Emory U. Upgrading the ‘Identity Spaces’ for ‘Historically Underrepresented Groups’
“for students from historically underrepresented groups (HUGs) to organize and socialize on campus”
Doesn’t this encourage students to stay insulated in identity-based groups? Isn’t the point of college the opposite of that?
Campus Reform reports:
Emory renovates ‘Identity Spaces’ for ‘historically underrepresented groups’
Emory University in Georgia is aiming to have an “Identity Spaces” project completed by the fall as part of its “Belonging and Community Justice” initiative.
The project aligns with the university’s mission to provide greater accommodation toward various minority groups ever since the “racial reckoning in 2020” that exposed the “systems, on and off campus, that allow some people to be treated differently from others.”
“Emory University is significantly upgrading our Belonging and Community Justice identity spaces to further enhance support for students’ education, empowerment, sense of purpose and belonging, and wellness – and to create a more just and equitable campus where all students thrive,” the school writes.
Emory says that it engaged with students during “40 feedback sessions throughout the planning of this multi-million-dollar project.”
In response to a recently released campus racial climate survey, the Identity Spaces will provide opportunities “for students from historically underrepresented groups (HUGs) to organize and socialize on campus.”
The project will serve as the new home for the Asian Student Center, the Center for Women, Centro Latinx, the Emory Black Student Union, and LGBT+ Life.
In particular, the newly created Asian Student Center will “serve Asian Pacific Islander Desi/American (AIPD/A) students.”
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True story about Emory:
About ten years ago I met someone who had just graduated from Emory with very good grades. His major was Spanish.
He could not speak Spanish.
Repeat for emphasis: A $250,000 education, a bachelor degree in Spanish. Good grades. Could not converse in Spanish.
This is a true story.
Emory is responsible for Arthur Kellerman (a gun in your home is more likely to kill you than help you) and Michael Bellesiles (guns were uncommon in the colonial period). Since then, anybody who says “Emory,” I hear “CNN.”
Also, keep in mind that AOC has a degree from BU in Economics, which is (by inspection) every bit as valuable as Chelsea Handler’s degree in Cosmology.
(Moral: learn how to spell “cosmetology” before signing any checks.)
Could he write in Spanish? I took two years of German as a language requirement for my major. One assignment was to write a story in German. Another assignment was to find, read, and translate into English an article in German that was in your major (I have a BA in Physics). That was over 50 years ago.
It was a weird experience for me.
He wasn’t embarrassed. He said most-all assignments involved reading and/or writing. Including upper level classes. Use of dictionary encouraged, obviously.
He had also done the strongly recommended semester abroad in Spain.
And yet , after all that, and with good grades, he acknowledged he’d be completely incapable of speaking Spanish in a work or a social setting.
My overall impression was that if he didn’t feel like learning to speak and understand spoken Spanish, nobody at Emory was going to bother to say anything about it. Perhaps the faculty was just happy and grateful to have a student in their department.
I wish I was making this up.
P.S. My point is that this experience , for me anyway, was an eye-opener.
I realized that America’s colleges really don’t have to teach their students much of anything.
As long as the tuition and fees get paid, they can hand out grades and transcripts and diplomas.
As long as US News & World Report reputations rankings are acceptable , then the system just rolls along.
Apparently accreditation overseers are happy to oblige.
From the article above, “40 feedback sessions.” Really? Are you kidding me?
How about TEACHING?
Or generating new knowledge via academic research.
These people are ridiculous.
And this Emory story is just another addition to others demonstrating the downfall of the American academy — stories from Johns Hopkins, Binghamton, Buffalo, Stanford, Middlebury, Hamilton, Berkeley, Connecticut, Arizona State.
These places really have become just ridiculous.
Clearly, whatever they’re there for, it’s apparently not primarily about education
I suspect he still learned more than if he’d been in pseudo-disciplines like “Women’s Studies” or “Social Justice.” But yeah, if you just wanna game the system to get a degree by doing as little as possible and without actually learning something, that’s been true for decades. The schools have nothing to gain from flunking people who can’t do the work. (See, e.g., David Hogg.)
Heck, I went to an elite (T1) law school forty years ago, and some of my classmates could not write a coherent, well-structured five paragraph essay. (I had that down by 10th grade.) They’d gotten in to “elite” undergrad universities in the name of diversity, where nobody was willing to recognize or say anything about what was an obvious lack of skills. So they were essentially “socially promoted” — bumped along all through college and given good grades in “soft” majors. They then were then able to parlay that into getting into a top law school (again, in the name of “diversity”).
But once they got in, there was nowhere to hide — at that time, first year grades (and grades for most other serious classes) were based 100% based on your performance on final exams, which were blind graded on a strict curve. The cream rose to the top, and those who weren’t cutting it filled out the bottom quarter of the class. And many of those were bitter about it.
Of course, those inevitable disparate results didn’t fit the preferred narrative (as Amy Wax can attest, even pointing that out to try and fix it is verboten). This why most “elite” law schools have long abolished grading and class ranks.
And that’s probably why I’ve seen some new grads from “elite” law schools recently with deductive reasoning and rhetorical skills below what you’d see at your average high school debate competition fifty years ago. Once you get in, you’re going to get out with a degree as long as you show up and keep paying, and nobody is going to seriously assess whether you actually learned anything.
I hear you. Yes, thereve always been slackers and bullshitters, Ted Kennedy types etc.
But — the thing that feels different to me these days is the quality and the magnitude of institutional involvement in all this ridiculousness..
Look at all the time and administrative involvement in this HUGs stuff at Emory.
And the pronoun diktats at Binghamton, and U of Colorado. Consider the unhinged rant by the president of Princeton at this year’s commencement. Or the speech police manuals issued at Stanford, Hopkins, Brandeis.
To me it feels qualitatively different than in years past.
It’s one thing to have a nutty professor here and there. This feels different.
Why would anybody listen to a word that these people have to say — about anything? They just seem so ridiculous
Yeah, the problem has metastasized from students being *able* to game the system to get a degree without really learning anything, to students having to game the system to actually learn how to think critically (i.e., not just regurgitate the indoctrination).
From a resources perspective, Emory spends far more in providing medical and legal education than it does in modern languages.
College students have a First Amendment right to form groups with their peers. If the student government wants to allocate lounge space designated for student use into separated designated areas and support that with mandatory student activity fees, that is permissible.
I worry about a bunch of “student affairs specialists” whose continued job funding depends upon racial tensions on campus being hired to staff the Emory Centers. Their jobs might be to promote cross-group understanding, but their personal profit motive might be the opposite.