I think it's important for people to understand that diversity means diversity of opinions and ideas, and is not just based on race or ethnicity. For example, I had more in common with my Black college roommate than he would have had with a Black man from the inner city, and than I would have with a poor white student from Appalachia as we both came from Middle class, conservative, religious backgrounds.
One of the fallacies I see of the "woke", is that individuals are placed into categories based on race, gender, sexuality or ethnicity, and those individuals do not necessarily have the same thoughts, ideas or priorities as the group they are lumped into.
A group like what you are describing should be mandatory in colleges, universities, even high schools.
These groups would help students relate to people with the realization that diversity of thought and opinion is independent of one's supposed group orientation.
"If those of us in higher education want to make our campuses places where all students can feel free to be themselves, in all their viewpoint diversity"
The major problem with this is that the majority of "you" in higher education -- in the USA and increasingly, devastatingly so in other English speaking countries like Canada where I live now and the UK where I was born, like Australia and New Zealand, spreading further step by step to the whole West to include Europe -- the majority of faculty and admins do not anymore want to create an academic environment conducive to the expression of different viewpoints and the creation of new ideas. What they want, what they believe is their mission, is to uphold the established Truth. For the good of mankind. It is like looking at the academic institutions of the old USSR, at the learned Catholic institutions at the time of the Counter-Reformation.
Sure, it is not ALL faculty and staff that do this. As an alumnus of the University of Oxford with a post-graduate degree, I have kept a close eye the currents and tides in academia for decades, as that has always been my intellectual milieu. I saw this drunkenness rise in fringe positions born of deconstructionist theories that percolated from text critique into social studies and from there everywhere, during the late 70s and early 80s; I saw it shed its Marxist trappings and selectively gobble Foucault & co. to transform into a theory of omnipresent power struggle, the numberless Critical <Name> Theories that seemed during the late 80s and 90s so new, so cool, so avant-garde thought; I saw it become not fringe anymore but the mainstream, I saw it become Gospel that cannot be challenged without high risks, until we came where we are.
It is not ALL faculty and staff that do this and undoubtedly there are many that do not believe in the Gospel given. But numberless careers have been built on Critical <Name> Theory, projecting to the top many scholars who would not have reached those posts without it; they have big stakes in preserving and perpetuating it. And academia is a conservative environment by definition (conservative not in a political sense, but in its resistance to change) as it is built on tradition and the power of select groups. It is also extremely sensitive to reputational damage: public loud outrage directed to it terrifies academia.
But once, with all its faults, academia stood on the pillars of free thought, free research and free exchange of ideas in a field of peer reviewed excellence -- not always realised, but constantly held sacred. Now those pillars have crumbled. So academia falls subservient to the ideological trends that itself engenders, supports and perpetuates, and becomes a tool for indoctrination rather than for increasing reason and widening horizons. (Make no mistake, although this is today more skewed to the left, academic institutions heavily influenced by right-wing ideology do no differently.)
I sincerely hope that efforts like this at Occidental College succeed and multiply. But I am less optimistic than the authors... I see no generalised will in academia to help Generation Z to go in a direction other than the culture wars that they are being trained to.
I think it's important for people to understand that diversity means diversity of opinions and ideas, and is not just based on race or ethnicity. For example, I had more in common with my Black college roommate than he would have had with a Black man from the inner city, and than I would have with a poor white student from Appalachia as we both came from Middle class, conservative, religious backgrounds.
One of the fallacies I see of the "woke", is that individuals are placed into categories based on race, gender, sexuality or ethnicity, and those individuals do not necessarily have the same thoughts, ideas or priorities as the group they are lumped into.
A group like what you are describing should be mandatory in colleges, universities, even high schools.
These groups would help students relate to people with the realization that diversity of thought and opinion is independent of one's supposed group orientation.
"If those of us in higher education want to make our campuses places where all students can feel free to be themselves, in all their viewpoint diversity"
The major problem with this is that the majority of "you" in higher education -- in the USA and increasingly, devastatingly so in other English speaking countries like Canada where I live now and the UK where I was born, like Australia and New Zealand, spreading further step by step to the whole West to include Europe -- the majority of faculty and admins do not anymore want to create an academic environment conducive to the expression of different viewpoints and the creation of new ideas. What they want, what they believe is their mission, is to uphold the established Truth. For the good of mankind. It is like looking at the academic institutions of the old USSR, at the learned Catholic institutions at the time of the Counter-Reformation.
Sure, it is not ALL faculty and staff that do this. As an alumnus of the University of Oxford with a post-graduate degree, I have kept a close eye the currents and tides in academia for decades, as that has always been my intellectual milieu. I saw this drunkenness rise in fringe positions born of deconstructionist theories that percolated from text critique into social studies and from there everywhere, during the late 70s and early 80s; I saw it shed its Marxist trappings and selectively gobble Foucault & co. to transform into a theory of omnipresent power struggle, the numberless Critical <Name> Theories that seemed during the late 80s and 90s so new, so cool, so avant-garde thought; I saw it become not fringe anymore but the mainstream, I saw it become Gospel that cannot be challenged without high risks, until we came where we are.
It is not ALL faculty and staff that do this and undoubtedly there are many that do not believe in the Gospel given. But numberless careers have been built on Critical <Name> Theory, projecting to the top many scholars who would not have reached those posts without it; they have big stakes in preserving and perpetuating it. And academia is a conservative environment by definition (conservative not in a political sense, but in its resistance to change) as it is built on tradition and the power of select groups. It is also extremely sensitive to reputational damage: public loud outrage directed to it terrifies academia.
But once, with all its faults, academia stood on the pillars of free thought, free research and free exchange of ideas in a field of peer reviewed excellence -- not always realised, but constantly held sacred. Now those pillars have crumbled. So academia falls subservient to the ideological trends that itself engenders, supports and perpetuates, and becomes a tool for indoctrination rather than for increasing reason and widening horizons. (Make no mistake, although this is today more skewed to the left, academic institutions heavily influenced by right-wing ideology do no differently.)
I sincerely hope that efforts like this at Occidental College succeed and multiply. But I am less optimistic than the authors... I see no generalised will in academia to help Generation Z to go in a direction other than the culture wars that they are being trained to.