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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 😁
Have you ever taken a diversity seminar? I'm surprised by your lack of cynicism.
70% will eye-rolling harassment boilerplate libspeak ("LaShondra and Xavier Alejandro Jose were talking about the latest Marvel Movie, but then Pete said that Black Widow's tits were too small. Is this sexual harassment?").25% will be progs smuggling in obnoxious consensus-building ("Science says that only white people can be racist.").
~5% will be the teacher saying something truly heinous and deranged ("My three year-old cried when Trump called E. Jean Carroll a liar.").
You're not predicting that academia will suddenly find conservatives to teach the "Justice" course, right? The text about allowing disagreements is just boilerplate.
In a college setting, most people will go along with whatever is presented. But most people won't have their minds changed either. Probably the average college student will agree with the majority of what's being taught, in a loose sense. A few students will speak out. In my experience, those students will tend to be men, especially non-whites who have one foot in another culture but are functionally American. Some of them will go a bit too far and say something that gets them in trouble. The rest will be passed through, because the university doesn't really want to deal with angry students complaining that Professor Socjus is failing them for saying tax cuts aren't racist.
There is no self-aware life-preparing edge. The people who will implement this course believe that academia and activism are compatible, not that they'll cynically teach students how to navigate lying in the workplace.
Any such course is almost certainly a waste of everybody's time. But for a certain kind of bureaucrat and moderate lib, diversity seminar kumbayah sing-alongs are catnip. They really just believe that DEI is good, and if we implement more DEI, we'll get more good.
I predict that there will be extremely low standards of rigour at these courses, and most students won’t bother actually attending to express disagreement.
It really depends on the druthers of the professors involved. In my college experience, engineering and more "serious" classes were lax about attendance, blow-off courses were mid-lax about attendance, humanities and college make-believe busy-work courses were much more strict. The less objective material that could be learned from a textbook at home, the more a professor might tend to enforce attendance.
Secretly, those who disagree with the material will be some of the likeliest to show up, because even if they individually keep their heads down, they will want to see someone else argue against the material. (My own bad habit of arguing against the material taught me that there was always a sizeable number of students who would approach me quietly later and thank me for saying something.)
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