DEI driven community college curriculum, argh!

[TurkeyOnRye]

Yes, they are. Such as, it's widely and broadly assumed women are incompetent with cars. Doesn't matter how good of a mechanic she really is, she's a she and therefore widely and broadly dismissed.
Generally having different interests is not at all what I'm even talking about.

And not even in tye same ball park of what I was talking about.

Again, not the topic.

You lack a lot of integrity when it comes to argumentation. I hate using the cliché phrase, but you've repeatedly moved the goal post. First, you complain about boys being favored in STEM fields, and when I make an evidence-based argument against it, you say that's not what you're talking about and start complaining about women mechanics being dismissed as incompetent. Then you literally ask me a direct question about race quotas, and when I tell you that affirmative action is a form of race quota, you claim that my answer was off topic....even when affirmative action is literally a DEI program that has been used in college admissions.

 

[TurkeyOnRye]

This video would be correct, as long as we ignore the growing left wing that literally wants to dismantle capitalism and replace it with communism. I really don't think Robert Reich has any idea what the modern left is peddling.

 

[Shadow Wolf]

You lack a lot of integrity when it comes to argumentation. I hate using the cliché phrase, but you've repeatedly moved the goal post. First, you complain about boys being favored in STEM fields, and when I make an evidence-based argument against it, you say that's not what you're talking about and start complaining about women mechanics being dismissed as incompetent. Then you literally ask me a direct question about race quotas, and when I tell you that affirmative action is a form of race quota, you claim that my answer was off topic....even when affirmative action is literally a DEI program that has been used in college admissions.

Saying what boys and girls tend to go for is not even a valid counter to the claim of boys being favored in STEM. That has absolutely nothing to do with boys more often going for certain and girls more often go for other fields. I mentioned the SAME fields. And you want to say I lack integrity? You can even draw a valid conclusion that relates to what I said.

hen you literally ask me a direct question about race quotas,

No, I didn't.

 

[Valjean]

This video would be correct, as long as we ignore the growing left wing that literally wants to dismantle capitalism and replace it with communism. I really don't think Robert Reich has any idea what the modern left is peddling.

"The growing Left-wing?!" I hadn't noticed the Green or Socialist parties pulling many votes lately. I never hear of any Extinction Rebellion or Earth Liberation Front actions anymore. at least not here in the US; nor have I seen any '60s-style demonstrations against foreign policy recently.

"Communism?!" Where have you heard anyone advocating a Communist revolution? What do you imagine we'd be trying to achieve?
If anyone has captured Congress and the hearts of middle-America, it's the corporatists and bankers, represented by the increasingly Right-wing Republican party. They've poured billions into inflammatory, fear-mongering, anti-social propaganda.

All the left is advocating is government of, by, and for the people -- not a new idea.
Social Democracies like those in Scandinavia are not Communist, and noöne considers them repressive.

 

[Shadow Wolf]

This video would be correct, as long as we ignore the growing left wing that literally wants to dismantle capitalism and replace it with communism. I really don't think Robert Reich has any idea what the modern left is peddling.

You should watch Bill Maher next year with campaign year. You might get to hear all about how many Dems and lots of LWers are "Capitalist Plus."

 

[Augustus]

If anyone has captured Congress and the hearts of middle-America, it's the corporatists and bankers… They've poured billions into inflammatory, fear-mongering, anti-social propaganda.

They have also poured vast amounts into DEI and related causes.

“Woke capitalism” is a very convenient shield to hide behind (and an equally good way to fragment opposition to the status quo).

 

[icehorse]

They have also poured vast amounts into DEI and related causes.

“Woke capitalism” is a very convenient shield to hide behind (and an equally good way to fragment opposition to the status quo).

Well, if we're going to zoom way out, the oligarchs and kleptocrats LOVE, LOVE, LOVE all the bickering between the left and the right. It distracts us all from focusing on them. What we should be doing is defanging oligarchs, but instead we let extremists on BOTH ENDS of the spectrum distract us with their nonsense.

