What is our seventh-largest university? It’s Arizona State. Of course, almost no college or university is able to keep the evils of leftism out these days because administrators are mostly in sympathy with its aims.
In today’s Martin Center article, Jonathan Butcher of the Goldwater Institute writes about the way “wokeness” has invaded ASU.
For example, a new hire in the music department is committed to teaching “social justice” more than music itself. Butcher writes, “In July, Arizona State University officials hired a music professor to train K-12 music teachers, emphasizing that the new professor is a specialist in critical race theory. Music instruction is secondary—the university’s press release announcing the new hire stresses that the instructor wants to give future music teachers ‘reliable tools beyond teaching the music,’ and she is committed to ‘progressive work’ on how the issues of ‘race, class and culture impact educational equity in music education.’”
No doubt the university could have hired any number of professors who don’t think that music must be politicized, but it chose one who does.
Over in the law school, there is now a course on “Critical Race Theory,” which merely fills the heads of students with crazed theorizing rather than legal knowledge.
And back in January, Butcher notes, “ASU’s biannual RaceB4Race Symposium focused on critical race theory and literature and foreign language studies. One of the presenters said, ‘We have to be taught to pursue radical equity,’ which in critical parlance means that some institution or system would force equal outcomes for individuals, regardless of individual choices. Even in classical language courses and premodern studies, educators are to push students to achieve ‘systemic change.’”
Systemic change, yes; knowledge, no.
I like Butcher’s conclusion: “If ASU wants “to be welcoming,” the university should encourage the pursuit of truth, not skew every course with a perspective based on skin color.”