This is really good. The key point here is that students have to adopt a certain political opinion in order to graduate. Give DEI proponents appropriate time to make their case, as we would with flat-earthers or creationists, then allow better thinkers to eviscerate those theories in front of the young students.
Keeping things about truth, rationality, and the merits of the core argument (rather than the arguer) is the long range path to success.
The left has run out of all the smokescreens, ad hominem, and emotional appeals here. People are figuring out that it's all BS. The next generation of Americans should not be exposed to this.
I got fired from my school for point #4, but I couldn’t find a lawyer to take the case. Tried to convince them of the same argument. Mine was a public school, so there was no ambiguity about who was compelling the ideological speech. Alas, they all said it was too nebulous.
Competency #1 could be acceptable until you get to this: "while respectfully engaging with other students around course content." We know that means no disagreement will be allowed.
Competency #2 is worse because it requires the student to not just be able to define justice and equity as applied by the DEI set, but to see obstacles to their defined achievement as problems they must solve. The word "capacity" is key here. It walks right up to the line of requirement. We're just giving you the capacity to do something; not mandating it.
But if you don't see those obstacles as problems to be solved, how could you pass the course? How could you demonstrate the capacity to do something you don't believe in?
The equity definition is confentious:
- How could one possibly ensure that all bias and favoritism are eliminated?
- Surely there are circumstances where bias and favoritism are warranted or whose deleterious effects are minimal and easily overcome.
- On what basis does this competency assert that being free from bias and favortism will ensure someone will "achieve their full potential and contribute to society"? And why should that be the goal of an academic course?
It's pure Cultural Revolution-level shit. Mind-boggling. I sure hope it gets shamed and ridiculed out of existence. Wealthy un-woke GMU donors perhaps??
Gary Saul Morson's incisive essay titled *Leninthink* which appeared in *The New Criterion* is quite instructive about the Woke in general & DEI in particular.
Thank you Bryan, for speaking out. Ultimately, DEI can only be beat back by means of political oversight by elected representatives of the people (like has happened/is happening in Texas, Utah, and Florida). Leftist tenured radicals and administrators will only stop this stuff when they are threatened with losing their jobs (or, at private universities, with a donor strike - like it was instrumental in pushing out Harvard's DEI president Claudine Gay). But every faculty member speaking out against it surely helps a bit.
But do they really think that such "DEI courses" really work?
For example, all university students in the Soviet Union had to "study" obligatory courses such as "Scientific Communism" and "Dialectical Materialism" (really). Did it produce true believers? It didn't, all sane students treated these "sciences" as something you have to rote-learn and forget the next second after passing the exam.
Do American students really take those DEI "sciences" seriously?
Tomas, even if indoctrination fails, students could have done something else with the time it takes to be berated by DEI apparatchiks for being white, or heterosexual, or non-obese, etc.
Musa al-Gharbi: Concerns About ‘Leftist Indoctrination’ in Higher Ed Are Inaccurate. But This Doesn’t Make Them Unreasonable. June 29, 2023
See the Harvard Harris polls in Oct and December 2023 on how many 18-29 year olds chose “Back Hamas” (not “the Palestinians “, but actually Hamas) in the wake of the Oct 7th murder/rape rampage, and you will have your answer
[it was about half]
So yes, unfortunately many do take DIE (sic) seriously.
The explicitly stated goals are not, as I see it, inherently problematic. Students should understand DEI concepts and be able to discuss them intelligently. The real question is whether the administration will allow classes that take a critical approach to these concepts to qualify for the flags. It's only though a critical approach that these concepts can truly be understood and discussed intelligently.
I suspect that only courses that do not actually meet the stated requirements will qualify.
There seems a tension between points 5 and 6. Philosophy classes *routinely* teach about competing conceptions of ethics and justice, without "indoctrination" (!), despite professors often having strong personal opinions on the topic (and very few Republicans).
If there's a problem with other humanities and social sciences, it can't just be the raw political demographics, but a failure of intellectual integrity (or willingness to give a fair hearing to views with which they disagree).
Some political philosophies inherently deny the morality of even allowing the opposition to speak, and those people are the ones deciding which views get taught.
> In the First World, the primary cause of unequal success is not unfair treatment, but unequal performance
Social justice is BASICALLY a NIHILIST attack on the focused mind's power of discrimination between life and death. It substitutes the unfocused mind's reduction of knowledge to a mere unevaluated difference between life and death, with no discrimination of better and worse. Its a nihilist rejection of discrimination in principle, not only a rejection of irrational, unjust discrimination.
Thus its rejection of unjust state and private discrimination is a smokescreen for all rejecting all discrimination. Thus its rejection of unequal success, not because it may be unjust, but because its unequal. Its basically a hidden epistemological claim, not, basically, a political claim about justice. Peter Schwartz, of the Ayn Rand Institute, has discussed this, most recently in "Diversity Delusion" (mp3). Kant's intellectually dominant, nihilist attack on the mind is the problem.
This is really good. The key point here is that students have to adopt a certain political opinion in order to graduate. Give DEI proponents appropriate time to make their case, as we would with flat-earthers or creationists, then allow better thinkers to eviscerate those theories in front of the young students.
Keeping things about truth, rationality, and the merits of the core argument (rather than the arguer) is the long range path to success.
