Tag: universities

University of Oxford considers scrapping sheet music for being ‘too colonial’ after staff raise concerns about music curriculums’ ‘complicity in white supremacy’ after Black Lives Matter movement

The University of Oxford is considering scrapping sheet music for being ‘too colonial’ after staff raised concerns about the ‘complicity in white supremacy’ in music curriculums.

Professors are set to reform their music courses to move away from the classic repertoire, which includes the likes of Beethoven and Mozart, in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement.

University staff have argued that the current curriculum focuses on ‘white European music from the slave period’, according to The Telegraph.  

Documents seen by the publication indicate proposed reforms to target undergraduate courses.

It claimed that teaching musical notation had ‘not shaken off its connection to its colonial past’ and would be ‘a slap in the face’ to some students.

And it added that musical skills should no longer be compulsory because the current repertoire’s focus on ‘white European music’ causes ‘students of colour great distress’. 

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UCLA Student Government Passes Stipend To Compensate Undocumented Students

The student government at the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA) passed legislation that will provide council members who are undocumented immigrants a financial stipend. 

UCLA’s Student Association Council unanimously passed a $23,000 fund called the “UndocuCouncil Member Stipend” on March 2, according to The College Fix. The stipend allows undocumented students, who cannot obtain legal work, to be financially compensated for their work on the student council. 

“The University of California’s payroll system cannot hire students without work authorization, undocumented students without Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals status cannot receive stipends as wage,” The Daily Bruin reported. 

The Daily Bruin claims that the $23,000 stipend is equivalent to two council members’ yearly pay. The money comes from the student council’s so-called “surplus fund,” which is taken from student tax dollars.  

The stipend legislation came after the council’s External Vice President lost her status as a recipient of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. Johana Guerra Martinez was unable to receive financial compensation for seven weeks for her vice presidential role after she lost her DACA status and work permit. 

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Students demand firing of liberal Vermont professor for opposing wrong kind of racism

On March 8, a University of Vermont (UVM) professor joined the growing chorus of brave souls willing to risk their careers and public scorn to stand for what is right.  Professor Aaron Kindsvatter, a self-declared liberal, claims that the university is embracing dubious ideological racial policies.  The intolerant backlash against this professor was fast and fierce, but so too have been the expressions of support.

Americans once regarded themselves as sharing agreement on most goals, just differing in desired means.  But “social justice ideology” does not broach dissent: it negates traditional liberalism and free speech protections.  Thus, “liberal” professors will be silenced as readily as conservative speakers such as those at Middlebury College.  “Social justice” ideology behaves much like an institutionalized cult. 

Professor Kindsvatter titled his latest video “Racism and the Secular Religion at the University of Vermont” as an allusion to that religiosity, warning that this ideology will seed future hate and division:

[W]hiteness falls under the umbrella, in the derogatory meaning of the word, of critical social justice.  And whiteness, the thinking that informs it is so crude, and so lacking in falsifiability, and it speaks so eloquently to our tribal impulses that the same logic that informs what’s currently being called whiteness right now can easily find its way to desperate persons who need a group to hate and who will adopt the suppositions that inform whiteness towards their own ends.

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PSU uses YouTube’s copyright reporting system to censor video exposing the college’s censorship

Portland State University (PSU) filed a false copyright claim with YouTube on a professor’s video that tried to expose the university’s effort to censor academic freedom of speech. The video followed a resolution passed by the university to silence critics of critical race theory.

PSU Professor Bruce Gilley recently published a report called The New Censorship in American Higher Education: Insights from Portland State University.”

The video, meant to accompany the report, included clips from a March 1 meeting of the faculty senate. During the meeting, the senate unanimously passed a resolution that deems critics of critical race theory bullies and anti-progressives.

His report claims that the resolution “imposes a gag order on criticisms of a university’s professors, programs, teaching, and research — criticism which is itself the heart of academic freedom — as an abuse of academic freedom.”

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Critical Race Fragility

The critical race theorists are feeling the heat. Over the past decade, they have had remarkable success in perpetuating the concepts of systemic racism, unconscious bias, white privilege, and white fragility in American institutions, beginning with universities and moving on to schools, government agencies, and multinational corporations. Their campaign began mostly without opposition, as most conservatives were either ignorant of what was happening or dismissed it as a campus fad.

