Nearly all American colleges and universities are now run by people who are sympathetic to the “woke” agenda and eagerly push it at every opportunity. True believers never let up and never say, “That would be going too far.”
East Carolina University is a mid-tier school in the UNC system, and its recent beginning-of-the-year faculty convocation was revealing. In today’s Martin Center article, Ashlynn Warta describes the thorough politicization of the event.
The first thing on the agenda was a discussion of “land acknowledgement,” meaning that ECU sits on land that was wrongfully taken from the original inhabitants. That’s a fad among the woke these days. Not that ECU is going to give the land back, but it’s important to make people feel guilty.
Soon, the heavy leftist stuff kicked in. Warta writes, “As the convocation proceeded, Anne Ticknor, chair of the faculty and professor in the College of Education, gave remarks titled ‘Making the Secret Hurt Visible.’ What is the secret hurt? According to Ticknor, it consists of the right-wing legislation that has recently been enacted throughout the nation, as well as the toll this legislation has taken on faculty and students who identify as BIPOC (‘Black or Indigenous people of color’) or LGBTQ. These laws are, in Ticknor’s words, increasing the “secret hurt” by “erasing, ignoring, [and] silencing” the alleged victims in question. ‘More specifically,’ Ticknor continued, ‘these bills have been focused on restricting the teaching of Critical Race Theory, [suppressing] the 1619 Project, and banning literature.’”
This professor of education is entitled to her opinions, but why subject the whole faculty to them? Obviously, because they’re regarded as the correct opinions. There was also a good deal of time devoted to LGBTQ issues.
Warta concludes, “However, in the process of this ideological charade, a clear line was drawn in the sand, and any thoughts of institutional neutrality were abandoned. Obviously, the issues raised during ECU’s faculty convocation have a place within an environment of open inquiry. What they lack is even a remote connection to the point of faculty-administrator meetings.”