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Saying “No” to Wasting Precious, God-given Time
There’s a little-covered kerfuffle happening over at Duke University’s Divinity School. Rod Dreher, over at his blog on the American Conservative, is performing his usual insightful and careful coverage of the matter. Faculty member Paul Griffiths had enough of the usual diversity drivel that is the mainstay at academic, and, for that matter, most commercial institutions.
It started when fellow faculty member Portier-Young circulated a boiler-plate memo to the Divinity faculty, urging their participation in a “Racial Equity Institute Phase I Training” session. Professor Griffiths, politely, but firmly, urged his fellow faculty; “I exhort you not to attend this training. Don’t lay waste your time by doing so. It’ll be, I predict with confidence, intellectually flaccid: there’ll be bromides, clichés, and amen-corner rah-rahs in plenty.”
Amen, professor, amen.
Of course, it didn’t end there. Where it goes is simply astounding. I encourage you to read the three substantial blog posts (1) (2) (3) on this issue.
I honor Professor Griffiths for his bravery and faith, as he has resigned from Duke due to this, which is too bad.
Published in Religion & Philosophy
Oh, absolutely. When she complains about not learning anything, that is my response. “You’re learning how to succeed under difficult circumstances. I would prefer that you learn math and Shakespeare. But you are certainly learning SOMETHING. Something that is likely to help you succeed in life.” And then I go take a long bath, because I feel soiled. But it’s all probably true.
Nasty business.
My only comfort in this is that our side has most of the guns. This nonsense can only go so far.
I doubt it. Obama bought a lot of guns and ammo for the federal agencies.
And if the tyrants have their way maybe not even then, in time. Heaven help us then.
If (when) this occurs, we will have to rise up en masse and say NO. Enough of us might make a difference…
I don’t think most people realize this is going on. It’s very big – this is the next generation – and the indoctrination is going in-noticed. It has consequences.
Here is the handbook for Harvard Divinity Students. The Harvard Divinity Review, which used to be a publication that covered various faiths, even atheism, various stories, has become a reflection of the political correctness and “social justice” (cozy term with a silencing agenda) that has been pushed on society at large. Women’s Studies are headed by professors that push questioning gender identity and pushing the multi-gender trend. It is a different world.
http://hds.harvard.edu/files/hds/files/hds_student_handbook_2016-17.pdf
If for fear of getting blamed we’re not willing to let the left throw a tantrum and do a govt “shutdown” now, we won’t rise up en masse later.
Bingo.
I started a clipping file on “academic intolerance” back during the 80s. I’ve thrown the clippings away, but I may still have the index.
Some years ago I was obliged to attend a mandatory faculty workshop entitled “Embracing Diversity Humility.”
Diversity Humility. (I will spare you the mandatory exercises, but more than one involved contact with the floor.)
Talk about a soul sap.
I don’t know how to change this. The only people who can are people who truly have power. If you challenge the system before you have the right sheet of paper, the system crushes you. If you challenge the system while working in the system like the Duke professor did here, the system crushes you. If you are at the top of the system, and this helps you perpetuate your own power to crush others in the system, why do you want to open your mind to do anything else in the system?
After college, I could regurgitate whatever you wanted to hear about intersectionality and oppression. The thing is… I really wanted to take that class on grammar so that I’d be a better writer/teacher. However, it couldn’t be fit into my schedule; I needed the piece of paper, and even though I was paying tuition, I was a powerless consumer of the mandated, not the useful.
There are all sorts of problems with higher education at the moment.
From what I’ve heard from my friends who decided to remain in STEM related Academia, the way they’re infiltrating there these days is through feminism. Since STEM fields usually deal with objective reality, it’s hard to justify most of this sensitivity stuff (when would it come up in a useful way?) and people really do have too much work to do to pay it much attention. So the game now is to “solve the problem of not enough women are in science.”
My niece, who is something of an SJW but not as hardcore as some, just graduated from college last weekend. She put up a long facebook post about her experiences in school, along with some thank you’s to various people. One of them was for her “feminist” mom and dad who had supported her, blah blah blah.
I was so, so, so tempted to comment something to the effect of “Should we assume that was intended as a compliment?”, but cooler heads prevailed…
There’s a way to stop all of this: stop subsidizing college education with taxpayer money.
These college commissars are only able to exist because they are employed. These people are only employed because of taxpayer money. Unlike useful things which are provided with taxpayer money, there is no private sector provider of social justice warfare who could survive without it. This industry exists because X-Studies departments in universities produce otherwise unemployable people after 4+ years of student loan debt, and this is the only thing they know how to do afterward. They’re only able to do this as a job afterward because the government pays for it in the form of subsidized student loans and education grants.