 

[wellwisher]

What do you have to say to those of us in the middle? Liberals who do not think humans should be crammed into identity politics categories, but actually seen as individuals. The "diversity" in DEI does NOT mean diversity of thought, it means diversity of skin color. I applaud diversity of skin colors. But DEI initiatives all support the same dogma, and no opposing ideas are allowed.

It is really a Left Indoctrination program, about pushing Left wing ideas. How does this benefit the other political parties? It is not that diverse, equitable, or fully inclusive. The Political Right should have their own version of DEI, forced installed in all schools and businesses, like the Democrats and DEI. They can push a conservative agenda; side-by-side. The competition would make it even more diverse and inclusive for all. Lefty and Righty could learn from each other. The DEI is a slogan and not an ideal, until all are invited, even the other side. Now it is for left wing fringe groups, being forced fed on everyone, via exclusion.

The main problem is the Democrat party spent so many years creating division as a way to recruit minority votes. The blacks almost exclusively vote Democrats due to carrot; promises, and stick; Republican will get you. They created a victim mentality, that is not held by a smaller group of black Republicans, who are beyond that. The Democrats get very racist, to black Republicans, since the Democrats are not really about the success of blacks but their votes.

DEI, I suppose is about therapy for the damage they have done, by making all these groups voter victims for so long. They are starting to notice discontent and are trying to appease. These group need more exposure from the Right and not the other way around.

 

[Orbit]

It is really a Left Indoctrination program, about pushing Left wing ideas. How does this benefit the other political parties? It is not that diverse, equitable, or fully inclusive. The Political Right should have their own version of DEI, forced installed in all schools and businesses, like the Democrats and DEI. They can push a conservative agenda; side-by-side. The competition would make it even more diverse and inclusive for all. Lefty and Righty could learn from each other. The DEI is a slogan and not an ideal, until all are invited, even the other side. Now it is for left wing fringe groups, being forced fed on everyone, via exclusion.

The main problem is the Democrat party spent so many years creating division as a way to recruit minority votes. The blacks almost exclusively vote Democrats due to carrot; promises, and stick; Republican will get you. They created a victim mentality, that is not held by a smaller group of black Republicans, who are beyond that. The Democrats get very racist, to black Republicans, since the Democrats are not really about the success of blacks but their votes.

DEI, I suppose is about therapy for the damage they have done, by making all these groups voter victims for so long. They are starting to notice discontent and are trying to appease. These group need more exposure from the Right and not the other way around.

This post displays an absolutely warped view of reality. I don't even know where to start...

 

[icehorse]

This post displays an absolutely warped view of reality. I don't even know where to start...

I'd like to hear what you have to say about @wellwisher 's 1st paragraph?

 

[Orbit]

I'd like to hear what you have to say about @wellwisher 's 1st paragraph?

Maybe later. There's a lot to unpack and I've got to get to work now.

 

[Orbit]

I'd like to hear what you have to say about @wellwisher 's 1st paragraph?

This is the part of the wellwisher post I'm responding to:

"It is really a Left Indoctrination program, about pushing Left wing ideas. How does this benefit the other political parties? It is not that diverse, equitable, or fully inclusive. The Political Right should have their own version of DEI, forced installed in all schools and businesses, like the Democrats and DEI. They can push a conservative agenda; side-by-side. The competition would make it even more diverse and inclusive for all. Lefty and Righty could learn from each other. The DEI is a slogan and not an ideal, until all are invited, even the other side. Now it is for left wing fringe groups, being forced fed on everyone, via exclusion."

Let's take the first sentence first, which is "It is really a Left Indoctrination program, about pushing Left wing ideas." The first part of the sentence implies that there is some vast conspiracy by a shadowy "Left" to "indoctrinate" students. First of all, let me counter with the reality of university education (I am a professor). In my career, which spans a range of educational institutions from community colleges (in California), to state universities (In California, North Dakota and New Mexico), to flagship public universities (the University of California System, the University of North Carolina system) and over the years 1994 to present, I have never witnessed this "vast conspiracy" to "indoctrinate" students.

