Students at Tufts University are upset right now. It seems their economics department is teaching something horrible, something despicable. You see, the department teaches…*GASP!*… economics.
Students at Tufts University are outraged that their school’s Economics Department promotes what they claim to be “capitalist ideologies” rather than social justice.
They claim that capitalism derives profit from the “tearing apart of livelihoods and families of color through its legacy of racism,” and cite feminist economics as a viable alternative.
In an op-ed for the Tufts Observer, students Gabriela Bonfiglio and Kyle Lui complain that the lessons offered by economics professors subtly indoctrinate students towards an acceptance of capitalism.
The article, titled “Moving Beyond Capitalism,” published on September 25 and highlighted on Campus Reform Tuesday, complains about how the university is doing little to “organize around threats to the safety of marginalized students by the Trump administration.” The students allege that the introductory economics course focused on “profit” over everything else.
According to one of the students, Alex Kowalick-Allen, the course wasn’t being taught “as a social science, but as hard science. We got so disconnected from the social side of it—that our economic system is supposed to benefit society.” She was among those with concerns that the Economics Department was “simultaneously created and reinforced by a lack of ideological diversity.”
What that means is that economics classes are teaching that capitalism is superior to communism and socialism.
Frankly, I find it laughable that anyone on the left would dare pretend that ideological diversity is actually a concern of theirs.
What the students are complaining about is that they aren’t being taught what they want to be taught. Imagine what it’s like for all those students who oppose feminism to be required to take a gender studies class. Imagine what it’s like for all of those who lean right politically to be forced to sit through diversity training.
So now you’re having to sit through a class that isn’t teaching you that social justice is the best? Tough. The complaints stem from what the professor wants to teach, not from the administration handing down dictates to appease the social justice zealots.
If you want more diversity of thought in instructors, that’s fine, but you’d better go all the way and open it up across the board.
Of course, we all know that will never happen.
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