It’s All Academic: Bad Ideas Bloom

A few years ago, I had occasion to walk regularly past the university in Galway. My journeys took me across the Salmon Weir Bridge, which had narrow footpaths and has since been relieved by a new footbridge, and up past the cathedral and the university. Often, I found myself walking against the current of students coming from the university. The various encounters along the way were sometimes surprisingly hostile. Many of the students seemed fired up with startling aggressive intent. Their demeanour reminded me of us as kids pouring out of the cinemas having watched a Bruce Lee movie, flexing fledgling muscles, feeling ready to take on the world.

Naturally, I wondered: is it just me or is this a thing? On one occasion, when a young black woman glared at me on sight, for no apparent reason, a paraphrase of Ali G’s line popped into my mind, “Is it cuz I’s white?” That made me smile, for a while anyway, until I realized there was likely more than a grain of truth in it.

I had attended that university as a mature student, took an arts degree, majored in English and sociology/politics (soc ‘n’ pol) and I do recall feeling similarly fired up at the time about the injustices of capitalism and so on, leaving me inclined to glower at men in suits. Was I now the man in the suit?

I read up on what was being disseminated in the universities that was causing students in England and across the West to tear down statues and demand reparations for slavery, among other outraged activities. Back in the 70s and 80s, this same type of young person would be forming bands or theatre troupes, annoying no one, but neighbours and critics. What has changed?

The New Puritans

I came across a very helpful book by Andrew Doyle called The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World, which pretty much laid out the entire state of play: woke ideology filling the place that religion used to occupy and becoming a pseudo-religion itself.  It seemed that I, as a “white hetero male with colonialist tendencies,” as a student might put it, was actually the new framed culprit for everything wrong with the world. A kind of latter-day elder of Zion, guilty of everything, with an innate desire to colonise as a result of an innate desire for violent expression and appropriation. In a word, I’m “bad”, and not in a good way, as in rapper “cool”. And not even salvageable. To put it religiously, I’m beyond redemption.

This idea of the “white hetero male”, as being “violent” likely stemmed from a confusion of terms, where male competitiveness was equated with “aggression”, which then brought the word “violent” into the word family, to be used for effect in argumentative debate, because everyone responds to scare stories and everyone loves a villain to make themselves look “good” in comparison. And what is a lecture after all but a kind of performance, the students filling the lecture theatres of the western world being the audiences. From this perspective the idea of the violent white male is a kind of pulp fiction, designed to thrill, while giving the freshers something to shoot at.

But as philosopher and neuroscientist Sam Harris puts it, there usually aren’t that many bad people around at any one time. Maybe only 1% or so of people are psychopaths and sadists in any one historical moment. More often there are bad ideas that good people act upon with good intentions and usually disastrous consequences.

And it seems from what I’ve learned from Doyle’s book and other sources, that Western universities have been disseminating some very bad ideas for a long while now, among them the idea that all white men are innately violent and all their works corrupt and deserving of destruction. But they don’t call it “destruction”. They call it “dismantling”. Meaning, I suppose, polite destruction.

“No, Marie Antoinette, we’re not chopping off your head, silly girl, we’re simply dismantling you.”

Then as if things weren’t complicated enough, meaning itself is regarded as a “construction” to facilitate patriarchal power, and that definitions of anything you care to name are totally subjective. Meaning, everything has many meanings. As many meanings as there are people. Which means that nothing has any real meaning, only subjective interpretation. Which means that everything is meaningless and ultimately the best yarn wins.

All these bad ideas then became cornerstones of black studies, leading to the conclusion of the increasingly discredited doctrine of Critical Race Theory, which itself is racist, and often proudly so – “Now it’s our turn!” – that “violent” white people owe people of colour big time, with, apparently, justified hell to pay. A belief system which is perhaps even inspiring the killing of white farmers in South Africa.