What I *have* seen are the occasional ideologues on BOTH the left and the right; they are always outliers, and the rest of the faculty are annoyed by them but mostly don't pay attention to what they do unless it results in student complaints. I have actually seen more student complaints about conservative professors than about liberal professors.

Also, at my university, as is common across U.S. universities, every class that is offered requires the students to do an anonymous evaluation of the course at the end, and there is usually a question on that evaluation that asks students to rate the following statement: "Professor provided an unbiased learning environment". As a department chair, I look at these course evaluations for programs/classes in History, Criminal Justice, Sociology, and Religion. After doing this for YEARS, I have never seen a trend in students saying that courses are biased in ANY direction. Note that the courses I'm looking at include "conservative" programs like Criminal Justice, and "liberal" programs like Sociology.

Since no one is "pushing" a liberal agenda in education according to the data that we have from anonymous evaluations of courses, the rest of the post I'm responding to just falls apart. I am curious what the "conservative agenda" is that got mentioned in that post, though.

 

[icehorse]

Let's take the first sentence first, which is "It is really a Left Indoctrination program, about pushing Left wing ideas." The first part of the sentence implies that there is some vast conspiracy by a shadowy "Left" to "indoctrinate" students. First of all, let me counter with the reality of university education (I am a professor). In my career, which spans a range of educational institutions from community colleges (in California), to state universities (In California, North Dakota and New Mexico), to flagship public universities (the University of California System, the University of North Carolina system) and over the years 1994 to present, I have never witnessed this "vast conspiracy" to "indoctrinate" students.

My understanding is that in recent years left-leaning professors strongly outnumber right-leaning professors. I hear various estimates, and if you do some search engine-ing you'll get a range of answers. But I've seen some estimates that at liberal arts colleges the ratio is as high as 15 to 1.

I also think that claiming "conspiracy" is often a red herring. For example, I think that oligarchs have almost entirely rigged our economy. No conspiracy is required. They all hire the best lawyers and those lawyers find similar ways for their clients to rig the system. So we can have large swings in things like left leaning vs right leaning without needing conspiracies.

What I *have* seen are the occasional ideologues on BOTH the left and the right; they are always outliers, and the rest of the faculty are annoyed by them but mostly don't pay attention to what they do unless it results in student complaints. I have actually seen more student complaints about conservative professors than about liberal professors.

My reading of the DEI paper I provided is that it is heavily left leaning and that it is meant to be used across all of California's community colleges. Is that how you read it?

Also, at my university, as is common across U.S. universities, every class that is offered requires the students to do an anonymous evaluation of the course at the end, and there is usually a question on that evaluation that asks students to rate the following statement: "Professor provided an unbiased learning environment". As a department chair, I look at these course evaluations for programs/classes in History, Criminal Justice, Sociology, and Religion. After doing this for YEARS, I have never seen a trend in students saying that courses are biased in ANY direction. Note that the courses I'm looking at include "conservative" programs like Criminal Justice, and "liberal" programs like Sociology.

I've been teaching adults in professional settings for more decades than I like to admit. In those circles, the joke is that post-course evaluations are "smile sheets". In other words, anonymous or not, students strongly tend towards giving good reviews. In my world of teaching, we recognize that a far better way to assess a course is to do retention testing months after the class was completed.

 

[Orbit]

My understanding is that in recent years left-leaning professors strongly outnumber right-leaning professors. I hear various estimates, and if you do some search engine-ing you'll get a range of answers. But I've seen some estimates that at liberal arts colleges the ratio is as high as 15 to 1.

I also think that claiming "conspiracy" is often a red herring. For example, I think that oligarchs have almost entirely rigged our economy. No conspiracy is required. They all hire the best lawyers and those lawyers find similar ways for their clients to rig the system. So we can have large swings in things like left leaning vs right leaning without needing conspiracies.



