Discussing the toxicity of wokeness

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It's not just the reactionaries who drank the coolaide who can't define woke. Even so called right wing intellectuals whose entire academic career revolves around "woke" can't define "woke", even when its central to books they have published.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/danidiplac ... oes-viral/

But its not like it was ever an intellectual argument. More like behavioural programming.

That's what the Harvard Alums and marketing department want you to think, but the reality is usually somewhat different in terms of most employers not actually caring that much about where the degree was issued, it's more about their particular experience with graduates of a particular college as much as the actual college itself. It might give a bit of an advantage with the first job, but it gets to be less and less significance as you build up a resume or CV as appropriate.

And yes, I'm sure there are people that would sacrifice a bunch to go to those colleges, that doesn't make it a right to have the standards lowered or mean that it's a justified trade off when the education available at other schools isn't necessarily worse.

Regardless, letting people into elite institutions that aren't up to it does basically nothing good for anybody. It undermines the reputation of the school and sets the students up for failure when they're not up to scratch on top of often saddling them with a bunch of debt.

Doesn't that also depend on the specific career? if you are talking about Engineering, surveying, technical fields or programming or coding then the answer is definitely no. Most employers in these fields aren't interested in paper qualification. they want to recruit people who have skills. Infact speaking to software engineers I know, they 100% have greater respect for self-taught programmers who certify themselves than spoilt twats flashing around a Harvard degree. Engineers of course need degrees but nowadays skills > paper.

But then there's business or law where having connections is really important. Ivy league really helps. I know people who go back and pay to obtain an MBA from a prestigious institution, not so much for skills but for opening doors/networking to compensate for having bachelors from an average higher education institution.

Medicine, dentistry or pharmacy or allied health don't count. Apart from clout when you go to parties, it doesn't really matter you are from Harvard. Once you are qualified nobody looks at where you studied. All that matters is you are a doctor, dentist or physiotherapist.

Arts/Science because they are generic degrees, the ivy league connection is important as well. If you are in research it helps getting a foot in the door and once you are in then the grants/publications you have speak for themselves.

Harvard has a huge endowement that makes Harvard one of the most affordable schools to go to!
24% of students pay nothing!

Harvard's endowment is rumoured to be larger than many small countries.

Sounds like quite the caricature, especially when most of the cases of people getting fired over what they've posted on social media involve some pretty egregious posts.

You wonder why folk who post egregious stuff on social media using their name/account get surprised when they get fired from their jobs.

It's pretty narcissistic to think one can expose themselves as utterly deplorable in public but not have anyone around them reevaluate their relationship with the deplorable.

I think it's like so called "karen" behaviour, it's a naive (or sometimes momentary lapse of reason) where there is self-belief that if the act takes place outside of work (or outside work hours in a non-work related social media platform) then they are somehow exercising their freedom of expression and/or freedom of speech.

There's a failure to understand that freedom of speech/expression doesn't mean freedom from consequences. It's especially ironic considering they're the same sorts of people who advocate for at-will employment, meaning their employer doesn't need any cause to dismiss them.

"I didn't expect the leopards to eat my face," sobs person who voted for the Leopards Eating Faces Party.

It's fascinating how the principles underpinning the "war on woke" somehow applies in a way that is unidirectional.

Exactly. I voted for leopards to eat other people's faces, not mine.

The short answer is for the most part no. A few degrees do, but for the most part nobody really cares. It's an achievement to get in, but the quality of education isn't necessarily such that the low performers are ahead of other folks. Harvard or not, you'd still have to establish that you're a qualified candidate that can do whatever the job is.

As far as arts/science goes, ivy league isn't even remotely important in most cases. It might, just might, help with the first job out of college, but you still have to actually perform and if you're not performing at the level that they're expecting out of a graduate of that college, you've pretty much screwed yourself over and would have been better off not coming in with the baggage.

Grants and research tend to be more on your proposals and simply being from an ivy league institution isn't going to do much if you're not already crushing it in terms of your proposal and with how specific doctorates are, there's no particular guarantee that a particular college will even have any of the top people in that field.

Personally, I went to what was a the time one of the top hundred public colleges in the US. It's been pretty much completely destroyed in pursuit of a woke ideology, but at the time it was someplace that most people could get into if they wanted to, because it was actually hard work and you didn't get the chance to really weasel out the way that you might in many other colleges. If you weren't performing, people knew you weren't performing and you got to choose to take harder classes and arrange for harder learning opportunities to be arranged if the ones available weren't hard enough.

It's roughly $83k a year if you pay full price, so it takes a pretty substantial amount of funding to make it even remotely affordable for normal people.

Especially larger companies, universities and government go through thousands of applicants for single job placements for graduates. I know HR people who work in recruitment and there are some basic filters they use to cut down the number of applications they have to review. One of those filters is institution studied followed by marks/grades.