LGBTQ

The Battle Over Pronouns Coming to a College Near You

March 29, 2018
By Daphne Patai

Last year, Jordan Peterson, a professor at the University of Toronto, made news when he refused to use the invented pronouns of the transgender movement as prescribed by Canadian law (see chart). Pronouns these days are a new battleground, as recommendations admonish us all that the standard English pronouns, which traditionally distinguish she from he, […]

You Will Attend Purdue’s ‘Safe Zone’ Training Session

February 16, 2017
By Gilbert T. Sewall

On January 18, the academic leadership of Purdue University received a letter from Mark Smith, dean of the graduate school. It said: On behalf of the Diversity Leadership Team, I’d like to invite you to attend a special safe zone training session … arranged exclusively for deans, associate deans, and department heads. This, you must understand, […]

No Free Speech: Heckler Cancels Another Student Meeting

Last week, a group of at least 4 Portland State University police officers stood by and declined to intervene as a heckler with a cowbell single-handedly canceled a College Republicans meeting. This is the second time in 2019 that PSU allowed hecklers or would-be hecklers to shut down campus expression — and the second time the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has demanded the university adhere to its First Amendment obligations. FIRE first wrote to the university Feb. 18 after PSU’s law enforcement unilaterally canceled a meeting of a socialist student group after the founder of the group Patriot Prayer said he would show up.

Be Careful What You Wish For on Social Programs

Nathan Glazer, the last of a group of famous neocon social scientists, died at the age of 95 on January 19 at his home in Cambridge, Mass. (He resisted the label “neocon.”) Glazer consistently warned that vast government plans to improve the lives of the poor often come to grief or create new problems of their own. “The evaluations of the specifics of the first ten years after the launching of (the War on Poverty) confirm that nothing worked and in particular, nothing in education worked.” He concluded that the family was the key institution to positive social change and that rights are inherent in individuals, not groups. The article here by Howard Husock of the Manhattan Institute ran in 2011 when President Obama planned an extension of the War on Poverty.

You, Too, Can Turn in Your Classmate

The campus police of the University of Illinois have issued calls for students to report “acts of intolerance” to the schools Bias Assessment and Response Team. It said, “acts of intolerance create an unsafe and unwelcoming environment for campus community members. Please let us know if you feel unsafe.” According to BART, bias is defined as “actions or expressions that are motivated at least in part by prejudice against or hostility toward a person or group because of that person or group’s perceived age, disability, status, ethnicity, gender, identity-expression, national origin, race, religion/ spirituality, sexual orientation, socio-economic class, etc.” Those reported to BART may be required to participate in mediation or other educational conservations.

More Evidence of Professorial Political Bias

University of North Carolina business professor Michael Jacobs polled 40 Republican students at his school and found that all but two believed they would be penalized for not expressing the professor's politics in a test answer. The professor claimed that faculty should pledge to respect ideological diversity and that chancellors who are too afraid to promote tolerance for ideological diversity should be fired. “One of my top MBA students, who I would categorize as moderate, recently told me that she will no longer participate in class discussions that involve social or political issues for fear of being branded by the ‘progressive police,’” the professor said. Read the story at Campus Reform.

More Risible News From Yale

As you recall, the campus exploded in outrage in 2015 when Prof. Erika Christakis challenged a Yale diktat warning students not to wear offensive costumes for Halloween. (“If you don’t like a costume someone is wearing, look away,” she wrote in a campus-wide email. Her husband Prof. Nicholas Christakis, threatened by a group of offended students, quit as master of Silliman House after getting zero backing from Yale. In a review of The Coddling of the American Mind in the American Interest, writer Aaron Sibarium says Christakis' successor at Silliman, psychology professor Laurie Santos, has a program for happiness that includes this advice:

Avoid binding attachments and obligations; these will stress you out and make you sad.
Focus on cultivating your own mind and mental habits so that you can be happy regardless of your external conditions, a self-reliant ray of sunshine.
Prioritize instrumental knowledge that helps to achieve your goals; in particular, learn how to manipulate others to your advantage.

In response to "How Diversity Hijacked History 101 and All the Humanities"

The humanities have been committing suicide for some time, but in the early 1990s, it was called “multiculturalism,” not diversity–different name, same game. That’s when our annual faculty reports began to ask for details about our “contributions to multiculturalism” in the three areas of teaching, research, and service. I was on a faculty senate committee discussing this change way back then, and many people on it wondered what they were expected to say to this. One asked: am I supposed to list how many Black students I have in each class? By now, of course, new PhDs are indeed required to pledge fealty to “diversity” and list their contributions to it in “diversity statements” that many universities insist on as part of a job application.

So, their diversity statements read, e.g., “As a gay, biracial, child of a single mother…” etc. One student (very talented, incidentally) with whom I discussed this, responded that there was no choice but to comply, however demeaning it is to have to stress and itemize personal identities and in effect brag about one’s “intersectionality.”

In English rhetoric programs, there are the (required) writing courses, which place curricular emphasis on social justice and identity issues, not on intellectual development, and certainly not on independent thinking. As for the faculty, I could never figure out why professors who have contributed to the decline and numbing repetition of their new pedagogy thought students would want to study second-hand politics in literature courses instead of going straight to the source in, say, poli-sci and related programs.

I think my generation is responsible for most this: professors have by and large not defended the integrity of their own fields, apparently because they do not feel such integrity exists. Identity issues have driven out most everything else. Course descriptions and job ads provide undisguised portraits of this depressing scene. It’s a terrible loss of intellectual vitality and in fact shameful — and faculty bear enormous, rarely acknowledged, responsibility.

Daphne Patai, Amherst MA