U. Minnesota Looking to Hire ‘Design Justice’ Architecture Professor
“committed to advancing a scholarly, pedagogic, and/or service agenda specifically focused on design justice”
There is absolutely no area of study that the left will not try to impose their ideology upon, even architecture.
The College Fix reports:
University of Minnesota seeks ‘design justice’ architecture professor
A good architecture professor should be able to teach his students about building strong structures, but what is more important at the University of Minnesota is dismantling structural racism for the school’s latest hire.
The new “Design Justice Cluster-Hire Initiative” seeks to “create space, policy, and practices that support the inclusion and retention of Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) as well as other communities who have been historically underinvested.”
Applicants to the College of Design should be “committed to advancing a scholarly, pedagogic, and/or service agenda specifically focused on design justice.”
This could be evidenced “either through architectural design teaching, in their design studio pedagogy, and/or in research, practice or service to the discipline of architecture.”
The tenure-track teaching hire should display “excellence in the teaching of design studios” and be “supported by the strong promise of significant creative achievement in the field through design work, scholarship, research, professional practice, or a combination thereof.”
The mission of the design justice initiative is to advance “anti-racism” and refugee rights, among other liberal agenda items.
The university defines the Design Justice mission in this way:
Design Justice is supported by a group of individuals across design disciplines, known as the Collective, who are committed to anti-racism, decolonized pedagogy, and the liberation of communities who have been underinvested historically, in both design academia and the design industry. Areas of scholarship, teaching, and/or service will involve: anti-racism, racial justice, racial disparities, and/or racial discrimination; equity, power/privilege, and/or bias; benefits to the BIPOC, immigrant, and refugee populations; environmental and social justice; and/or other forms of studying and countering systemic oppression.
DONATE
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.
Comments
Architecture peaked 50 years ago.
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2hwqok
Wouldn’t it be lovely if every single applicant had a strong history of designing penal facilities.
Meanwhile, let me ask this: what are the universities in India, Japan, China, Thailand, Taiwan, morocco, Greece, turkey, and other countries teaching? Something tells me it is not architectural justice, nor are they teaching Grievance studies.
Exactly. Far too many American graduates are getting “participation trophy” degrees and spending more time worrying about wokeness than actually developing competence and critical reasoning skills.
Heck, right now hard science PhD’s looking to land their first academic positions are spending more time on their “diversity statements” than their research summaries . . . because many universities are making their “first cuts” of candidates based soley on the diversity statements. (This is the method d’jour of excluding or minimizing the number of straight while men (and in many fields Asians) who are hired.)
Particularly in the hard sciences, graduates of the School of Woke are going to have their lunches eaten by their peers from China, India, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, etc., where the educational focus is on results, not DEI uber alles.
Regarding this instant UoMinn ridiculousness, it’s doomed. My law practice centers around representing architects, and I have lectured at university and professional continuing education courses on architectural copyright law for almost 30:years. Suffice it to say that I know that the architecture business is *extremely* tough and competitive — either you perform and generate technically-competent products that clients like and want, or you starve. (Heck, even when you are a talented architect, it’s still tough to make a good living — the market is saturated Andy extremely competitive.)
The only thing “woke” architecture instruction will generate is more “woke architecture” specialists, who will not be able to make it in the market (except maybe as “woke architecture” professors, for which the supply of candidates will exceed the demand by a huge factor).
decolonized pedagogy??? No… I said.. Don’t look it up I said.. but..
SNAP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
More stuff along the lines of critical race theory… Hopefully they will stay in Minnesota… (sorry Aunt Betty)
It’s far too late. ADA stunk this discipline up long ago.
Does design justice includes making things easier for left-handed people?
“A good architecture professor should be able to teach his students about building strong structures …”
Actually, that’s structural engineering, not architecture.
Except for a few stars, architects seem to be working overtime to make themselves irrelevant. For the fact remains, no one really needs an architect to build something (anything) useful.
As it becomes increasingly obvious that few architects add value (but they always add costs, sometimes including the costs of remediation) all but a few starts will find it increasingly difficult to make a living at it.