The fact that these people can also later go on to act as consultants for “diversity training” at large corporations is just a side hustle at best, which is enabled by the universities lending an air of authority to this entirely intellectually bankrupt excersize.
Turn off the spigot to stop these bigots.
Well put.
The first paragraph should begin: The industry exists because of the Left’s long march into the institutions. Now, SJWs including members of the plaintiff’s bar have persuaded legislators (or are legislators) and regulators to create legislative and administrative mandates (often in response to activist lawsuits) which require administrators in every business, and in larger businesses and government require specialized administrators. These by now are a significant political constituency; the social justice indoctrination that is now a major part of K-12 and higher education has expanded the constituency; as a result, universities now produce… etc.
I don’t disagree with you, but I think you’re giving “them” as a whole slightly too much credit.
I mean, yes, there is a long march into the institutions, which created these things. But, those people who did the march are starting to get old now. People my age (I’m in my early thirties) and the kids who are studying this stuff today in order to be the SJWs of tomorrow aren’t thinking on that level, if they’re even thinking anything much at all.
College was sold to a lot of people my age as a kind of magic process by which we could earn six figure salaries while pretending to read books and enaging in hedonism as long as we stuck with it enough to get a piece of parchment at the end. What was written on the parchment mattered less than who gave it to you, and what you actually knew didn’t really matter much at all. This was always a set of lies propagated by narcissistic stupid people, but The Great Recession basically revealed it to everybody because it became much harder to find cushy jobs in large corporations who hire know-nothings in the private sector.
So now you have this group of otherwise unemployable people, who have nothing to do but work Twitter and run this whole Social Justice Warfare hustle wherever they go because they don’t know what else to do. Which actually ends up influencing the opinions of these college administrators, who see all of this nonsense but embrace it just because they don’t really know how they’re supposed to think either.
That’s why we need to stop funding. We need to stop creating these useless people who are going to engage in this endless war, so the old people who did the Long March can die off and be replaced by sane people.
If it’s not too late.
The problem is that it’s a self-perpetuating cycle. The pipeline of candidates to fill the jobs of those old people who did the long march are not the sane people, they’re more of the same.
The sane people are getting jobs outside of academia.
They also trained and hired their successors. They have been teaching the teachers for more than a generation. In my region the indoctrination begins in preschool. When it is that pervasive, most people are not aware of it any more than fish are aware of water. It takes a contrary external frame of reference and a lot of work to see things differently.
That is, I believe, the reason for the elimination of the traditional humanities education (which by design provided a longitudinal perspective) and the hostility to non-politically correct religion on campuses.
To continue with the cancer metaphor: If you had a therapy that would kill 100% of cancer cells without harming healthy cells, it would probably still be dangerous to use in the case of a large tumor, which would then be a large mass of dead tissue. You probably want to debulk the tumor first.
I think you may be underestimating how hard it will fight back. The otherwise unemployables also “influence the opinion” of college officials in part because if this SJW administrative cancer were to be removed from colleges and universities, their budgets would shrink. A smaller budget makes it hard to justify the high salaries of the top levels of administrative parasites, so the university chancellors’ and presidents’ rice bowl is dependent on the size of the cancer. And on the size of the student body, which is dependent on subsidized tuition.
In reality, there has always been affirmative action in university admissions. It mostly had to do with admitting students who brought money with them. In the old days, a rich father or uncle who could be relied on to give generously to Junior’s alma mater, or, in the case of a good football player, who would prompt alumni to donate money.
Today, the rich father/uncle is Uncle Sugar, who also obliges with the mandates we were talking about, and non-quota quotas, and advisory letters that spawn new layers of administrators, and so on.
Like welfare recipients and career criminals who have lived off society while harming it either overtly or by consuming its resources without making a positive economic contribution, these people will need retraining and may have to settle for lower income, at least for a while.
It needs to be done, but it’s a yuuuge problem.
The indoctrination cuts both ways. My children are both in high school, and they use the language of the SJWs (such as “triggered” and “racist”) ironically. They roll their eyes at that stuff. The students they know who are SJWs tend to have brains full of mush and intend to march off to college to obtain degrees in worthless “studies.” I suppose those kids’ hearts are in the right place, but they are not logical thinkers. Kids like mine, who can actually think (they intend to go into dentistry and engineering), recognize this. They see biased teachers for the indoctrinators that they are – and they don’t like it.
