The diversity, equity, and inclusion mania continues to sweep through American higher education, with fresh offensives launching almost every week. Unscholarly administrators who are full of rage against everything that has made Western civilization so successful are constantly pressuring faculty members to put more “woke” blather into their courses.
At least a few, however, don’t care to go along. In this North State Journal article, English professor Nan Miller (retired, and thus safe to speak her mind) writes about a dissident she knows.
She writes, “My informant, who, for now, identifies only as Professor X, was among those who sat poker-faced in a workshop as the new DEI director justified her involvement in academics on the grounds that, left alone, university professors would not understand ‘the psychological processes that impact the ways people interact with each other’ — implying that, left alone, professors might band together in a cabal of bigots.”
Professor X is keeping his head down while gathering information that, he hopes, will enable the school’s leadership to do an about-face and return to just teaching real academic subjects.
Miller continues, “The dissenters were struck first by the contrast in the czarina’s $300K-plus salary and her mission to have classroom instruction reflect her claim that capitalism is ‘a major driver of systems of oppression in the United States’ and ‘continues to be the beating heart behind inequity, discrimination and income inequality.’ What the dissenters heard instead was that a Sharpie with a degree in Human Resources could make anti-capitalism a highly profitable sideshow in higher education.”
The “czarina” is a mis-educated zealot who has no business dictating to real scholars what they are expected to believe, but this sort of thing is common throughout our education system.
Miller concludes, “While students are sharpening their ‘self-censoring’ skills, soon-to-be former Professor X is quietly making plans to transition into whistle blowing. At the close of our off-campus session, my new hero quoted Charles Dickens’ appraisal of the type whose ‘glorious vision of doing good is so often the sanguine mirage of many good minds.’ My source has a far, far better plan to end the worst of times in our public universities.”