(Yes, he’s coming up somewhat often on this blog these days, but hey…?) Joanne Jacobs has some disturbing posts about thought control at the University of Oregon. And speaking of Orwell, doesn’t the term “cultural competency” sound like it comes straight from the lexicon of “Animal Farm”? (ht: Catherine Johnson)
PJ Media appreciates your comments that abide by the following guidelines:
1. Avoid profanities or foul language unless it is contained in a necessary quote or is relevant to the comment.
2. Stay on topic.
3. Disagree, but avoid ad hominem attacks.
4. Threats are treated seriously and reported to law enforcement.
5. Spam and advertising are not permitted in the comments area.
These guidelines are very general and cannot cover every possible situation. Please don't assume that PJ Media management agrees with or otherwise endorses any particular comment. We reserve the right to filter or delete comments or to deny posting privileges entirely at our discretion. Please note that comments are reviewed by the editorial staff and may not be posted immediately. If you feel your comment was filtered inappropriately, please email us at story@pjmedia.com.
From the university’s course catalog:
Cultural Competency Course 101: a celebration and excursion into the humanitarian land of moral inversion, logic perversion, truth aversion, irresponsible aspersion, attention diversion, childish reversion, leftist immersion, islamist conversion, cesspool submersion and outright subversion.
“Exhibits non-judgmental openness to new experiences”
Not somebody one would want to be alone with in a locked room.
In the comments at the second link, Michael Totten points out that Frohnmayer is a Republican. Now, that’s a shock and a bit of a corrective. It will be fun to see how this proposal gets clarified in the next few days/weeks.
“Understands the history of oppressed groups”
This could be used in hiring and tenure decisions? It is a bottomless pit of subjective political correctness. What if you held the view that native American tribes had been more in the wrong than American settlers in the conflicts that arose between them? Is there a “correct” answer? Can it be proved? It reminds me of my own experience twenty years ago when I was opposed for tenure because the school of thought I was associated with was not that of the majority of my department. Good thing I didn’t want that job. And today I can’t imagine being among these idiots.
When North Carolina was contemplating the expenditure of a large sum of money some years ago to build a “state zoo”, a certain infamous politician said “Why not just build a fence around Chapel Hill?” As one who had a tenured position there, I was not flattered at the time. But today it seems as if building fences around places like Chapel Hill, but especially places like Eugene and Berkeley, would be a humane way to keep the inmates from harming themselves.
Joanne, in turn, links to a post from Amritas:
http://www.amritas.com/050604.htm#06012357
Amritas is a former professor at the University of Oregon. He (or perhaps she) has some great stuff. The primary objective of the University’s diversity plan seems to be to double “the number of black, Hispanic, Asian, and American Indian students” in the next five years. Amritas, it seems, is Asian. I’m surprised that (s)he didn’t make the point that the likely reason that there aren’t more Asian students at Oregon is that they’re attending the Ivies, MIT, Northwestern, Stanford, CalTech, etc. And this blue-eyed white boy says more power to ‘em.
These criteria have a close relationship to ones I have seen for second and fourth graders in Central Texas grade schools. This “collapse the individual into the group at the mercy of its fringes” stuff is more pervasive than we know until it leaks out.
Come gather ’round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you
Is worth savin’
Then you better start swimmin’
Or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’.
Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won’t come again
And don’t speak too soon
For the wheel’s still in spin
And there’s no tellin’ who
That it’s namin’.
For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin’.
Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don’t stand in the doorway
Don’t block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There’s a battle outside
And it is ragin’.
It’ll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin’.
Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don’t criticize
What you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is
Rapidly agin’.
Please get out of the new one
If you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin’.
The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is
Rapidly fadin’.
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin’.
The cold war enemy wasn’t defeated. The cold war never stopped, now itís on another front and is just being noticed. Its time to do away with tenure and to look carefully who has charge of the most precious people in our lives; our children. We certainly would protect them from child molesters why are we allowing something being taught them now that is worse than the worse perversions, something that has killed millions. Socialism has been tried and found deadly to freedom, why are we allowing these idiots to ‘teach’ such things. We have a 5th column on the campuses of the United States who are trying to change the very fabric of our country to a foreign ideology that has led to the death of millions.
