As long as it’s “diversity,” you don’t have to understand it.
Remember when laws, rules, and regulations used to tell you what you couldn’t do, and as long as you didn’t do those things, you were left alone?
But now, comrades, they tell you what you must do!
The Looniversity of California has now decreed that persons applying there for jobs as math professors must provide “diversity statements” detailing their “past and/or potential contributions to diversity, equity, and inclusion” (https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=11927).
What the devil does any of that stuff even mean? “As a math professor, I promise to load my teachings on calculus with extravagant praise for transgenderism, gay-ness, amnesty for undocumented migrants, and feminist music!” Or maybe “I promise to tack an extra 50 points onto the grades of minority students!” What the dickens does it mean? What imaginable purpose does it serve?
Hints: “nothing whatsoever” and “none at all.”
It’s long, long, long past time to cut off all public funding to colleges and universities, where anything meaningful in the way of education always takes a back seat–if it gets any seat at all–to Far Left Crazy politics. This is not education. This is poop.
And we’re paying a flamin’ fortune for it.
All education has become social engineering, for which reading, writing and arithmetic has no purpose. Keep ’em dumb. Make indoctrination omnipresent with no escape, no challenge, and no knowledge of anything else. The Communist Democratic Party’s religion: ” Raise your children in the way WE want them to go” – or else.
Shortly before I retired from college teaching, our administration started mandating statements that we had to put on our syllabi — and remember, in college, at least at the upper levels, there are no standard syllabi. Each professor creates his or her own syllabus. Anyway, first we had to have a statement about what (if any) General Education requirement the course met. Then we had to add a statement about accommodations for students with disabilities. Then we had to add a statement about plagiarism and other kinds of academic misconduct — which I really didn’t mind, since I was on the Committee for Academic Misconduct and routinely gave a lecture on it at the beginning of every quarter. But considering that over the years I’d had to expand my own statement about penalties for absence and lateness, my syllabi were beginning to resemble in size the Manhattan telephone directory. (Assuming there are still any paper telephone directories in this digital and cellular age.)
And now, as I discovered a year or two ago, my old university is among those who also require a diversity statement on syllabi. (I debated whether to use “who” or “that” about the university, but I finally decided that the institution had taken on a life of its own.)
Down with free speech, up with compelled speech! Better living through Stalinism!
I sometimes think this is somehow a manifestation of the Mark of the Beast. Don’t play along, and you can’t buy or sell.
Over the years, liberals have gotten better and better, and a lot smoother, at oppressing people.
I think that the roots of it go a lot deeper than social or political distinctions. As I see it, this comes down to worship and the god to which one submits.
I think you’re both right. The left has become the tool of the Evil One, mandating division and death in most of their programs. And yet many of their adherents really do think they’re serving the Good — which is also one of the tricks of the Evil One. I suppose a lot of the Israelites who asked Aaron to build them a golden calf thought they were doing the right thing now that Moses had been gone so long.
Dennis Prager often tries to distinguish between “liberals” and “the left,” but I think he’s still trying to recapture the 19th-century sense of “liberal,” which would now, ironically enough, be considered conservative by modern “liberals.” Today, “liberal” and “left” are indistinguishable, although many liberals/leftists prefer to call themselves “progressive.” But as my friend Juliet Capulet once said (or might have said), a skunk by any other name would smell as awful.
19th century John Stuart Mill-style liberals have gone the way of the passenger pigeon and the quagga.