"Universities are turning our youths into Marxists!"

What fucking kind of ecologist says that? Anyone I know who knows ecology beyond an undergrad level is extremely critical of malthusian/darwinist forms of thought.

To be fair, your university sounds like shit. I mean, the professor in my mandatory humanities class (in a stem college), smack dab in the middle of neoliblandia, was basically just teaching us marxist historical materialism. I literally passed the exam of that course by studying "the origin of private property, family and the state".

The degree to which people become Marxist in or as a result of academia is almost entirely siloed off from any levers of power. If anything the mechanism is capturing people that might otherwise have led worker strikes, instead spending their lives applying Derrida to this or Foucault to that. Don't exile Lenin, give him a somewhat comfortable job where he feels like he's contributing to theory (but poses no threat to capital).

Source: my ass.

I was an art major in a very "progressive" place. One of my painting professors got reported for criticizing Bush in class. We all looked around and were like "Who the fuck picks painting for a major in a town with more gay bars than churches and supports Bush? And why didnt the department head just laugh them out of the room?"

Completely dispelled the notion that universities were Marxist indoctrination camps.

that's funny.. i'm fairly certain in the 5 years i was in college there wasn't a single goddamned professor on campus that knew anything about Marx, including my sociology professor who constantly railed on the state of the US and had then had us read Weber as if protestantism explained it all.

college was the most disillusioning thing ever. i truly thought it was where you go to learn real true things that you just won't find outside of that setting, but it was just more horseshit shoveled by clueless gluttons who just want tenure.

Famously all chemistry professors are communists.

that's the first time I've ever heard of a reactionary biological-supremacist ecologist. usually they are shit libs politically with like weird desperation turning into fatalism, a surrendering to political expediency and a narrowing of concern. it has been called the "subversive science" for longer than I've been alive, because it does not lend itself easily to reductionist paradigms like many disciplines do.

usually they are, at least in the discipline, pretty averse towards maximalist suprrmacism, because it gets drilled in constantly that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, the system is supreme and it's emergent properties of many networks of species working in concert are what produce benefits. it is webs and cycles, not competitors and victors. competition has costly consequences, while cooperation has elegant rewards.

anyway, so that guy sounds an idiot deluxe. ecologically speaking. at least he's making turds for bacteria to enjoy.

my ecology professor is literally teaching that survival of the fittest is about genetic superiority and that evolution is about working towards that 'goal'.

That demonstrates a deep misunderstanding of how evolution works. It is a common misconception in the general public (partly because it is beneficial to right-wing ideology for it to be perpetuated, as you mentioned), but a misconception that even a kinda competent biology layman would know better than to believe. It's nothing short of shameful that an ecology professor is repeating such a thing. To do that as a supposed authority on the subject is actively misleading students, it's worse to teach a falsehood than it is just to leave them ignorant.

I obviously don't know your situation specifically or how things like this work in Australia, but if I were still a student and my prof was saying those things, I would definitely complain about it to the department chair or someone who has the power to intervene. I don't know if your professor is just woefully uninformed/misinformed on the subject they're teaching, or if they're repeating this misconception because they have a reactionary political agenda. But either way it's horrible and shouldn't be allowed to stand imo.

One of my Spanish professors called Cuba a communist dictatorship ran by authoritarians in a class about Cinema in Spain.

I went to her office hours and ranted for half and hour about AES and China and she told me she had a lot to think about (it helped that she liked me as a student). I do this with all my professors lmao. I have a professor whose an anarcho-communist (he specializes in Latin American indigenous activism and culture) whose sus about China so I hope to convince him not to be.

I'm the one who has to radicalize people smh.

"Universities are turning our youths into Marxists!"

Insofar as debt peonage turns people into Marxists.

Comrade, when I was in college I didn't have the self awareness not to publicly argue with professors either being dicks or straight up saying factually incorrect things. Arguing got me the respect of classmates and professors. Also some enmity but I say go for it, arguing with power is a useful skill and there will never be a better time to hone that skill than now

Meanwhile my ecology professor is literally teaching that survival of the fittest is about genetic superiority and that evolution is about working towards that 'goal'. This is incorrect and bad science that is rooted in right-wing ideology that was disproven decades ago.

Even Richard Dawkins, who started this whole shit, opposed this. Send your ecology professor his documentary.