That changed last year. The intellectual movements around the so-called Intellectual Dark Web, Quillette magazine, and the 1776 Unites coalition of dissident black scholars had laid down a theoretical case against critical race theory (CRT). President Trump elevated the debate into the mainstream, denouncing CRT by name at the National Archives, signing an executive order banning CRT-based training programs from the federal government, and sparring on the topic during a televised presidential debate. Since then, investigative journalists, including me, have reported on the negative impact of CRT in government, schools, and corporations; states such as New Hampshire, Arkansas, Iowa, West Virginia, and Oklahoma have introduced legislation seeking to ban CRT programs that promote the concepts of race essentialism, collective guilt, and race-based harassment in public institutions.

This shift in momentum against the new racial orthodoxy, which has now grown beyond America’s borders to England, France, Italy, Hungary, and Brazil, has rattled the American Left. Their first argument against this change is that conservatives are using state power to “cancel wokeness.” New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg recently followed this line, attacking my work “leading the conservative charge against critical race theory,” declaring that the Right wants to ban critical race theory because it is afraid to debate it. This is false, of course. For more than a year, prominent black intellectuals, including John McWhorter, Glenn Loury, Wilfred Reilly, and Coleman Hughes have challenged the critical race theorists to debate—and none has accepted. After Goldberg published her column, I called her bluff even further, challenging to “debate any prominent critical race theorist on the floor of the New York Times.” Predictably, none responded, catching the New York Times in a fib and further exposing the critical race theorists’ refusal to submit their ideas to public scrutiny.

The second line of attack, advanced by Goldberg and Acadia University professor Jeffrey Sachs, is that the attempt to regulate critical race theory-based programs is an “attack on free speech.” Goldberg and Sachs are attempting to reclaim the mantle of free speech, but on closer inspection, their case is legally and morally groundless. First, as legal writer Hans Bader points out, the Supreme Court has ruled that states and public schools have the ability to control curricular speech without violating free speech. Furthermore, under the Fourteenth Amendment, states and school districts have an obligation to prevent the creation of a learning environment that promotes hostility toward a certain race or sex. The courts have repeatedly ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment outweighs and limits the First Amendment when it comes to government entities adopting policies and programs that perpetuate racial stereotyping, discrimination, and harassment. Despite Sachs’s hyperventilation about threats to academia (i.e., the public-employment program for new racialist ideology), many legislatures have explicitly allowed the teaching of CRT in university classrooms; it is only forbidden to turn these principles into compelled speech, employee-indoctrination programs, and official state curricula for primary and secondary school students.

The most telling limitation in their argument, however, is that Goldberg and Sachs both refuse to deal with specifics. They present critical race theory as a benign academic discipline that seeks “social justice,” while ignoring the avalanche of reporting, including my own, that suggests that, in practice, CRT-based programs are often hateful, divisive, and filled with falsehoods; they traffic in racial stereotypes, collective guilt, racial segregation, and race-based harassment. The real test for intellectuals on the left is not to defend their ideas as abstractions but to defend the real-world consequences of their ideas.

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Arizona State Dean: Grading Writing Based On Quality Is ‘Racist,’ Promotes ‘White Language Supremacy’

In a book titled “Labor-Based Grading Contracts: Building Equity and Inclusion in the Compassionate Writing Classroom,” professor Asao Inoue encourages teachers to ditch grading for a “labor-based” grading system wherein students earn grades based on their effort. The quality of a student’s writing would not help or hinder their course grade. 

“This book focuses on one kind of grading contract, one that calculates final course grades purely by the labor students complete, not by any judgments of the quality of their writing,” Inoue writes. “While the qualities of student writing is still at the center of the classroom and feedback, it has no bearing on the course grade.”

Near the beginning of the document, the author admits that the theory of “labor-based” grading is rooted in critical race theory. Critical race theory is the idea that America is rooted in racism as are the systems of modern American society.

