College education used to be mainly about education, with a side order of fun. Now, it is far more about a host of leftist obsessions: diversity, equity, inclusion. Education is now a peripheral matter, and having fun seems to be frowned upon by our “progressive” scolds.
And now, we have a new obsession — “belonging.” In today’s Martin Center article, Professor Adam Ellwanger writes about this, calling it a linguistic Trojan Horse.
What are we talking about? Ellwanger quotes Cornell’s statement on belonging:
Belonging is the feeling of security and support when there is a sense of acceptance, inclusion, and identity for a member of a certain group. It is when an individual can bring their authentic self to work. When employees feel like they don’t belong at work, their performance and their personal lives suffer. Creating genuine feelings of belonging for all is a critical factor in improving engagement and performance. It also helps support business goals.
So what? Ellwanger explains:
Cornell is interested in belonging only when it comes to acceptance based on one’s “identity” and “member[ship] [in] a certain group.” This is vague language, but make no mistake: Cornell is referring to the categories of individual identity that are presently fetishized on campus: race, sex, gender, sexual orientation, and (non-Judeo-Christian) religious faith. In short, the university is concerned with belonging only when it comes to some students — the ones who are members of minority cultures of political import for the left.
Ah, yes — another linguistic ploy to reshape the university so it does what leftists want it to.
Ellwanger gets a gold star for this observation:
By taking an immeasurable mental feeling and setting it up as the measure of institutional justice and effectiveness, and by placing the responsibility for securing a sense of belonging with the community rather than the individual, the Left establishes a political ideal that can never be met: total belonging felt by every member of the community. As long as that impossible goal remains unmet (and undemonstrated), our cultural revolutionaries have a readymade justification for fundamentally transforming the campus, the workplace, the family, the church, and national identity writ large, forever.
To that, I’d add that the obsession with “belonging” is detrimental to the left’s pet groups, but they’re just pawns in a big chess game. Read the whole thing.