Many colleges and universities now have a “diversity” requirement — even if they don’t require students to take anything else. The whole curriculum could be a hodge-podge of dubious, disconnected courses, but students absolutely, positively must be exposed to DIVERSITY. As if young Americans would otherwise have no clue that people aren’t all the same and they ought to get along with everyone.
Often, school officials justify these courses by saying that the students want them. But as we learn in today’s Pope Center piece, at one school, Hamilton College, the “student demand” was ginned up by a few faculty leftists who used a small number of SJW type students to push for its diversity requirement. The author, Professor Mary Grabar, has been at Hamilton for a year as a resident fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute and in the piece she explains how a few faculty members managed to get college administrators to institute the only curricular requirement it has.
“Due to their efforts,” she writes, “starting in the 2017-18 academic year, every concentration will require a dedicated course or combination of courses to teach about ’structural and institutional hierarchies based on one or more of the social categories of race, class, gender, ethnicity, nationality, religion, sexuality, age, and abilities/disabilities.’” In other words, students must be exposed to the leftist obsession with groups. Whatever else they might study, the faculty leftists will shove this stuff down their throats. Doing so, they hope, will plant the seeds of numerous progressive tropes about society in young minds.
The faculty member most responsible for this, Grabar writes, is Women’s Studies chair Margo Okazawa-Rey, who was allowed to spend a considerable (but unknown) amount of college funds to take a number of students to a “social justice leadership training school” in Tennessee. For the students, the experience was “transformative” according to Okazawa-Rey. More likely, it reinforced their existing leftist ideas and helped radicalize them for campus protests.
Those protests led in turn to a series of demands, including, of course, more diversity!
Grabar concludes, “It’s apparent that such professors, armed with boundless funds, go to incredible lengths to radicalize students. Then they capitalize on their ‘heartfelt’ emotions to create demands for still more emphasis on their favorite project — ‘diversity.’”
No wonder that Hillary wants to keep the higher education bubble going as long as possible (as I discussed in this recent Pope Center article) because it helps support and expand her base of Americans who want to accelerate our plunge into statism.