One faculty group wants to retain tradition and keep personal politics out of the classroom. Another group wants to embrace more DEI and LGBT.
The College Fix reports:
Dueling petitions at Yale have faculty divided over classroom politicsHundreds of Yale University faculty have taken sides in a battle over the future direction of the school ahead of coming changes in the top administration.One petition by a group known as Faculty For Yale calls for a return to the university’s mission of preserving, producing and transmitting knowledge by teaching objectively without an activist standpoint.The petition, signed by about 150 faculty over the past five months, supports the avoidance of partisan influence in lesson plans.“Yale as an institution should not prescribe any moral or political positions as institutional orthodoxy or treat the failure to endorse such a position as grounds for sanction or exclusion, whether formal or informal,” it states. “Doing so thins our collective knowledge and experience and diminishes the truth-seeking enterprise in which we are all engaged.”Accounting Professor Rick Antle, who signed the petition, said political issues do not come up much in his classes. But he said he sometimes uses current events as examples.“For example, we have discussed the accounting rules for personal financial statements as the issue arose in the New York v. Donald J. Trump, et al and the particular objections to the financial statements that the defendants submitted in the process of obtaining loans,” Antle told The College Fix in a recent email…Second petition supports ‘diversity,’ inclusion of BIPOC and LGBTQ+After Faculty for Yale released its petition, another faculty group issued a different list of priorities for the university in the form of a letter to the next president. Current President Peter Salovey recently announced his plan to step down.The letter, which had 215 signatories as of April 10, urges the next president to commit to “the advances that have changed Yale for the better in the recent decades,” including greater inclusion of “BIPOC and LGBTQ+” communities.Yale must “reject faux-populist” and “politically motivated” attacks on universities and their DEI programs, the letter states. It also says “critical thought and free speech on campus require structural support and protection,” and “there is no excellence without diversity.”
CLICK HERE FOR FULL VERSION OF THIS STORY