Dawkins is a fuck now but it's useful to have the person who literally wrote the book your ecology professor is mis-teaching (The Selfish Gene) call him out on it.

The doc: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7n0igh

I literally went through a poli sci program and there were no actual leftists, mostly liberals. Granted, my professors knew their stuff and I genuinely respect them as people, but we talked about really only the basics of what Marx believed but only to further contextualize the Soviet Union.

Granted, my professors did tolerate some of my pushback on defending some of the achievements of the Soviet Union, and how even far-right capitalists like Putin still invoke Lenin as a folk hero despite Dugin’s explicitly fascist intentions.

unlimited genocide on the first world

Biology disciplines that focus on evolutionary study really do have rightoid enclaves, it feels very much like a microcosm of the ideological side of being right wing since studying evolution is ultimately systemic study and these people instead boil down the rich and fascinating narrative of evolutionary history into a series of great man narratives except it's Great Gene Theory instead.

I actually had a sociology professor, elderly Italian-American guy, who was a self-proclaimed Marxist.

He was a based as fuck professor, but at the time, I was still quite libby, so I didn't see it the way I see it now when I look back.

To the extent that evolution is even adaptive (most of it is drift), greater fitness is just something heritable becoming more common in the population because it was conferred some advantage relative to the environment (with "environment" very widely defined).

The advantage itself could be all kinds of things, many of which have little to do with any common understanding of a "superior" trait. For example, female birds seem to (usually) have something wired pretty deep, genetically, that makes them hot to go for flashy feathers on a mate. Therefore, a gene variant that makes male feathers more appealing to a potential mate will tend to increase in frequency. Sometimes birds get kind of weighed down by their flashy feathers, so a gene variant that made their flashy feathers less costly (e.g., lighter) might often be advantaged. But over time this "give me a shiny mate" thing could, of course, change. In many animals, a seemingly common kind of "advantage conferring" gene variant is neotany, i.e. retaining some juvenile traits into adulthood. Like being able to drink milk into adulthood or when humans artificially select canines for puppy-like friendliness (like dogs) they tend to get the package deal and also acquire floppy ears (like dogs). Things like this aren't what come to mind when someone talks about "genetic superiority", though.

Re: Working towards a goal, this is exactly the opposite of how evolution works. It is a stochastic process where fitness is relative to an "environment " that is constantly in flux (though much more in flux at certain times than others). Vestigial traits are an obvious example for how there was no original plan or goal, just adaptation and drift over huge periods of time and in different environments.

This also applies to us, of course, but over almost unfathomable periods of time and relative to our environment that changes very rapidly due to our ability to consciously change it. Nobody can really tell you what is adaptive for humans at this point in time.

I'm pretty sure "fit" is about how an organism fits into an environment and a lot of people definitely think it means physical fitness or strength

I recently suffered through the literal DEI staff having kids proclaim how it's okay to have open fascists talk on campus so long as they have trigger warnings

I don't believe for an instant that you aren't already known as a shit stirrer.

I had a mandatory class for my masters called “biomedical research ethics” and most of the class was to convince us it’s okay that research done by public universities gets given to private companies to make money off of

The other notable part of the class was just promoting class infighting between PhDs and not PhD staff and saying that just doing large amounts of labor for a paper doesn’t mean you should get authorship

Serious social science departments are ok tho, you must be idiotic and a failed academic to learn about history and support the status quo for “objectivity”

Business/stems/design departments tho..

Measurehead

i remember reading here about an alternative theory of evolution that was pretty compelling, where they state that organisms evolve rapidly over a very short time inbetween incredibly long periods of stagnation, and how thats contrary too the bourgeois narrative of slow gradual change (ie reformism). if someone could link that author I'd appreciate it

Exposing our children to different points of views and cultures makes them empathetic and open minded people, oh no!

it's been a while since I graduated college but the wokest it ever got was an into linguistics class that was like "different native american nations have different languages, they're not a monolith" and an english class where we read Fun Home. everything else was non-political like math or programming (and usually taught by people who would sneak in conservative politics in their lectures) or espoused conventional "moderate" ideals.

oh yeah and I remembered companies like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin had offices in the main engineering building for some reaspn

My impulsive ass would just debate the teacher lol. I’ve done it before.