Let’s start with “subject matter competence” and reasonable pedagogy.
Public universities have so diluted their entrance requirements that many freshmen are simply incompetent and require remediation. That doesn’t require a lick of “cultural competence” to address. It requires hard work, longer office hours, better lesson planning.
If Johnny can’t read or write it’s because he was not taught. If his so called culture values illiteracy so what? Being sensitive won’t help.
“Cultural competence” is racist by definition, not to mention, it’s abject bull shit.
Ron,
Slowly but surely, one little bit at a time, our children are dealing with the worn our and tiresome fools who run our nation’s colleges. It will take time, but the time is comin’. An ever increasing, if still small, number of them are refusing to stay stifled. They are, thank goodness, missing good opportunities to shut up
Knucklehead,
Yes,
Dylan wrote that,became a multi-millionaire and lived miserably ever after.
Fortunately, PeterUK, I’m not counting on Mr. Dylan. I’m counting on the clever portion of the yougsters we’re sending off to university. They aren’t all in need of remediation
I’m counting on the clever portion of the yougsters we’re sending off to university. They aren’t all in need of remediation
I think that you’re absolutely right about that. It seems to me that there’s far more dispersion about the mean than there was when I was in high school (1965-1969). The best students now are VERY good – far better than anybody whom I ever encountered at an excellent private high school. The worst ones, and even the average ones, are terrifyingly ignorant and even more terrifyingly unconcerned about their ignorance.
Boy, how appropriate is it that this is a “Five Year Plan”?
Roger:
Terms like “cultural competency” and all of the other pretencious soft science buzzwords are the theological scriptures of the secular orthodoxy. They invent these philosophys for the various african american, womens, lesbian, gay, indian studies courses.They create these terms to give a intellectual sheen to their departments. They are now trying to transfer these notions to the entire teaching establishment. This is no different then requiring religous tests on teachers.
This is just political indoctrination. If they want to open a private multi cultural college and require these doctrines thats ok with me. If religous colleges can do it the secular orthodox should have the same right. But these are not teaching tools. It is pure political indoctrination and a teacher should not be judged on the adoption of these faith beliefs in the same way that a math teacher at a public institution should not have to understand or swear loyalty to the concept of the trinity.
Forgive me if it was someone here or even Roger himself who called my attention to this a few days ago, but those who haven’t yet done so should definitely check out the excellent Heather MacDonald’s Harvard’s Diversity Grovel.
Jamie Irons
Second Jamie, the essay is powerful, and even gallows-humorish, in the “Five Strategies”. If ya can’t read it now, by all means read it later.
Just one more creepy reason to get rid of tenure.
And to think people go in debt for this.
I say let your children be plumbers. They could avoid being programmed and learn to be useful.
Terrye ó Let them be plumbers and give them a library card and modem.
This academic leftist movement might be–if no evidence existed that it inevitably leads to the opposite of its language–mere utopian idealism.
But now it’s not like it was before. In earlier times, say even as late as the 70s, it was still possible for an open-minded person to get sucked into the ‘progressive’ language.
But no more, the word is out and the evidence is in. The link with crime and misery and poverty and totalitarian repression is just simply no longer conjecture, no longer explainable as a special case here or a bad harvest there.
So. These professors. What are they thinking? Is it a case of hatred for their fellow man? Are they suffering from some sort of loss? Is it mere fashion? Is the Odessa File still paying people? Do we actually have a profit-making industry creating this product? If so, from whence comes the demand for the product? The seven deadly sins? If so, what is the counter, how is virtue sold without a return to the accepting of forms of religious dogma that have become unavailable to many modernists who nevertheless want and need an antidote to sin? A set of beliefs about the utilitarian, practical value of virtue is sorely needed, to fight the nihilists on their own ‘ground. Even the words are tainted though. ‘Virtue’ is a laugh line.