Critical race theory contributed to Inoue’s idea that ranking things is a system rooted in racism. Because grading is a form of ranking, grading must also be a racist idea. In his book, Inoue dubbed grading and the education system writ large “racist” for their connections to ranking. 

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Cleveland State Professor Is Indoctrinating The Next Generation Of Educators With Critical Race Theory

Two education majors at Cleveland State University did not realize when they signed up for a class titled “The Social Context of Urban Education” that they would be lectured on white privilege, implied racism, and forced to learn critical race theory from a Robin DiAngelo textbook. DiAngelo, the famous “antiracist” educator who was exposed as providing Coca-Cola’s now-deleted “try to be less white” training to employees, has become one of the leaders in the insane movement.

“Every week it’s something different, and our textbook has nothing to do with my major, middle childhood education,” said the whistleblower, a sophomore from Lake County, who first contacted The Federalist. “Last week, we had this presentation from people who hold positions at CSU about the likewise relation between the riots in the 1960s to the riots that took place in Cleveland in 2020. … All the assignments have nothing to do with being a teacher. It all has to do with how I have white guilt apparently. We also had to give a presentation in class on how our positionality and intersectionality interact with us in society.”

The course is being taught by Molly Feghali, who students say has prohibited white people from using the word “ghetto” in the classroom due to its supposedly racist connotation. One paper prompt Feghali has assigned for the class asks students to spend time “reflecting on your educational journey thus far,” and describe “how has your positionality/intersectionality impacted your journey?” Another asks students to “create a graphical representation of how prejudice, discrimination, implicit bias, power, oppression, and socialization are interrelated and impact the isms.”

The radicalism of Feghali is unsurprising given the substance of her doctoral thesis. The 2018 thesis, titled “Interracial Contact at a Diverse High School: How School and Community Structures Shape Students’ Experiences,” is 126 pages of leftist buzzwords. It states that “unconscious bias” manifests in “micro-aggressions,” and that “white privilege” means white students are inherently ignorant.

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The Spectre of Totalitarianism

In March 2019, tax expert Maya Forstater was dismissed from her job — legally, according to a later judicial ruling — for voicing the view that “sex is a biological fact, and is immutable.” When author J.K. Rowling came to Forstater’s defence, she was bombarded with abuse, including an invitation from one lady to “choke on my fat trans cock”. The case became a cause célèbre. But it is only one of many such cases. Today, anyone who ventures a controversial opinion on “trans”, race, disability, Middle Eastern politics and a handful of other issues risks being fired, insulted, intimidated and possibly prosecuted. 

Last year, a “Journal of Controversial Ideas” was launched, offering authors the option of writing under a pseudonym “in order to protect themselves from threats to their careers or physical safety”. How did things come to this pass?

The new intolerance is often seen as a specifically left-wing phenomenon — an intensification of the “political correctness” which emerged on US campuses in the 1980s. But that is a one-sided view of the matter. It was US Zionists who pioneered the tactic of putting pressure on organisations to disinvite unfavoured speakers; far-right nationalists are among the keenest cyberbullies; and religious zealots of all stripes are prodigal of death threats. 

Generalising, one might say that left-wing groups, being more publicly respectable in our part of the world, prefer to pursue their objectives through institutions and the law, whereas right-wing groups seek out the anonymity of the internet. But the goal on each side is the same: it is to intimidate, suppress, silence. In any case, the distinction between “left” and “right” is becoming increasingly muddled, as lines shift and alliances regroup. All one can safely say is that the various forms of contemporary extremism imitate and incite each other. What has given way is the civilised middle ground.

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Ivy League University Offers Rock Climbing Class — No White Students Allowed

Cornell University was offering a racially-segregated rock climbing class for their students physical education — but no white students allowed.

The physical education class, “BIPOC Rock Climbing,” was originally slated to be restricted to “people who identify as Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, or other people of color.”

After Campus Reform reached out the university for comment about the discrimination, the course description was edited to state that the class is “designed to enable Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, or other people of color underrepresented in the sport of rock climbing to learn the sport and to feel included and supported.”

The original listing for the course, set to begin during the Spring 2021 academic semester, was archived and can be viewed here.

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