While the American left plunges ever more deeply into the dark recesses of its collective mind, the left on college campuses is following suit.
One worrying illustration of this comes from – none other than – the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) with, chapters at more than 500 universities and colleges throughout the U.S. According to Campus Reform, the AAUP is urging its members to combat legislative proposals meant for “the protection of free speech” on campus.
These “free speech” bills contain proscriptions against the cancellation of “controversial” (non-leftist) speakers and require that schools supply instruction on the First Amendment to first-time college students during freshmen orientation.
But the AAUP regards these “free speech” bills as the byproduct of a “right-wing effort to disempower public higher education in the United States,” so, the group formed “One Faculty, One Resistance” campaign to stop these legislative proposals.
From the perspective of the country’s largest faculty association, attempts to safeguard the First Amendment for college students and professors constitute a conservative power play.
Over at Portland State University, the Women’s Studies department is searching for a prospective faculty member who is a “practitioner of feminist activism,” someone “with particular attention to women of color feminist, reproductive justice, and community-engaged learning.”
The description continues: “Teaching experience should include women of color feminist theories, contemporary feminist social justice activism, global reproductive justice, and/or introduction to women’s studies, using an intersectional lens of analysis.”
The courses that the new hire will be teaching are “Women of Color Feminist Theories,” “Women, Activism, and Social Change,” and “Global Reproductive Justice.”
The school’s insistence that a candidate for the position will not have to be supportive of abortion is not credible, for as Campus Reform notes, “reproductive justice is a specific ideology birthed from foundational texts and a foundational person, Loretta Ross [.]” The latter, unsurprisingly, is a college professor herself.
In 1997, Ross founded “SisterSong,” a nonprofit organization that defines “reproductive justice” as a woman’s right to “personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities.”
At the core of “reproductive justice” is the “human right” of women to have unhindered access to abortion. According to SisterSong’s website, reproductive justice is “about access, not choice. Mainstream movements have focused on keeping abortion legal as an individual choice. That is necessary, but not enough.”
The problem, as the proponents of reproductive justice see it, is that though abortion is legal, “many women of color cannot afford it, or cannot travel hundreds of miles to the nearest clinic. There is no choice where there is no access.”
For these radical leftists, more abortion clinics must be erected.
It stretches credibility – to the snapping point – to use the unadulterated support for abortion as the litmus test by which Portland State University evaluates its Women’s Studies applicants.
Far-left administrators at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo also boast that their “diversity initiatives” are successful in reducing the white student population from 63% of the student body, in 2011, to 55% in 2017. However, given that more work is to be done if the student population is to reflect the demographics of California, new “diversity” efforts are underway.
“Diversity and inclusion have been and continue to be priorities at Cal Poly,” reads the school’s “Executive Summary”of its plan. But, the “many” who want “to change the culture and climate on campus” are assured, administrators are well aware that, while progress is being made, there is “more [that] needs to be done.”
Cal Poly prides itself on having created its Office of University Diversity and Inclusion, as well as hiring its “first-ever vice president and chief officer for diversity and inclusion.” The school has also recruited “senior-level administrators in the colleges and divisions to lead diversity and inclusion efforts.”
Other efforts include programs designed to recruit thousands of low-income students from neighboring high schools. “The president also recently proposed an initiative that would dramatically expand the Cal Poly Scholars program,” an expansion that promises to increase the number of low-income students supported from 300 to 3,000 within the next four to five years. There are also in motion programs aimed at increasing the number of students who are “African-American” and “members of other underrepresented minorities.”
Even as Cal Poly administrators pride themselves on having reduced white enrollment, they can hardly contain their glee over the astronomical increase in minority enrollment.
“As a result of these and other programs and initiatives detailed in the Diversity Action Initiatives document, the number of underrepresented minority first-time freshman applicants increased 78.4 percent between 2011 and 2018,” with “Latino” and “African-American” first-time freshman applicants increasing by 80.1 percent and 31 percent, respectively.
As for “underrepresented transfer applicants,” they increased overall by 110.6 percent. Hispanics within this category increased their numbers by 118.3 percent, while blacks increased their representation by 128 percent.
Over at the University of Wyoming, multiple professors are demanding administrators to abandon their new marketing slogan: “The World Needs More Cowboys.” According to The Laramie Boomerang, some faculty object to the slogan on the grounds that it’s “sexist, racist and counterproductive to the goal of recruiting more out-of-state students.”
But, the school’s Director of Communications, Chad Baldwin, explained that it was UW’s objective to “redefine” the term cowboy so as to render it gender-neutral and inclusive of “all faculty, staff, students and others associated with the university.” Even the marketing campaign –who offers as illustrations of “cowboys” historical icons like Mary Wollstonecraft, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malala Yousafzai – managed to enrage some faculty, prompting them to accuse the campaign’s architects of associating UW with the stereotypical “white, macho, male, able-bodied, heterosexual, U.S.-born person.”
The foregoing events are but another week in the Academic-Industrial-Complex.
Photo: Fibonacci Blue
Leave a Reply