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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.
By the grace of the Lord God Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen, I have not. I am too old (and never went to college) so this stuff was not around in my youth. It may well come up in work, but I might just about be retirement age and not have to sit through this by then.
It being Caplan's place of employment, I wondered if there was a tiny chance that it wasn't all Persons Of Hair Colour. Can anyone tell me what George Mason U is like from that angle?
Ah, the cynicism is there from my side. As I said, the poor divils are going to go out into the workplace where this stuff is all around (at least for another few years) so they'll be exposed to it anyway, better that the more hard-headed of them get early exposure so they know how to bluff around the corporate requirements.
I had to take a BS cultural diversity class in college. The professor was a black female adjunct who started off day one by trying unsuccessfully to create racial and sex-based divisions between the students. In day three or four, she snapped at me in class for “questioning” her and thereby “undermining her authority.” I was frankly stunned. I pretty regularly asked questions in other classes if something sounded off to my ears and even directly argued with professors. In all those previous classes, the professors loved it (at least I was engaged, which couldn’t be said for many of my classmates). After I challenged her for including inaccurate information in her presentations, she stopped uploading them to the class site. These were insane errors too, like claiming that Max Weber, close friend and colleague of Martin Luther, invented the Protestant Work Ethic as a way to discriminate against Jews and Catholics, which in turn served as a model for later Jim Crow laws (I swear I’m not making any of that up). Her final straw was when she said something blatantly wrong in class, and one of the other students turned around to me and asked, “Is that right?” The fire in the prof’s eyes was quite a sight to behold. She naturally failed me, but fortunately, I’d been meeting with my advisor after every class to document the issues, so I was able to get the grade overturned on appeal.
That’s the kind of bullshit that these diversity classes make people put up with. If you have even the slightest inkling that the professors teaching those classes will treat students fairly or allow multiple points of view, you need to spend more time with The Nybbler. Maybe some his cynicism will rub off.
Someone should have asked him for his longevity secrets.
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