Item How Identity Politics Is Harming the Sciences
A scientist at UCLA reports: “All across the country the big question now in STEM is: how can we promote more women and minorities by ‘changing’ (i.e., lowering) the requirements we had previously set for graduate level study?” Mathematical problem-solving is being deemphasized in favor of more qualitative group projects; the pace of undergraduate physics education is being slowed down so that no one gets left behind.
I linked this article in a Stream piece, but I worry it got buried. Do read it. You will not be surprised to learn that Diversity leads to mandatory quotas and a lowering of standards. Science, math, and engineering fought the good fight and held out for a long time. They are now surrendering on all fronts.
Proof? You demand proof? As you should, dear reader. Here’s a Nature editorial “Science benefits from diversity.” They say diversity will lead to “better” research. I say…well, what I say is too crude for print.
Item Canada’s top court rules against Christian law school: LGBT ‘rights’ trump religious freedom
In a pair of 7-2 rulings (here and here), the court ruled that it was “proportionate and reasonable” for the law societies of British Columbia and Ontario to refuse accreditation to future Trinity Western University students because the proposed Christian law school’s “community covenant” would discriminate against LGBTQ people.
“In our respectful view, the [law societies] decision not to accredit Trinity Western University’s proposed law school represents a proportionate balance between the limitation on the Charter right at issue and the statutory objectives the [law societies] sought to pursue,” the ruling stated.
The ruling means that future grads from Trinity Western University’s law school — if the school, in fact, opens — will not be able to practice law in Ontario and B.C.
TWU held to the reality that only men and women could engage in procreative sex and so on. Reality is illegal in Canada, which you would have thought a law school would know. Never mind. The end result if the court’s ruling will be fewer and fewer Canadian lawyers how to reality. Leading a sort of slow-motion death spiral. As has occurred to other destroyed civilizations.
Item Anti-gay activist wanted for promotion of hatred will surrender in Calgary, lawyer says
William Whatcott, a well-known anti-LGBTQ activist wanted on a Canada-wide warrant for wilful promotion of hatred, plans to turn himself in this week, according to his lawyer.
Whatcott, who once lived in New Westminster, is accused of distributing 3,000 pamphlets to attendees at Pride Toronto’s 2016 parade. They contained what Toronto police call “hateful” content. A warrant was issued in spring 2018.
The “hateful” content was that sodomy in sinful and dangerous to one’s health. More reality. Which is illegal in Canada. Good luck to Whatcott finding a lawyer!
Item Judge says Philadelphia can cut contracts with Catholic groups for refusing same-sex adoption
Last year, a story about Bethany Christian Services turning away a same-sex couple raised public awareness of both it and Catholic Social Services (CSS) having a policy of placing children only in homes with a mother and/or a father.
Despite both being expressly-religious organizations and the stance aligning with traditional Christian teaching, the city claimed to have been surprised by the revelation, and suspended its contracts with the groups in March. While Bethany moved to comply with the state to restore its contract, the Philadelphia Inquirer reports, CSS took the state to court. CSS is operated by the Archdiocese of Philadelphia….
Tucker and CSS’s opponents suggested that CSS was unjustifiably rejecting “qualified” parents for purely religious reasons, but pro-family advocates point to a variety of social science literature indicating that children fare best in households with both a mother and a father.
It isn’t only the land of great Gordie Howe in which Reality is illegal. It is increasingly so in these once United States.
Two men cannot, in reality, be married. Nor can both be fathers. Reality says so. Therefore, the Catholic Social Services is right to insist one placing orphans in families which have males and females.
Besides, men presuming to be married admit to objectively disordered sexual desires. Given the greater observed rates of such persons with child abuse, they should not be allowed access to children. Not by adoption or by any other means.
But Reality is illegal.
Hey, come on. You have to give the children to the homosexual men. After all, those little boys just won’t bugger themselves to become emotionally and mentally confused.
Leftism is a lie. To survive, it must be a big lie. So big, that in order to be true, literally everything else must become a lie. To the Leftist, there is no truth. No reality. No morality. There is only power.
Down the rabbit hole—or actually, down the toilet.
When you become politicaly correct you have to deny reality and live in fantasy land.
Those in the ‘STEM’ fields have to really BE smart. They cannot ‘fake it’ with jargon strictly limited to their profession.
Efforts to ‘diversify’ as an end in itself automatically result in ‘dumbing down’ the ‘STEM’ courses.
In addition to diversifying it down, there’s a parallel attack on STEM excellence, knowledge and skills in STEM. It is a bastardization and a word game:
STEAM
Yeah!
Add in ART in the middle of STEM–and everybody can play!
http://stemtosteam.org/
The City Journal article laments “The results will be disastrous for scientific innovation and for American competitiveness.” I didn’t read much further. Slight variations of this article have been written countless times over the last few decades.
There will always be jobs where a person can fake competence, sometimes for years, while getting paid handsomely. Top-down “Diversity” efforts just serve to rearrange the artificial playing field available to these pretenders. I don’t lose any sleep over the winners and losers.
In contrast, the engineering field, in my experience, has been brutal in weeding out the pretenders, as a practical matter. Yes, the field is more diverse than when I first entered it, but the pace of change is not nearly as rapid as we had been promised. Once the initial artificial barriers (prejudice) were broken down, the field has diversified at a slow, steady pace, seemingly immune from all the political efforts to speed it up. I can understand this, though; you have to love engineering, and possess a certain mental bent to flourish under the constant pressure to innovate. If the world is your oyster, there are easier ways to make a living.
I can see where, in the strictly controlled identity-politics-driven academic world, innovation has suffered, lacking the accountability and competitive pressures of the market. But, judging by the patents I’ve read, only a very small percentage of innovation originates in universities anyway.
Engineering as all about accountability; political correctness is all about unaccountability. Oil and water; shake as hard as you want, watch what happens.
The destruction of standards is already a reality in the medical fields. What was the teaching hospital that was decertified last year because not enough blacks graduated? Pour encourager les autres.
The field of medicine in America is the center of the perfect storm. Diversity worship dumbing down standards, government regulations forcing down standards and removing humanity, the enormous population of lawyers preying upon the ever more sparse herds of potential victims, and trade guild protectionism artificially limiting the number of new doctors produced every year, so we have to import ‘doctors’ to keep up with demand.
Briggs,
“TWU held to the reality that only men and women could engage in procreative sex and so on.”
It took you a while to get to that one.
You would think that TWU would know the law. Obviously if they did they would not have lost their case or would even have illegal practices in place.
The reality you forget is that school has nothing to do with with procreation and that universities cannot tell individuals how to live their life when these individuals are at home.
Their rule of conduct was ordering how people could lead their life.
Also, institutions others than actual Churches can’t have religious beliefs. A university is not a religion and has none. The leader have religious belief but they are not the institution.