From Suppressing to Compelling

The transition of American college campuses from centers of liberal arts education to ideological training camps has taken a major step forward with a recent redefinition of what counts as social and cultural diversity in courses that wish to receive general education credits at the flagship University of Massachusetts campus in Amherst. The guidelines are to be woven into the diversity courses from which students are required to enroll in at least two, one dealing with diversity in the United States and the other with diversity globally. These are required, not elective courses, explicitly warning against “ethnocentric stereotypes,” endorsing particular “attitudes” and apparently designed to ensure that the politicization of education continues to encroach on student life and also on what now passes for intellectual activity in the classroom.

Proof of this transition lies in many quarters, but most glaringly in the new dispensation adopted by the Faculty Senate in late 2014 and distributed in March 2016. The guidelines make plain that the university is no longer content with attempts to censor student and faculty speech. The time has come to cross over into the realm of compelling the inmates to utter–and presumably come to believe–the nebulous precepts of “diversity, equity and inclusion.” These are the oft-repeated terms in university documents and now a crucial part of what Chancellor Kumble Subbaswamy has dubbed “our diversity strategic plan.” With numerous references to “social progress” and “social justice” based on identity politics, these are the concerns that appear ever more prominent in the university’s definition of its mission.

Using politically fashionable jargon, the three new gen-ed guidelines for diversity courses stipulate not merely, as before, geographic and cultural breadth but the specific attitudes and beliefs that must animate certain areas of teaching (or indoctrination, depending upon your point of view). Faculty members must embrace “knowledge, pluralistic perspectives and engagement beyond mainstream traditions,” by focusing on “unequal access to resources that derive from race and ethnicity, national origins, language, socioeconomic class, gender and sexual orientation, religion, age, and ability.”

The second mandated guideline encompasses “cultural, social and structural dynamics” that shape human experience and produce inequality, while the third specifies “exploration of self and others” so as to recognize inequalities and injustices. The clearly stated goal, not left to the imagination, is “to engage with others to create change toward social justice.” This phrase encapsulates the shift from educating students to be able to think and analyze for themselves to the vastly different effort to indoctrinate students into administrators’ and professors’ belief system, which is assumed to be the only worthwhile, good and moral one from which, therefore, no one dare dissent.

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