My reading of the DEI paper I provided is that it is heavily left leaning and that it is meant to be used across all of California's community colleges. Is that how you read it?



I've been teaching adults in professional settings for more decades than I like to admit. In those circles, the joke is that post-course evaluations are "smile sheets". In other words, anonymous or not, students strongly tend towards giving good reviews. In my world of teaching, we recognize that a far better way to assess a course is to do retention testing months after the class was completed.

Professors whose personal views are liberal doesn’t translate into them trying to indoctrinate students, so that is not “evidence” of anything. Also, my decades of experience with student evaluations of teaching is absolutely at odds with what you are claiming. On the contrary, students are all to eager to complain when something bothers them.

 

[Debater Slayer]

“I suggest that the preoccupation of many Africans with decolonising is inseparable from our placing colonialism as the defining framework within which to understand and narrate African life and thought. Our past—designated ‘precolonial’—is understood in terms determined by colonialism, and our future—postcolonial—is tied to our obsession with leaving it behind. How we expect to do the latter while privileging colonialism in our own understanding of our history and letting it characterise our discourses beats me.... If there was never a time when any part of Africa was hermetically sealed from the rest of the global exchange of human discourses and ideas, then to suppose that what needs to be changed or made sense of in our current experience is best traced to modern European colonialism is at least implausible and possibly wrong.

His argument is that the history of Africa is one of continued interaction with the world. Africa was influenced by Christianity, Islam and other 'foreign' ideas from the start. Parts of Africa were colonised by Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Ottomans etc. not to mention other Africans who were equally 'foreign' in many cases. Moreover, Africans themselves colonised parts of Europe and the Middle East.

Why should we insist the British Gold Coast was more important than the Empire of Ghana, and isn't it a bit absurd to label African and Arab Empires as designating a purer "pre-colonial" era?

He notes that European colonial powers often supported more conservative traditional rulers and opposed modernisation, yet for many modernisation is akin to colonisation hence the nostalgic desire to return to a mythical pre-colonial past.

I agree that it's unreasonable to treat European colonization as if it were an anomaly compared to other instances of colonization throughout history. I tend to think of that pattern of thinking as "colonial exceptionalism," where some colonizers are unjustifiably viewed as much better or much worse than others on a historical scale.

In my opinion, an example of this is how some Egyptian nationalists argue that the Arab conquest of Egypt "ruined Egyptian culture," or that British colonialism was much worse than its Roman or Ottoman counterpart. The underlying idea seems to be that if only a specific group of "bad colonialists" had never conquered the country, it would have avoided the consequent problems from being colonized.

What this seems to overlook is that history shows that it's almost inevitable that one empire or another will invade or colonize weaker states and that, ultimately, expansionism, imperialism, and projection of power are quite similar across different cultures regardless of which empire is exercising them. I think that European colonialism tends to be in the spotlight the most nowadays because of its recency compared to, say, Ottoman or Mongolian colonialism, which is understandable but sometimes also leads to a sort of recency bias that seems to treat it as exceptional or inherently different from similar historical precedents.

That's largely his point.

There is no cut off point and everything bleeds into everything else and thus no reason to grant European colonialism exceptional status with regard to earlier Arab, African, etc. colonialism.

For something like Christianity, it has been in Africa longer than most of 'Europe'. The 20th C expansion of Christianity was largely driven by African missionaries and evangelists, not Europeans. It is almost comical how inept European missionaries were when you read their histories, often they would get literally no converts in a decade (before dying of malaria).

The seedbed of missionary schools etc would have some long term impact of course, but the Africanisation of Christianity by Africans is responsible for the massive 20th C growth.

Also the idea that 'European' Catholicism is significantly responsible for lack of contraceptive use is very dubious given religious demographics



We can say the same about why so many speak Bantu languages or Arabic. As someone said "we are here because the past happened".