Ever notice how odd the word “peace” looks without quotation, or irony, marks? The attack is psychological, and very powerful, as the exorcist in the movie said.
Buddy, a link for you.
Does success in it lie in the enjoyment of bodily pleasures, or in the doing of spiritual duty? Is there anything in it that is right for its own sake, or are all things right only because of their consequences? And seeing that, if we struggle for virtue, our struggles can never be quite successful here, is there any other place where they may have, I do not say their reward, but their consummation? To these questions only two answers can be given, and one must be entirely true, and the other entirely false. But you?you dare not give either; you are too enlightened.
http://www.pseudopodium.org/repress/mallock/5-1.html
Starts out slow, but it’s a stem-winder.
As a public school teacher, I’m sorry to report that future K-12 teachers are being trained similarly to these professors:
http://www.nysun.com/article/14604
Definitional change required. Diversity shall henceforth be required to mean diversity of thought.
Anything can be tacked on in addition, but ‘thought’ must be included.
That’s really all we need to concentrate on.
Great questions Buddy. And a subject that interests me greatly. Motive and intent. It may be that the answers are so complex as to be unknowable, from a practical viewpoint. I’m thinking we can’t blame it all on the 60′s hippies anymore (nor the music.)
. It goes much deeper than that, of course. I’m reminded of an inebriated post I made some time back, in which I totally failed to make a point. The point I failed to make was that when we started, as a country, to lend legitimacy to the communist/socialist structure of the USSR, we essentially failed to uphold our moral values as a country. What I mean is, we accepted them as equals in the world. Not just equals in a political sense of course. But as equals in the sense that we negotiated/dealt with them at all. That right from the start we didn’t denounce (we did, but not strongly enough) communism and its wellspring of socialism as antithetical to the values that we held as a country and as the evil that it was, and just have not dealt with them at all. It took another 60 years for Reagan to put that simple truth on the table. Now I realize I am greatly simplifying here, Engels/Marx and Lenin had many admirers in this country right from the start. And, at the time, there were many reasons for that, the great capitalists (Carnegie, Rockefeller, etc. were not exactly ‘men of the people.’ There was injustice, greed and most certainly avarice going about in those days. But, as a government, we did not hold to the values of the founders. That was the start in my viewpoint. From then on the russkies played us like a well tuned harp. Our own goodness of accepting with an open mind, of not wanting to be tyrants, led us to what we have today. Legitimacy for the sordid viewpoint of many.
“how is virtue sold without a return to the accepting of forms of religious dogma that have become unavailable to many modernists who nevertheless want and need an antidote to sin?”
Another excellent question. And you could place me among this group. But somehow I managed to retain the basic principals of right and wrong, perhaps due to a rather severe and to the point upbringing. I have no problem using the values and morals of religion, though I may not be a believer. Does one have to be a believer to see the essential moral truths therein? It all comes down to adaptability in my mind, what keeps the good flowing down the hill.
I have now had too much wine to continue the conversation. I work best gathered around a table with many and varied viewpoints, with no detriment as to intellectualism or point of view, just a large pitcher of beer in the middle. Used to have great conversations in the Corps, with politics and religion being the best topics. But we all respected each other in the morning,
regardless of what was said. Wish it were so today.
I love how it’s called the “Five Year Diversity Plan”. Gets you into the proper mindset right away.
This was great too:
These professors get a little testy when it’s their thoughts being brought under control, don’t they.
At least the UO thing looks like it isn’t going to fly. Larry Summer’s $50M mea culpa is a done deal. And Brooklyn College–yikes. Got another one anybody, for a grand slam?
Is it just me or has the news been exceedingly depressing of late?
I am compelled to remind everyone of an ugly truth: someone possessing a soft science Ph.D must be considered an idiot until proven otherwise. Thatís just the way it is. Itís sad that a number of good people have to suffer because of the actions of the majority. One normally has to be a person of low moral qualities to ìearnî a Ph.D. in the liberal arts. Also,an intellectual slut is just about the only one who ever become a tenured professor.
