollar earned after five million would be taxed at 90%. You'd only get a dime on it, and Uncle Sam would get 90 cents. Everything earned by that would be taxed at the lower rates of the lower brackets. The first 50k would still be taxed at less than 15%. That's not "in poverty."

As a professor, I'd welcome a monoculture. I'd love for all my students to have the same machine with the same OS and the same apps. Otherwise, every class with a computer component becomes a class in teaching half the students how to change systems settings or whatever on different machines. The average student doesn't have any great computer competence, despite the "digital natives" hype. They can get on Facebook or use Google, but inserting a header in a document or hooking up to an external monitor is beyond them. I can really understand why other educators would want a "monoculture." (However, I think the emphasis on computers in education is misplaced and overhyped. My students, at the college level, would benefit much more from learning touch typing and a few basics than from whatever malarky they're being taught now.)

Meh. I spend 40 hours a week after work teaching underprivileged children yoga. I volunteer to be a practice dummy at the police firing range. I've donated all my major organs to the Red Crescent, and I've sent my bones off to fertilize the roses at the local battered women's shelter. I developed a forty-two bazillion line software project intended to help developing nations coffee farmers integrate the principles of feng shui into outhouse production, and I have given up my own sex organs to be used by sex surrogates for elderly veterans. And I've accomplished all of this while taking care of my own family and my own job, up hill both ways, ten miles, in the snow, every day!

Looking at things like impact factor of the journal or the number of times the article is cited require reading/counting* skills most deans don't seem to have--at least based on how most of them seem unable to read contracts or faculty handbooks. (*It seems skills learned while counting beans do not transfer well.)

Why is this modded "insightful"? It should be modded "completely ignorant of history." Marriage is legislated as far back as Hammurabi's code. It is regulated in the Islamic Hadith, in Jewish law, in early Christian law, and in Daoist and Confucian systems. I'm sure it's regulated in other religious systems, but I don't have knowledge of them. And the statement "Religion cannot coexist with government"? The list of state religions is too long to list before I finish my coffee. Not to mention all the religions that are coexisting with government right now. I say all this as an atheist and critic of the value of religions. We have enough fantasists in high office, on TV, in pulpits as it is. We don't need to go modding this particular denier of reality as "insightful."

I keep reading about this bubble, but I don't experience in my daily life. I am by political inclination pretty far to the left, but I run into plenty of right-wing opinions, from the libertarians on Slashdot to the Tea Party people on Facebook. I interact with moderate Republicans at work and extreme (God needs to cleanse this nation! Gold Standard!) Republicans in my neighborhood. I have no sense that there's a bubble. I sometimes wish there was a bubble that could filter out all the idiots. Some of the best days of my life were spent hanging out with people of varied and conflicting views who were all intelligent and capable of mutual respect and civility. I'd love a bubble like that. But, again, I don't see any damn bubble in my daily life. Why's it getting broadcast so much? Cui bono?

I have a doctorate in English from a better state university (University of State_name). I worked with people well-known in my field. I have teaching awards, research awards, and publications. I'm willing to work anywhere in the US except places I can't afford (where I couldn't get hired anyway): San Francisco, NYC, etc. After searching for a job for four years, I ended up at a school in the deep South that's ranked near the bottom. I work with people who have doctorates from Brown, Purdue, Penn State, and the like. We earn, at the start $44-49k/yr. During the job search, I got quite a few interviews and would be enthusiastically supported by a few members of the committee, but would get beat out by someone a little better, or a little younger. I was lucky, though, and have always been a scholarship boy, so I don't have a crushing student loan debt, "only" $50k. But that debt is a significant burden for my family, and, without it, we would have been able to buy a house much earlier. (Also: I left out the part where I taught at a major research school for four years off the tenure track with 100-135 students a semester, half of them composition students, for $32k/yr, with only annual contracts. I worked between 55 and 60 hours a week during the semester. 40 in the summers, trying to get out publications and doing extra teaching so that we could afford to live in a f*cking shack.) So, yes, when anyone tells you "Be careful. Yes, do it for love, but for god's sake, consider the consequences!" You'd be wise to quit being a callow little Holden Snotfield and listen to what we're trying to tell you. Better yet, go look at the job market figures over at the MLA and AAUP websites. Don't be a chump.

I have no problem addressing theories of divine creation in a humanities class. It's an appropriate topic for religion, philosophy, history, etc.. But it's a problem in a science classroom. There's a limited amount of time, and students in science class should be investigating ideas that are falsifiable, amenable to the scientific method. If we want to do creationism, AWESOME! Let's bust out Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Roger Bacon and the whole fat lot and throw up against Lyell and his gang. It'd be an awesome scrap. But, again, today's public school curricula really give very little time to science, and I'd frankly rather students learn the mechanisms of science in science class. SCIENCE. Which is based, in terms of the history of ideas, in skepticism and materialism--granted, with fat doses of mostly counterproductive hoo-ha metaphysics, but SCIENCE!!! (The last two instances of all-caps should be performed in the voice of Thomas Dolby.)

You were offered a dictionary definition of democratize accompanied by the etymology. Whether you profit from that gift is up to you.

If ten a month is the standard load for a reviewer, I think there's already a problem. Reading an article should probably be allotted at least an hour. Any fact-checking will take more. I read articles for the humanities, and that's pretty easy. You can spot a bullshitter pretty quickly, in a page or two. But I'd imagine science can be trickier. So, the half-hour or so it might take me to be sure that it's crap would probably double for science. At a minimum. I say minimum because reading a stack of a dozen poetry submissions can easily take me over an hour, and that's really not very much text. Then you have the separate but connected problem of being rushed or just feeling sick and tired of the stack and rushing through it. It seems to me like it's a recipe for rubber-stamping and carelessness. I know that a science journal my ex-wife worked for sent out far fewer articles a month. But it was a small journal on a narrow topic. I think that it will boil down to, this whole issue, to the fact that you'll always be able to game the system. The process of peer-review doesn't end with publication. For good reasons.

I read an article a year or so ago claiming that this was a natural rhythm. Apparently quite a few intellectual workers had this pattern. The one I remember is John Milton. Sorry, too busy to run down the article for you!

Traffic fatalities and gun deaths are both just over 32,000 per annum in the United States. Most gun fatalities are self-inflicted, last I checked, around 60%. So I'd say that the cops are doing a damn fine job when they're ticketing/arresting people speeding, running lights, drinking/texting while driving and so on. Of course this particular cop seems to be a limit case, a bad example. As are those redlight cameras that are about revenue and not safety. Still, I don't think it's right to claim that traffic tickets are some kind of low-hanging fruit. It's also to comforting, easy, and disingenuous to point fingers at "real" bad guys when all of us are self-centered enough to occasionally put someone's life at risk because we're running a few minutes later, or want to eat or something else while driving. We can debate helmet laws and such, but I think we'd still have to acknowledge that traffic control is an important form of police work.

Hearing the sonic boom of the B-52s?

I suppose you don't read the news. The most recent example is the girl who killed herself after a gang of her classmates spent a year tracking her down on social media to write things like "why don't you kill yourself." Ostracism, hateful words, those things are very powerful. Sure, violence. But you don't need violence to be a bully.