American colleges and universities have been hiring lots of administrators ever since the federal government turned on the money spigot for student loans. At many schools, administrative positions have increased much more than have faculty positions. And what do those people do?
Many of them are ideologues who occupy themselves with “social justice” type projects such as compiling lists of words and phrases that should never again be used because they supposedly exclude some people. In today’s Martin Center article, Professor Michael Behrent writes about this phenomenon.
Referring to a new list of this kind at UNC, he writes, “Far from being the work of an English or history department, or even a center dedicated to social justice, the list was published by UNC Student Affairs—a large bureaucracy run by a vice chancellor. This affiliation points to a crucial fact about the recent wave of “forbidden-word” lists: Many are written not by faculty but by ambitious university administrators.”
Another recent example is the Stanford list that was such an embarrassment to the university that it decided to drop any official connection with the project.
Behrent adds, “In my view, controversial issues relating to race, gender, and difficult historical moments have an appropriate and even necessary place in the classroom when taught for educational purposes by qualified specialists. They should not be taught in order to advance a doctrine but in a spirit of free inquiry that focuses on critical thinking — assessing evidence, contextualizing, examining multiple viewpoints, and so on. A major problem at present is that these issues are effectively being taught by university administrators who, though they may provide important services to their campuses, have little academic training.”
Agreed, but the people with academic training aren’t necessarily much better.