Intellectual Dark Web Dorks Explore Deep Questions At Bari Weiss' University Of Martyrdom

We mustn't! It is forbidden!

It has been a while since we checked in on Bari Weiss’s academic vehicle for separating rubes from their money. Or the University of Austin Texas, as she probably prefers we call it. Let’s see what’s new and ridiculous over there!

This week, the school posted a video on its YouTube channel , featuring one of their “Polaris Fellows” by the name of Ezra Gershanok droning on and on and on for the longest 90 seconds since Marin Mersenne first fired up his pendulum.

Why One Polaris Fellow Quit McKinsey    www.youtube.com 

What is a Polaris Fellow? We’ll let UATX’s website explain :

 The UATX Polaris Fellowship is a part-time, year-long program focused on cultivating principled leadership. Polaris Fellows study the interaction between law, markets, and institutions through contemporary and classic texts, acquire fundamental leadership and managerial skills, and meet with leading-edge public and private entrepreneurs, among others. 

We’ve written marketing copy, and that is some Grade-A prime corporate gobbledygook. It is vague, it is general, it makes UATX sound like an MBA program.

But anyone familiar with the history of Bari Weiss and the mountebanks and rebels of the Intellectual Dark Web knows that its raison d'être is not to fill up our nation’s C-suites with bright-eyed capitalists throwing around phrases like “principled leadership.” When the university’s founding was announced in 2021, as Liz Dye noted at the time , the purpose was to “reclaim [...] a place in higher education for freedom of inquiry and civil discourse."

What did this mean in practice? Well as Liz noted, two of its Founding Fellows were university professors whose gripe was that they were publicly criticized for statements they made and work they did, and despite their employers standing by them still quit in a huff because apparently academic freedom only goes one way.

Gershanok tells us that he had graduated college and gotten a corporate job and quickly found it to be stifling:

 “I found that you couldn’t really openly ask a question…It also just kind of felt like people would say things to be a part of the, like, crowd. I felt like there wasn’t a critical thinking element.” 

His job was with McKinsey, the infamous management consulting firm whose past efforts include helping Saudi Arabia crack down on dissidents and advising Purdue Pharma how to boost opioid sales and profit off of the number of addicts and overdoses it could push pharmacies into helping them create. There are all sorts of questions such an organization might not want asked. Questions such as, “Are we evil?” And “No, seriously, the bonuses are nice and I love my Porsche Carerra GT, but did I earn it by doing evil?”

Somehow we don’t think these are the questions Gershanok was asking, though. Because if he was, he would not have sought the answers at the phony university of the Intellectual Dark Web. He would have gone into the Peace Corps or Teach for America instead.

Also, Gershanok tells us, before he was a Polaris Fellow he took the university’s Forbidden Courses. What’s in those Forbidden Courses? We don’t know -- probably forbidden stuff! -- but let’s take a look at their page on the school’s website . Oh look, there is one of those former professors who huffily quit writing forbidden professorial things on a whiteboard:

UATX website 

What’s he writing? What questions of the mind is he leading his students on a deep intellectual exploration of? What are they doing with their unfettered freedom of inquiry and civil discourse?

Let us just zoom in here:

Non-black people cannot use the n-word.   www.wonkette.com 

“Non-black people cannot use the n-word.”

Oh. Okay. The forbidden word so forbidden even the people complaining that it’s forbidden won’t even write it out when in a room full of people who also don’t understand why they can’t say the forbidden word.

We’re sure it makes sense in context, the same as all those other left-leaning phrases filling the whiteboard that the right loves to deconstruct. (“Sex is binary,” “There is no God,” “Housing is a human right.”)

The Lambada it's not.

[ YouTube ]

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