Technical Writing Course at Clemson U. Allegedly Transformed Into Social Justice Seminar
“technical writing and professional communication as conduits of social justice and cultural logics”
The left is doing this with multiple disciplines. Nothing will be left untouched.
The College Fix reports:
Clemson lecturer turns technical writing course into social justice seminar
At Clemson University, English 3140 has traditionally been a class for juniors and seniors to learn technical writing for use in their future careers.
But a Clemson lecturer this fall has changed the focus of the course to “engage with technical writing and professional communication as conduits of social justice and cultural logics.”
According to the syllabus circulated by lecturer Victoria Houser, the central text the class will be using is Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code by Ruha Benjamin. The book’s promotional materials say it “cuts through tech-industry hype to understand how emerging technologies can reinforce White supremacy and deepen social inequity.”
Benjamin, an associate professor of African American studies at Princeton University, has argued that racism is endemic in technology, such as when a Google Maps glitch read “Malcolm X Boulevard” as “Malcolm Ten Boulevard” or when all the beauty contest winners in a competition judged by robots “were white and only one finalist had visibly dark skin.”
According to Benjamin, her book has been used by over 45 classes or programs in the past year.
Students signing up for Houser’s section of ENGL 3140 would likely be unaware they were walking into a class with a heavy social justice theme. According to the technical writing course’s description, the class offers “Intensive, project-based application of principles of audience, context, purpose, and writing strategies of technical writing: proposals, reports, communication deliverables.”
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Comments
This sort of nonsense will only stop when the students themselves demand it stop.
“Benjamin, an associate professor of African American studies at Princeton University, has argued that racism is endemic in technology …”
No wonder she would think that. The president of Princeton has said racism is everywhere at Princeton. Prof. Benjamin ought to get out more, there’s a far less racist world outside of campus.
No worries. Technical writing is dead as a career. Studying it in college was always a waste of money, since there was little about it that an intelligent person couldn’t learn in a week. If they weren’t wasting their money to learn leftist dogma in a technical writing class, they’d be wasting their money to learn leftist dogma in an even worse victims-studies class.