Those of you who wonder what diversity officials do all day must listen to Sheree Marlowe, the new chief diversity officer at Clark University. During first-year orientation, a baffled and tense freshperson asked if she could sing along with a carful of other white people when a song containing the N-word filled the air. “No,” said Marlowe, who applies diversity ethics for groups off campus as well as on.
Marlowe had other nuggets of advice: don’t ask an Asian student for help with your homework and don’t ask a black student if he plays basketball because these acts evoke stereotypes of Asian intellectual competence and black athleticism. Also never use the term “you guys” when addressing a group, because it could imply you are leaving out women.
There’s more: Marlowe thinks careless statements such as, “Everyone can succeed in this society if they work hard enough” are not just micro-aggressions but also micro-invalidations because they suggest that race plays a minor role in life’s outcomes.
Related: The New Age of Orthodoxy Overtakes the Campus
This advice came in a New York Times article yesterday by reporter Stephanie Saul, which added this concern about racism negatively affecting college attendance:
“Fresh on the minds of university officials are last year’s highly publicized episodes involving racist taunts at the University of Missouri in Columbia — which appear to have contributed to a precipitous decline in enrollment there this fall.”
This is an odd way of putting it, since we recall only two incidents of racist taunts (and one mysterious swastika) reported before the Mizzou protests, one from a passing car and thus probably not a good barometer of campus racial attitudes.
Most people think applications to the campus are down not because of the two or three incidents in or near a campus of 35,000 students, but because of the turbulent protests and the way they were handled — the abrupt resignation of the university president and chancellor, a hunger strike, the temporary paralysis of the campus and the now famous Melissa Click attempt to bar a photographer from covering events for the school paper.
Related: Finally, One Major Campus Condemns Trigger Warnings, Safe Spaces
Reporter Saul adds a dark interpretation of resistance to the diversity tsunami: “Some graduates have curtailed donations and students have suggested that diversity training smacks of some sort of communist re-education program.
The backlash was exemplified recently in a widely publicized letter sent to incoming freshmen at the University of Chicago by the dean of students, John Ellison. The letter clearly rejected the need for “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces” for an adult student body that should be capable of hearing ideas and concepts contrary to their own.
A communist re-education program, quickly linked to the University of Chicago free-speech letter? Probably not. You would almost think that some reporters can’t resist adding their opinions to stories.
Jesus wept.
You have got to love how Mizzou is claiming the drop in enrollment is purely due to racism and racist incidents as opposed to the insanity of the protests.
I’m sure one-on-one, behind closed doors with a close friend, they’ll admit the real reason, but even then they are “true believers”
They truly believe that all the tumult was caused by racist incidents instead of teaching outrage and racial hate mongering.
It reminds me of stories out of the former USSR, wherein the collectivist farm and factories, which were unmitigated disasters, were failures – but to admit the system would be to admit socialism / communism were wrong, and since *that* could never be true, they found fixes that addressed the symptoms but never could see the problem.
“Diversity” is a chimera. It does not add to culture and socienty. It subtracts. It is merely an another avenue for leftist to apply force.
Taquon won’t do his homework = racism.
Taquon won’t study = racism
Taquon can’t read = racism.
Taquon can’t get a job = racism.
It got old a long, long time ago.
It’s basically a far-right movement now, just anti-Caucasian racism with 20th Century Leftist phraseology. Fact is, not one of these limosine deans would condescend to being seen with a real Marxist.
This is an anarchist movement? I am not sure you know what “far-right,” at least in an American context, actually means.
Racism isn’t left or right.
The deans are probably real Marxists.
Useless, overpaid jobs like [Diversity Officer] and [Vice Chancellor of Student Life] contribute to a university’s overhead, which gets passed on to students via tuition.
Pretentious jobs like these are one reason — of many — why I oppose “free” college at taxpayer expense; or forgiveness of federal student loans.
The most important job of a campus diversity bureaucrat is to continually justify his/her job position.
If college were “free,” you’d find not one Vice President of Diversity, but platoons of them. They are no different than the political officers the old Soviet Union planted in every military unit, factory, and office to ensure ideological conformity.
It seems to me that the increasing obsession with race has supplanted the university’s primary purpose. Finding bias and racism in language that, under normal circumstances, cannot be said to relate to race or gender is a measure of the desperate need of some administrators to justify their positions.
In addition to the free speech issue, the allegedly offensive speech also appears to be a new excuse for failure. If everything is race-related, and the mere use of a word is enough to cause unbearable anxiety in any victim class it may be used as a convenient excuse for nonperformance.