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Social Justice Tag

The last time we reported on Reed College in Portland, Oregon, a student sit-in had shut down school’s finance office. The protests were organized by “Reedies Against Racism,” (RAR) a group that has been active on campus for a little over a year and whose members interrupted the lecture of a humanities class (Humanities 110) on Western Civilization it described as "Eurocentric" and "silencing people of color". Despite the intimidation and harassment, Reed College freshmen are battling back. The following snippet is from an article in the Atlantic that details the challenge the freshmen are giving to the RAR's moral authority.
...This school year, students are ditching anonymity and standing up to RAR in public—and almost all of them are freshmen of color. The turning point was the derailment of the Hum lecture on August 28, the first day of classes. As the Humanities 110 program chair, Elizabeth Drumm, introduced a panel presentation, three RAR leaders took to the stage and ignored her objections. Drumm canceled the lecture—a first since the boycott. Using a panelist’s microphone, a leader told the freshmen, “[Our] work is just as important as the work of the faculty, so we were going to introduce ourselves as well.”

Reed College Assistant Professor of English and humanities Lucía Martínez Valdivia writes in The Washington Post of the extremism from the "social justice" movement on campuses, and how too many faculty just stay silent., Professors like me can’t stay silent about this extremist moment on campuses. Her story begins with the history of a months-long continuous disruption of classes objecting to the required first-year humanities course, among other reasons because it included the teaching of Aristotle and Plato:

Apple's Vice President of Diversity and Inclusion Denise Young Smith had a bold idea -- maybe, just maybe, diversity is not contingent upon skin color. Speaking at One Young World Summit in Bogota, Colombia, Smith said, ""There can be 12 white, blue-eyed, blonde men in a room and they're going to be diverse too because they're going to bring a different life experience and life perspective to the conversation," according to Business Insider. And she's right.

Cotton. Cotton is now, apparently, a racist symbol that triggers people perusing craft stores. Or it did Daniell Rider. Rider was shopping at the local Hobby Lobby in Killeen, Texas when she passed a cotton decoration. But Rider did not continue on her merry hot gluing way, no, no. Rider decided to take a stand against this vile symbol of oppression. She snapped a picture of the Racist™ faux cotton stem, tapped on her Facebook app, and demanded the retailer remove the decorative stems from their store.

At both the University of Missouri and Evergreen State College, an atmosphere of aggressive "Social Justice" activism damaged enrollment and contributed to financial difficulties. Apparently, even liberal students don't want to attend institutions where student and faculty social justice warriors have turned the campus into a battleground. The same thing may be happening at Oberlin College in Ohio.

Increasingly, campus "social justice" activism is resembling the tactics of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, particularly the public shaming of those deemed ideologically incorrect, including professors. In The new Cultural Revolution on Campuses in late April 2017, I reviewed recent examples, including Yale, Cornell, Middlebury and Claremont McKenna:

Just weeks until the September election, Merkel government is threatening "legal measures" against large German companies that fail to implement a 'gender quota' by putting more women on their executive boards. In what could simply be cheap antics to garner votes from women, the Merkel government is waging a war against “male-dominated” corporate boardrooms. Germany's Women's Affairs Minister Katarina Barley has “threatened legal measures if the firms fail to fix the problem within the year,” German public broadcaster Deutsche Welle reported on Wednesday. The Women's Affairs Minister presented a report on the “Corporate Gender Imbalance” to the Merkel-led cabinet this week. According to the report, large German companies had 27.3 percent of women on their supervisory boards. This still isn't good enough for the Merkel government. The State wants large companies to allocate more than 30 percent of seats on their boards to women.