Buddy,
Do we actually have a profit-making industry creating this product? If so, from whence comes the demand for the product?
Well, of course there’s a “profit-making industry” creating the product. The bulk of it is the “aristocracy of the intelligensia” – the elites milking the vast university system for rather nice salaries and benefits packages while enjoying light work schedules, plenty of communal cross-congratulatory cocktail partying complete with flowing and multicolored robes, and fat retirement packages. The real money, however, is in the corporate diversity training and management industry and the legal muss and fuss (and financial redistribution) surrounding that.
I neglected to mention… these folks have figured out how to tax the entire nation. They’ve managed to levy an individual and “progressive” income tax (those who have money pay enormously more tax into this system than those who don’t have money) as well as a corporate business tax. A brilliant scheme, really, and nobody should be surprised that they aren’t willing to give it up without a fight.
And don’t leave out, Knucklehead, the billions in government and foundation grants up for grabs.
Oh, pleeese don’t get me started on the tax system. But, what I was getting at was not the vast left-wing conspiracy industry in general, but rather the aspect of human nature which derives the demand for such a verifiably shoddy academic product. the nation’s parents, by and large fully engaged in rational trade commerce, purchase shoddy garbage from the national liberal arts educational establishement–willingly. I just don’t get it, that’s all.
Not that I’m above it, I have been fully and wallet-thinningly engaged for some years now in the very thing I decry. I’m just a friggin’ sheep, I guess. My current UT student walked out of a cultural anthropology class a year ago when the prof introduced himself with “I hate white people and anyone who doesn’t like it, can leave now!” I’m not kidding; she called me in tears just after she walked out.
Did I march-ass down there and confront the jerk? Nah, I was busy trying to worship mammon–to help pay for the abuse, as it were. I merely advised her to try to replace the hours, see what else she could fit into the slot. Shrug, and proceed alternatively. Tough to fight the giant do-boy, punches don’t register. Someone called it “invincible ignorance”. Make a scene, mark your kid for more of it.
Buddy Larson said, ìEver notice how odd the word “peace” looks without quotation, or irony, marks?î I have noticed that as well as others, ìLove is Hateî and ìWar is Peace,î they are all out of George Orwellís ìNewspeak Dictionaryî and the one that I see every day in the liberal/progressive press is insurgent, every notice that these murderers are never given their correct names. Some more smoke and mirrors for our enemies, the Moslem Maniac’s have been been dissembled by newspapers and made to be something they are not. We have had ‘religions’ like this before, it’s where the name of thug is derived; they were annihilated.
IIRC, the thugees were the original “Assassins”, the acolytes of ‘the old man of the mountain’ who ran an international extortion/murder ring aimed at the then-world’s aristocracies, as early as the time of Marco Polo (who mentioned the ‘old man’). His lair was near the Caspian in present-day Iran. He recruited suicide-assassins with drugs and mesmerism, and would send hundreds of them independently targeted on a specific personage. Sometimes by contract, other times on spec. The target usually caved and paid or abdicated and hid, after the first wave of suicides had been detected and killed. The target knew there would be more, endlessly, and this is the fear that made the system work. The Mongols finally got p*ssed and from the east, came in and crushed the whole nest of ‘em.
That’s why the costs of “higher education” are largely indistinguishable from a “tax”. Yes, there are ways to minimize one’s tax liability and one could arrange one’s life to stay within the “cash economy” or even simply avoid paying the tax, but doing so requires risk and, for some, hardship that is unacceptable. So, essentially, paying taxes is not voluntary.
It may be stretching the point but a college degree, and even graduate degrees, are by and large a matter of necessity for a large swath of what people and their offspring aspire to. Add the lure of the pedigree to the necessity of the degree, and you’ve got a tax
For what little it’s worth, my own brats have experienced similar things and they are in what are considered to be relatively “conservative” schools (their choices, not mine). I reluctantly chalk it up to part of “getting educated” that they learn when it is time to fight against the machine and when it’s time to protect the ol’ GPA by spewing out what the idiots want to hear.
