Many of you thought Cornell had already leapt over the progressive cliff when they fired me and hired a lady sexual harassment lawyer to teach statistics. Not so. This only brought them to the edge of the cliff, a destination to which they have been loping towards ever since rewarding students who menaced faculty with machine guns back in 1969.
It did finally happen, though. They have flung themselves over and are in midair. Just like in those old cartoons, they are still at the point where gravity has not claimed them because they haven’t yet looked down.
They will be forced to soon, though. Consider the headline is “Cornell Adds ‘Diversity’ Courses to Graduation Requirements” (for the tykes in Arts & Sciences).
Cornell University announced this week that the school will be adding a “Diversity and Inclusion” course to the graduation requirements. The proposal for the new requirement was passed by a faculty vote on Tuesday. 182 faculty members voted in favor of the requirement, 90 voted against it, and 18 abstained. The changes are expected to be implemented for students enrolled in the fall of 2020.
To the eighteen who hid their heads: So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.
About one third of the faculty did retain their sanity. Or so we might have thought. Tom Pepinsky, a professor of government and chairman of the curriculum committee has a different idea.
According to the Cornell Sun:
“It’s hard to know what lies behind the faculty who did not endorse the new curriculum,” Pepinsky said, explaining that faculty might have thought the new changes were not “meaningful” or “substantial” enough to vote for.
Now either this Pepinsky believes this or he does not. If he does not, and recalling he is a professor of government, he is bullshitting the readers. He’s putting a good spin on the substantial disagreement, in an attempt to wave it off.
The real fear is that he believes the words leaking from his lips. This makes him a dangerous individual, more akin to a political kommissar than a professor. Anybody who believes the faculty who voted no actually wanted more Diversity is the sort of fellow for whom no amount of indoctrination is enough.
The paper said “The new social difference requirement can be fulfilled by classes that ‘take class, race, ethnicity, nativity status, religion, gender, sexuality, or ability as an object of study,’ according to the proposal.”
Ability would seem to be dangerous ground, given how easy it is to discover hate facts. But since these are classes taught by already indoctrinated professors, the concern is less.
It is just indoctrination in “Social Differences” which are required for graduation. Students also have to pay to take “Global Citizenship”. This “could also include the study of global issues such as transnational migration, international justice, colonial histories and their legacies, and world health systems.”
As a for-example, Cornell says the class FGSS 2010 would fulfill the indoctrination requirement. That is “Introduction to Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies“. It is “an interdisciplinary program focused on understanding the impact of gender and sexuality on the world around us and on the power hierarchies that structure it.”
Anybody who allows herself to write “hierarchies that structure it” is lost. Skip it.
It is, of course, possible for Reality-minded students to fake it, or to find some class that is only weakly ideological. This will surely happen for those kids who want to concentrate on, say, math or physics.
But the weaker minds will not be able to resist. Propaganda does work. That is why it is used.
It isn’t only Cornell that has embraced insanity, of course. Many institutions have. Georgia Southern University, for instance. In ten years time the question will be how many universities do not require indoctrination.
Only 290 faculty members voted. Counting just the 1794 full-time instructional faculty, that’s a 16.2% turnout. Tail wagging the dog.
Well in that case the university will raise the cost of going there with all the added pc to take!
Well, I can finally see the logic in the “Free College for All” talk. After all, getting what you pay for is an American tradition. This new requirement certainly supports going that route.
Conservative parents will be so outraged they stop sending their children there. Not. The difference between the liberals and conservatives is liberals act on their outrage, conservatives simply complain, which shows conservatives really don’t care … action reveals preferences, words just blow with the wind.
Conservative parents will no longer send their children there. Not. A difference between most liberals and most conservatives is liberals act on their outrage, which shows conservatives really do not care, despite their words … actions reveal preferences, words simply blow with the leaves.
The silver lining is that it will be a boon to all the minority and gender studies departments that have been started up in recent decades. They will become the core curriculum.
“Anybody who believes the faculty who voted no actually wanted more Diversity is the sort of fellow for whom no amount of indoctrination is enough.”
For some reason, I was immediately reminded of Cardinal Cupich’s public speculation that hostility to Pope Francis among orthodox American Catholics is due to their animus against “Hispanics”.
It’s hard to imagine that a sentient human being could actually produce such thoughts, let alone give voice to them.
Cornell faculty, padded with voting members in pseudointellectual specialties (e.g., Queer Theory :-D), are silly. Their graduates will be equally, if not more, silly.
Having said that, education and indoctrination are synonyms. We usually reserve the word “education” for teaching from a philosophy with which we agree, and “indoctrination” for teaching from a philosophy with which we disagree. The difference between classically-based indoctrination and postmodern indoctrination is that a classically-based philosophy usually has a basis in reality.
“For the wise men of old, the cardinal problem of human life was how to conform the soul to objective reality, and the solution was wisdom, self-discipline, and virtue. For the modern, the cardinal problem is how to conform reality to the wishes of man, and the solution is a technique.”
— CS Lewis
The true victims of identity politics are the supposed beneficiaries. If you want to ruin someone’s life over the long haul, just give them an immutable excuse for failure. Then indoctrinate them with the corrosive notion that society is a zero-sum game, and the only way that can have more is if some other identity group has less, taken from them by force, if necessary.
In the US, the selfish people who have planned for their retirement are one election away from losing their 401K’s to those who haven’t. This is the first elephant in the room that liberals don’t dare acknowledge. The second elephant is the knowledge that at least some of the selfish people won’t go down without a fight, and that they are still well armed.
I am sure that the word “ability” is meant in the sense meant by those who proclaim people who do not have a disability to be “abelists.” They don’t mean, for example, the ability to solve differential equations or to design bridges.