Queer LatinX Environmentalisms is a Real Class.
Someone suggested we pay attention to this story published last week in the Chronicle of Higher Education. (To all the CPR sources out there, we salute you.)
It covers the UNC System’s smart and well-reasoned move to comply with a Trump administration executive order titled, “Ending illegal discrimination and restoring merit-based opportunity.” Setting aside a bunch of legal complexities, the UNC System in effect instructed the state’s public universities to suspend mandatory classes related to DEI.
This is good. Yes, universities need to have some mandatory classes as a requirement for graduation (all graduates should prove they know how to do math and write a cogent sentence, for example). No, controversial political ideologies should not be part of those mandatory classes.
This basic maxim probably enjoyed near-universal agreement from 1795 to 2019.
But the guy who speaks on behalf of the professors at UNC doesn’t think so. Jay Smith, president of the UNC chapter of the American Association of University Professors, called the move “chilling,” “surreal,” “deeply offensive,” and – this is the best one – “Orwellian.”
Not requiring students to take some radical lefty class on equity as a condition of earning their degree is “Orwellian” to Mr. Smith. One wonders whether he’s read the author he cites.
But the purpose of this post isn’t really to spotlight the UNC System’s move, though we support it. And it’s not even to make fun of Mr. Smith.
We reviewed the list of courses UNC offered students as a way to meet their (soon-to-be-defunct) “Power, Difference, and Inequality” graduation requirement. There are a bunch classes, more than 400. Students only had to choose one, and if they wanted to they could find one that’s not all that ideological.
Indeed, many courses across the UNC System are sound, non-ideological, and scholarly in the traditional sense.
But when it comes to the identity-focused, heavily ideological course options, students will not find intellectual diversity.
For every class like “Queering China” and “Queer LatinX Environmentalisms,” there’s no equal and opposite. The catalogue is unabashedly far-left, and there’s nothing to balance it out.
People like Mr. Smith may not acknowledge it or even have the capacity to understand it, but this particular course catalogue would alienate 95% of people outside of academia who read it.
This is why your house is burning down.
One of the classes, “Right Wing Populism in Global Perspective,” has this as its description: “This course will examine right wing populism globally. . .We will ask what role such factors as religion, ethnicity, economics, and gender play in its rise.” Let us guess – Christian white poors who were assigned male at birth are fueling it, right?
The better question is what role The Academy played in its rise. The answer is more than they think.
A return to the centuries-old academic tradition, and some semblance of ideological diversity, would go a long way toward rebuilding trust in higher education.
