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Bryan Caplan complaining on X that Mason U is introducing mandatory Just Society courses; https://twitter.com/bryan_caplan/status/1760048714847064146
It looks Conquest's Second Law is still strong as ever. And I guess Caplan's libertarianism will ask for some intervention against it that will never work.
Given that I generally react "Anything that annoys Bryan Caplan must be a good thing", I decided in the interests of fairness to look this up.
Hmm. I agree that making it mandatory isn't a good look, but there are two things:
(1) Bryan says "creating an official state-sanctioned orthodoxy and requiring all students to spend multiple classes feigning agreement with it", but the course prospectus says:
Now granted, that may all go by the wayside when the modules actually start and the blue-haired SJW profs (does George Mason U have blue-hairs?) start teaching, but they're not coming out of the gate with "this IS the TRUTH, all must AGREE AND BOW THE KNEE"
(2) More cynically,
What Mason U is doing is preparing its students for life in the workplace. 'Kids, when you graduate and head out to make the big bucks in corporate jobs, you'll be expected to sing off this hymn sheet. We're gonna teach you the jargon so even if you think it's all baloney, you can sling the bullshit with the best of them'. Bryan should appreciate that the university is giving its graduates another tool in the box for success in the corporate world!
Mind you, I'd like to see his reaction to a mandatory course on Catholic social justice teaching 😁
This common language will surely include terms like toxic masculinity, white privilege, and heteronormativity, but certainly not black violence, female privilege or Jewish in-group bias. So it will be strictly of the form “<negative adjective> <disfavored group>”, where the disfavored groups are exactly those hated by the radical left (only Jews are iffy here, depending on how radical they intent to go). And then students are free to express their personal values but required to use only terms that imply that cisgender straight white males suck.
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