My optimism, as tepid as it may be, on this front is based upon my observation that many of today’s college aged yutes are remarkably tolerant (wrt race, gender, ethnicity, homosexuality et. al) and, therefore, not particularly inclined to simply take their “well deserved beating” from idiots like your daughter’s professor and they do, at least while freshman, complain to the administration. My optimism is tempered, however, by the fact that the students are subject to the same “outlast those who would stand up to us” bureacracy that I mentioned previously to Catherine about grade, middle, and HS math curriculum.
Ultimately though, I know that the moonbats will die off. The times they are a changing and the only certainties remain death and taxes
Buddy, is your daughter’s racist (and I make that characterization with all appropriate caution given that a hatred of white people is so seldom associated with racism) professor named Robert Jensen by any chance? Nah, guess not–he’s journalism.
You parents can be given a pass to an extent, I think. You want only the best for your children and the sheepskin from our “select” schools is still highly regarded. But this crap won’t stop until every parent with a story like yours does “march-ass down there and confront the jerk[s]“. Until parents stop handing over their children to these wholely illiberal thought control centers and paying the freight that keeps them afloat. As long as there is profit in the status quo of higher education, it won’t change.
No, but Jensen DID prompt one of my few go-to-the-trouble-to-actually-complain efforts. He organizes the Austin left from his perch at UT, but uses a certain Presbyterian Church quite a bit, for actual meetings with the local subversives. I wrote to that church, but got nothing back. Jensen has a perfect right to his activities, my complaint was that his analysis collapses in the light of the facts of the war being waged against us, and that I didn’t appreciate his contention that we would be better off losing the war on the notion that that would teach us a lesson about “starting wars.”
I will get that Anthro prof’s name, tho, and re-desribe the incident here, attributed.
Good point, Knucklehead–everything is education, and these moonbats do quite a bit of the inadvertant sort. Nice to be on the other side of the sort of ideas that weaken with scrutiny.
Kyda and Buddy,
As parents my wife and I will get involved when we feel it is necessary. In general this is not called for, IMHO, in classroom situations where profs say stupid sh*t unless it is something on the order of recalcitrant idiots like that moron at Colorado or something systemic. In the case of my daughters I don’t believe the problem is “sytemic” (although I will come back to that momentarily). The folks running colleges and universities are not a sharp as we wish they were and for which they are so obviously given undue credit. They offer up seemingly no end of non-academic stupidity to go with the academic ones. There’s plenty of opportunity for “parental participation”
The students themselves should handle rhetorical battles with professors if they decide to wage them. And they should go to department chairs and even deans when necessary. The reason I suggest escalating beyond the individual professor relates to that “systemic” business I mentioned above.
I guess it’s sorta semi-systemic and here’s what I’m blathering about.
As I mentioned I don’t see much evidence that the schools my daughters attend have a systemic problem with stupid profs spouting the sort of nonsense Buddy pointed out. But virtually all colleges and universities, with only a handful of exceptions, spout the Lefitst Party Line to some degree. I mean, after all, those who can do and those who are Left teach.
Now, although a student might decide to challenge a professor and even put forth a reasonably articulate and well-reasoned case, they stand no rhetorical chance against the professor standing there in front of the class.
The moonbats may be twits and loons but they aren’t stupid. Nobody who can’t handle a challenge from a student would be a college professor. They’ve been there, done that, donned the t-shirt and raised the placard in protest.
They have all the advantages including overt power and long experience. So, should the student wish to take on the challenge of registering a complaint, she needs to be prepared to document the exchange and escalate it to a suitable level.
If nothing else that sets the stage in case the professor takes his revenge by giving an undeservedly low grade – she has somewhere to go to try to rectify that injustice.
I’ve gone on way too much about this topic. Sorry, but it is of immediate interest to me
No, you’re right…it’s Sun Tzu…pick your battle carefully and then go all out. If you’re not prepared, then wait.