Perhaps we’ll see the younger generation become fed up and rebel, as Prof. Griffiths did – but hopefully while they’re still students. Or perhaps kids like mine will keep their heads down and go along to get along. I hope it’s the former.
I took a small, liberal artsy seminar as part of my honors college course work my freshman year of college, 25+ years ago. The professor/facilitator was a Harvard man. When it came time to write papers, I would literally draw two columns on my notebook and on one side, I would write down what I really thought about the issues and include my points of argument etc and then, on the other side, I would write the counterpoints. I would then use the counterpoint side to write my paper. I made an “A” in the class. The name of the class was…wait for it…”Utopian Visions”. I have told my college-bound children about this little trick…get the grades and get out. Don’t argue with the prof. You won’t convince them and they hold the power of the the GPA.
You can always tell a Harvard man, you just can’t tell them much.
Leaving out the government of course. I asked a friend (retired military) “if it came down to a modern replay of Lexington and Concord, would the officers of the 82nd Airborne follow orders to gun down fellow citizens?” Would the troops obey? He didn’t know the answer. Culturally the troops are much more conservative. Pray it doesn’t come to that.
I refused to do that, but felt that meant I had to bullet proof my exams and papers. I had to demonstrate that I understood all of his arguments on an issue and, perhaps not refute them, but argue for alternative approaches. I don’t think it would work as well today.
It depends on the professor, to be fair. While academia leans left, that doesn’t mean that all people in academia are close minded or illiberal. It’s just… It’s hard to figure out which is which as a student.
This is true. I also think that public universities are safer places for conservative students than private ones. My colleagues range from progressive to communist in their political leanings, but I’ve seen them rave about (and give an award to) a paper about how Reagan won the Cold War because it had a clear thesis, good research, and was well argued. They didn’t care about the argument, they just wanted to see solid writing and analysis. I have a thousand stories like that – of lefty SJW academics being quite reasonable about working with and respecting students on the right – that don’t really match up with conservative stereotypes about academia. But it’s different out there in the big public universities than it is at the liberal arts colleges, private high-cost elite schools, etc.
On this story, I rolled my eyes twice: at the email invitation to the absolute time waster of a seminar on racism, and at Griffith’s blowhard response. I liked what Griffith was saying, but not how he said it – it’s possible to convey your objections more politely than he did, and that he chose to do it the way he did makes me wonder what kind of history he has with his colleagues.
This certainly jives with my experience as someone who went to a large public university and went to public school in a very liberal part of the country. I disagreed with most of my teachers about everything, but the vast majority of them were simply happy to read an actual argument and liked the fact that I would spur discussion in the class so that they didn’t have to. Though also at the university level I also chose to go into natural sciences specifically to avoid these sorts of potential partisan problems, which I did run into once or twice in high school.
Contrast that with my wife, who went to a private somewhat elite school. She wasn’t terribly conservative (and now wouldn’t describe herself as conservative at all, but I’m trying to work on that) but they made a concentrated effort to beat any such impulse out of her and anyone else that might ask naive questions which, to this day she’s still bothered by.
Is that still true today in Massachusetts’ public schools? The public schools in much of the San Francisco Bay Area are determined to turn out student activists, and students get class credit for participating in anti-Trump protests, in which they have been joined by their teachers.
This was true of Massachusetts public schools I went to, 13+ years ago. There might have been like, 3 teachers that I ever had some kind of actual political problem with. And that was during:
1. The 2000 election that George W. Bush obviously stole through shenanigans in West Palm Beach, where old people who were voting were obviously confused by tricky ballots and Republican cheating.
2. 9/11, which was obviously our own fault because Howard Zinn (who came to our school to lecture us about it) said as much.
3. The entire debate about gay marriage in the commonwealth. Which obviously nobody but a bigot could be opposed to.
4. Michael Moore’s stupid movie about Columbine came out, which we had to watch in English class because… well in this case thinking back on it our teacher of that class was even lazier than we were, and we were in Senior Slump.
So, don’t get me wrong, things were crazy liberal. Just that the liberal craziness often didn’t directly or indirectly translate into bad grades for me or unprofessional behavior from teachers.
I don’t know how throughly insane they are at this point. This is only what I remember off of the top of my head.
I hope things in Massachusetts haven’t gotten this bad in the years since you left the public schools:
From 2012:
Ms. Schweng is now principal of Berkeley High School.
Yvette Felarca, a petite but very violent left wing thug, in addition to committing assaults is one of the BAMN on scene directors at the riots BAMN and antifa organize.
She is still working as a Berkeley middle school teacher.