The left has run out of all the smokescreens, ad hominem, and emotional appeals here. People are figuring out that it's all BS. The next generation of Americans should not be exposed to this.
That is what I call a 'tour de force'! #Attaboy
Your commentary's always sharp, but this is a veritable Sword of Heroes!
I got fired from my school for point #4, but I couldn’t find a lawyer to take the case. Tried to convince them of the same argument. Mine was a public school, so there was no ambiguity about who was compelling the ideological speech. Alas, they all said it was too nebulous.
The three month period is obviously a rope-a-dope strategy.
How about the course still runs, but Bryan is the course leader?
Competency #1 could be acceptable until you get to this: "while respectfully engaging with other students around course content." We know that means no disagreement will be allowed.
Competency #2 is worse because it requires the student to not just be able to define justice and equity as applied by the DEI set, but to see obstacles to their defined achievement as problems they must solve. The word "capacity" is key here. It walks right up to the line of requirement. We're just giving you the capacity to do something; not mandating it.
But if you don't see those obstacles as problems to be solved, how could you pass the course? How could you demonstrate the capacity to do something you don't believe in?
The equity definition is confentious:
- How could one possibly ensure that all bias and favoritism are eliminated?
- Surely there are circumstances where bias and favoritism are warranted or whose deleterious effects are minimal and easily overcome.
- On what basis does this competency assert that being free from bias and favortism will ensure someone will "achieve their full potential and contribute to society"? And why should that be the goal of an academic course?
It's pure Cultural Revolution-level shit. Mind-boggling. I sure hope it gets shamed and ridiculed out of existence. Wealthy un-woke GMU donors perhaps??
Gary Saul Morson's incisive essay titled *Leninthink* which appeared in *The New Criterion* is quite instructive about the Woke in general & DEI in particular.
Thank you Bryan, for speaking out. Ultimately, DEI can only be beat back by means of political oversight by elected representatives of the people (like has happened/is happening in Texas, Utah, and Florida). Leftist tenured radicals and administrators will only stop this stuff when they are threatened with losing their jobs (or, at private universities, with a donor strike - like it was instrumental in pushing out Harvard's DEI president Claudine Gay). But every faculty member speaking out against it surely helps a bit.
DEI = Divisiveness Exclusion and Inquisition
But do they really think that such "DEI courses" really work?
For example, all university students in the Soviet Union had to "study" obligatory courses such as "Scientific Communism" and "Dialectical Materialism" (really). Did it produce true believers? It didn't, all sane students treated these "sciences" as something you have to rote-learn and forget the next second after passing the exam.
Do American students really take those DEI "sciences" seriously?
Tomas, even if indoctrination fails, students could have done something else with the time it takes to be berated by DEI apparatchiks for being white, or heterosexual, or non-obese, etc.
Musa al-Gharbi: Concerns About ‘Leftist Indoctrination’ in Higher Ed Are Inaccurate. But This Doesn’t Make Them Unreasonable. June 29, 2023
https://heterodoxacademy.org/blog/concerns-about-leftist-indoctrination-in-higher-ed-are-inaccurate-but-this-doesnt-make-them-unreasonable/
See the Harvard Harris polls in Oct and December 2023 on how many 18-29 year olds chose “Back Hamas” (not “the Palestinians “, but actually Hamas) in the wake of the Oct 7th murder/rape rampage, and you will have your answer
[it was about half]
So yes, unfortunately many do take DIE (sic) seriously.
*snaps fingers*
The explicitly stated goals are not, as I see it, inherently problematic. Students should understand DEI concepts and be able to discuss them intelligently. The real question is whether the administration will allow classes that take a critical approach to these concepts to qualify for the flags. It's only though a critical approach that these concepts can truly be understood and discussed intelligently.
I suspect that only courses that do not actually meet the stated requirements will qualify.
The explicitly stated goals are indeed inherently problematic for a public institution.
“Ability to promote DEI”
That form reads like a K-5 teaching plan. EdD proles cleary had something to do with it.
Lady Justice with the sword but with no blindfold and no scales. What could go wrong?
There seems a tension between points 5 and 6. Philosophy classes *routinely* teach about competing conceptions of ethics and justice, without "indoctrination" (!), despite professors often having strong personal opinions on the topic (and very few Republicans).
If there's a problem with other humanities and social sciences, it can't just be the raw political demographics, but a failure of intellectual integrity (or willingness to give a fair hearing to views with which they disagree).
Some political philosophies inherently deny the morality of even allowing the opposition to speak, and those people are the ones deciding which views get taught.
> In the First World, the primary cause of unequal success is not unfair treatment, but unequal performance
Social justice is BASICALLY a NIHILIST attack on the focused mind's power of discrimination between life and death. It substitutes the unfocused mind's reduction of knowledge to a mere unevaluated difference between life and death, with no discrimination of better and worse. Its a nihilist rejection of discrimination in principle, not only a rejection of irrational, unjust discrimination.
Thus its rejection of unjust state and private discrimination is a smokescreen for all rejecting all discrimination. Thus its rejection of unequal success, not because it may be unjust, but because its unequal. Its basically a hidden epistemological claim, not, basically, a political claim about justice. Peter Schwartz, of the Ayn Rand Institute, has discussed this, most recently in "Diversity Delusion" (mp3). Kant's intellectually dominant, nihilist attack on the mind is the problem.