Diversity Training at American University Forces Students to Examine the Race of Their Friends
“mandatory first-year course known as the American University Experience”
This sounds like a weird experiment in social engineering. It does not sound like anything that has to do with the pursuit of scholarship.
The College Fix reports:
American University forced us to admit most of our friends are the same race
Student activists and their administrative enablers often demand that students, faculty and staff be forced to take diversity and inclusion training.
It sounds nice in theory, until …
American University student Riya Kohli, columnist for student newspaper The Eagle, shares her experience in the mandatory first-year course known as the American University Experience, or AUx.
It’s part of the private university’s two-year, $121 million “Plan for Inclusive Excellence.” Newly arrived students are “disheartened” that they have to spend “their first few semesters fulfilling tedious university requirements,” Kohli writes.
One of them – the “power, privilege, and inequality” course known as AUx2 – is particularly awkward:
For example, my class recently did an activity that involved putting beads of different colors in a cup. Each color represented a race/ethnicity and each bead correlated with an individual in your life, such as your best friend, your favorite teacher, etc. The purpose of this activity was unclear and the result was overall discomfort as everyone felt judged for having mostly one bead color filling their cup.
The activity failed in sparking any real conversation and instead stunted any will to volunteer our personal experiences. While my instructor and peer leader made a personal effort to clarify the activity in the following class, the fact that the exercise itself exists in the curriculum with little context goes to show the flaws it holds in its understanding of classroom dynamics.
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Comments
How dare she complain about the important and relevant activity of validating her own inferiority as a human? Diversity requires this evil be exposed! Have YOU filled the required quotas for color, ethnicity and gender in YOUR life?
Neanderthals! Learn to be ashamed and do as your masters command! There is no other way to atone!
Because we should all first use color/race to choose our friends instead of common interests and compatability, right? Are we to have quota friendships now?
“Diversity” is just the academic code word for racial discrimination. The social justice folks maintain that people must be judged primarily on the basis of their race and sex. Is that racism? Of course. But this is what they would classify as “good” racism, just like racial preferences in admissions and hiring on the basis of race and sex.
Without racism, the “diversity” administrators wouldn’t have an excuse for a job. So they must promote their “good” racism in every way possible to make sure people look at others not as individuals, but as faceless stereotypes based on their race and sex.
Nearly all of the racism coming out of colleges and universities today originates in the “diversity” programs and in the “identity studies” programs. They don’t like to call it racism, but when you treat people differently because of their race, that is the essence of racism. In reality, there isn’t any “good” racism, but until colleges scrap their “diversity” bureaucracies, those administrators will continue to gin up racism to support their jobs.
OldProf2L Exactly. I think you’ll enjoy a piece I posted on Trevor Loudon’s site last fall that discusses the concept you express in greater detail (and, if I say so myself, a biting yet effective take-down of the whole thing).
Here: https://www.trevorloudon.com/2018/09/twelve-questions-for-fauxcahontas-and-her-progressive-tribe-part-i-of-iii/
What a weird planet. Someone can pretend that he’s a gender he very obviously isn’t and never will be; but if he doesn’t obsess about a more nebulous concept like “race”, he has to go to school to learn to hate the “right” people.
It must be some sort of Borg Collective thing.
Heh, the Borg valued efficiency and advancement of the collective. This is backwards and counter-productive.
The Ferengi might value it for the profit angles.
One reason for staggering student debt are staggering inefficiencies from all the useless departments, majors and programs designed to promote people who are simply not smart enough to be in a university.
The truth is that people are not created equal. That is not anyone’s fault, it is simply the roll of the genetic dice. Some dice are more equal than others.