Incidentally, the “Now it’s our turn” idea also comes from feminism, and was used by some feminists to justify abuses of power when they gained authority over others, conveniently failing to recognize that far from creating equality Heaven on Earth, many of them seemed instead quite determined to create the same old same old, with themselves in the seats of power. Proving, at least, that power and ambition still have very definite meanings.

Eamonn Kelly argues that It stands to reason that a private company entrusted with a state service, is going to rig the system to maximise its profits.https://t.co/GN0QbIFe6h

— CassandraVoices (@VoicesCassandra) June 12, 2025

Compulsory

When I started in university in the early 1990s, one of the things that struck me as odd at the time was that gender studies was compulsory. The last time I’d been in “school”, Irish language was compulsory and eventually people saw that this was a bad idea because it created a system of inequality, favouring some and side-lining others. Now here I was, back in “school”, and the university, which I understood as being a place of free-thinking, had a compulsory subject. It all seemed a bit “off” to me.

I asked some people I knew who worked in education about the oddity of having a compulsory subject in the free-thinking university, and both just looked back at me and said absolutely nothing, immovably shtum, although both exuded the vibe that this was some kind of unmentionable thing and that I would be best off saying no more about it, which I duly did, obediently attending the various compulsory gender studies lectures and seminars, to no great advantage.

“To put it clearly, girls: white men are bad, but white women are good. We’re their first victims. And there’s hell to pay”

Ironically, feminists also appear to have placed themselves in the role of white saviour to the Third World. Now heading up NGOs and helpfully inviting millions to “deserved better lives” in the likes of Newtownmountkennedy, they continue the task of identifying “bad” people, most of whom, oddly enough, come wrapped in white skin with male genitalia, making them easy to spot.

“Look! A violent colonialist misogynist! Get him!”

On top of all that, those radicalised students emerging from Western universities appear to believe that anyone who disagrees with them, on even the most trivial point, is actually evil, if not in direct league with Satan, and possibly psychically and spiritually contagious, justifying physical reprimand, as was demonstrated recently in Limerick when student Jamie O’Mahoney waved an Israeli flag during a pro-Palestine meeting. It’s little wonder then that these unfortunate students, at the receiving end of an education seemingly designed to make enemies of their fellow countrymen, now appear to have so much in common with radical Islam.

Theory to Practise

Well-intentioned theory, as was so strikingly demonstrated by the Nazi misreading of Nietzsche, doesn’t always bloom beautifully into reality. For instance, one of the current real-world consequences of the teachings of comfortable academics serenely creating theoretical paper models in ivy-decked tenure, is mass immigration. The thinking and moral lesson being that male white Europe owes reparations to the Third World for colonialist crimes committed in previous centuries. This idea is partly driven by another text called The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon, which was a big ideas source in my university time.

The ensuing academic-influenced invitation to the actual wretched of the Earth has resulted in, among other perplexities, the village of Dundrum in County Tipperary, with a population of 200 or so, being joined by almost 300 male strays – sans WAGs – from the Third World who no one quite knows, least of all our government, with locals being labelled criminally racist by the apostles of the global equality agenda for even questioning this more than extraordinary imposition. If there was any real social justice, those migrants would be housed in the universities. Chickens coming home to roost and all that.

“Now girls, listen up! I want you to give a big feminist ‘Hey there’ to your new exotic boyfriends.”

The Pot is Black

If the Humanities become selectively humane, as appears to be happening, it’s no longer the Humanities. It’s something else entirely. And the particular slant of “humanities” that is becoming evident in universities across the West seems more than a little racist and sexist, the very things it claims to be attempting to eradicate, itself apparently unwittingly succumbing to malignant Freudian projection on a grand scale.

Referencing political philosopher John Rawls’ book A Theory of Justice, Thomas Sowell, economist and historian writes in his 2010 book “Intellectuals and Society”:

Justice is the first virtue of institutions, as truth is of systems of thought. A theory, however elegant and economical, must be rejected or revised if it is untrue; likewise, laws and institutions, no matter how efficient and well-arranged, must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust.

The way things are going, we may one day see a social movement demanding reparations from the universities.