Knuck–I seldom have the hubis to critize parents. You guys have a singular set of problems/concerns. I’m frequently in awe. It’s easy to forget that college kids are in fact adults and surely the whole process of higher education should include learning how to fight one’s own rhetorical battles.
I read a similar discussion some weeks ago at another blog. The “blogmaster” (what is the proper title? is there one?), a professor (if I’m remembering correctly), reported that the kids are getting pretty saavy about “going along to get along” and very adept at parroting back the moonbat claptrap necessary to get the grade.
I thought, how sad for these kids and how sad is the state of higher education today. It seems the whole point anymore is getting the grades to get into the school to get the grades to get the sheepskin. What happened to getting an actual education? Under the circumstances described above, are they learning anything at all of value? Knowing how to go along to get along is a valueable skill that we all should have available in our arsenal, but surely it shouldn’t be the sum total of one’s educational experience.
Kyda, it’s a law of nature, in fact a permutation of the law of the jungle, that politicizing an institution will drive it toward the short-term immediate interests of the hungriest inhabitants.
Kyda,
The very first scam the Esteemed Institutions of Higher Learning try to perpetrate is “the students are adults now and they need to deal with their problems for themselves.” Sorry, but 18 to 22 year olds aren’t equipped to deal with Blathering Bureaucrats – it’s difficult enough for adults to manage that.
So you pick yer battles. No, sorry, Mr. Dean but you don’t get to stuff my daughter into a closet sized room with a maniac byatch at $6000 for 9 months, you’ll have to do better and I’ll make your life miserable until you do.
Re: the matter of spouting the claptrap back at the moonbats, I’ve been amazed many, many times at how sophisticated these yutes can be. Just because they spew back the nonsense the teacher wants to hear doesn’t mean they haven’t learned much more material. I’ve had hours of entertainment listening to them sift through information, have the most remarkable discussions about it, then get down to the business of building and paring the thing the teacher wants. They keep the rest handy since they seem to fully understand they’ll need correct information later in life. It’s fascinating to watch them learn to learn and then learn to manage the systems around them.
One last little bit related to that is that if the student is doing something that will require graduate work the GPA may be far more important than any test they took. Most reasonably clever students will not jeopardize their GPA on a Cultural Anthropology course when what they see as their “task at hand” is getting a sufficiently high GPA to go to grad school for chemistry.
There’s a lot of nuance in there
It is, of course, a crying shame that these so-called educators are so petty that they try to enforce thought control and such, but that’s life.
hi everyone—-
Terrye what can I say, except No sh** sherlock.
Two years ago I actually taught Christopher how to Speed Clean bathrooms (there’s a book on the subject) so he would have a Real World Skill.
Reading this sentence now, I think: jeez.
I do get Carried Away from time to time.
Old Dad [see above, response to Terrye]
PeterUK hahahahahaha!!!!!
Buddy Make a scene, mark your kid for more of it.
I find this isn’t so . . . I was feeling pretty downcast a couple of weeks ago (trouble in special ed) but now we’ve got everyone hopping . . . I guess I shouldn’t say more—–
Most people Don’t Want Trouble. I think that’s generally true.
Which means that if you are trouble — and if it’s clear that you could easily cease to be trouble if, say, your daughter’s professors didn’t make racist pronouncements on the first day of class that send her from the room in tears — well, that’s an Incentive.
That’s an Incentive for the relevant administrator to see to it that your daughter does not experience any more racist pronouncements in her college career.
Knucklehead I found a whole cache of Top Secret Math Trailblazers marketing materials!
If anyone’s interested, I’ve posted excerpts (How to Get Parent Buy In & others).
It’s pretty fun.
Catherine,
Yowza! You’ve discovered a Euro trick being used in our schools. Use our tax dollars to promote their programs.
If we have any lawyers in the crowd (dang place is crawling with shrinks!), can you comment on the legalities of that?
Re: getting results from being the squeeky wheel… do you perceive any difference in the reactions or willingness to address your concerns between the special-ed and “mainstream” bits of the bureaucracy?