As I have warned repeatedly, the left’s committment to DEI is eclipsing the pursuit of scholarship. It is being treated as more important than the subjects being taught.Randy Wayne writes at Substack:
The Search for Truth at Cornell UniversityThere is a fork in the road for the future of Cornell University. Cornell must choose between what Jonathan Haidt calls two mutually exclusive telos—the search for truth or social justice activism. The fact that these two teloi are mutually exclusive has been highlighted at Cornell University where the SIPS Diversity and Inclusion Council claims on an official website of the CALS School of Integrative Plant Science (SIPS):
The Council’s vision is for an inclusive SIPS community that flourishes because it values and supports diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice. It recognizes that our institution was founded on and perpetuates various injustices. These include settler colonialism, indigenous dispossession, slavery, racism, classism, sexism, transphobia, homophobia, antisemitism, and ableism.
Does anyone who is reading this now believe that Cornell perpetuates slavery? Does anyone in charge of perpetuating this website care whether this claim is fact or fiction, true or false—a fundamental concern of science at a university? Sadly, as documented in The College Fix and by Constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley, the answer is no.
When the search for truth is subservient to another telos, authoritarianism becomes more likely. As reported in Current Biology, in an 2020 interview with Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, former President Obama admonished,
If we do not have the capacity to distinguish what’s true from what’s false, then by definition the marketplace of ideas doesn’t work. And by definition our democracy doesn’t work. We are entering into an epistemological crisis.
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