It's like in Europe where people want to believe the Enlightenment was a break from the past rather than its latest iteration. Periodisation of history tends to create magically divisions between eras, rather than convenient literary constructs to note when certain long term trends become apparent. It's like believing it was only the last straw that broke the camel's back.

The designation "African" is a very arbitrary construct, but for many (not saying you) white colonisation of brown/black people is somehow different from black/brown colonisation of black of black/brown people or white colonisation of white.

(In parts of South Africa, white colonisers have been there longer than Zulu colonisers. Both used violence to displace the 'traditional owners of the land' yet only the former are considered colonisers).

His argument is rejecting the framing allows people to start to appreciate the complexity of history, rather than the facile "oppressor/oppressed" version harking back to a mythical past that is favoured by "decolonisers".

I agree on this too, although I think the "oppressor-oppressed" framing can be useful when applied to specific contexts and not limited to any given ethnicity or nation. If we accept that specific groups of humans can generally be viewed as oppressors in terms of their net effect on specific other groups and that the latter groups can also be generally viewed as oppressed in certain contexts and by certain metrics, I think there are many useful applications of that framing, especially in the study of sociology and history.

It's a much less useful way to look at the world when essentially all of history or all of geopolitics is reduced to that binary framing, though, as can be seen in some Marxist-Leninist literature (especially from the 20th century).

 

[Kenny]

Higher education is supposed to shake up your world view. It's suppose to expose you to new and unsettling ideas. It's supposed to expose you to different cultures and lifestyles. It's supposed to expose you to the diverse people and ideas you'll be dealing with during your lifetime. Education is supposed to expand your world, and give you the skills to navigate it.

I don't think so. That isn't what higher education is about. You may be exposed to other ideas but if you are studying engineering, medicine, robotics, and a host of other areas, it is NOT there to shake up your world view but rather to enhance your capacity to grow in these areas.

Now... it you are in a theology class, you would naturally expose you to other ideas.

 

[Valjean]

I don't think so. That isn't what higher education is about. You may be exposed to other ideas but if you are studying engineering, medicine, robotics, and a host of other areas, it is NOT there to shake up your world view but rather to enhance your capacity to grow in these areas.

Now... it you are in a theology class, you would naturally expose you to other ideas.

No. Medicine, engineering, and robotics are trade schools, not higher education. They teach a useful skill, not cultural literacy. They don't increase your appreciation of the world. They don't generate sophists or polymaths.

 

[icehorse]

No. Medicine, engineering, and robotics are trade schools, not higher education. They teach a useful skill, not cultural literacy. They don't increase your appreciation of the world. They don't generate sophists or polymaths.

Do you think DEI relies on a set of theories? If so, what are those theories?

 

[Kenny]

No. Medicine, engineering, and robotics are trade schools, not higher education. They teach a useful skill, not cultural literacy. They don't increase your appreciation of the world. They don't generate sophists or polymaths.

False:

noun​

1. Education beyond the secondary level, especially education at the college or university level.
2. University education or higher.

you can have higher education on culture that can challenge your position... but that is just one.

 

[SkepticThinker]

My understanding is that in recent years left-leaning professors strongly outnumber right-leaning professors. I hear various estimates, and if you do some search engine-ing you'll get a range of answers. But I've seen some estimates that at liberal arts colleges the ratio is as high as 15 to 1.

I also think that claiming "conspiracy" is often a red herring. For example, I think that oligarchs have almost entirely rigged our economy. No conspiracy is required. They all hire the best lawyers and those lawyers find similar ways for their clients to rig the system. So we can have large swings in things like left leaning vs right leaning without needing conspiracies.



My reading of the DEI paper I provided is that it is heavily left leaning and that it is meant to be used across all of California's community colleges. Is that how you read it?



I've been teaching adults in professional settings for more decades than I like to admit. In those circles, the joke is that post-course evaluations are "smile sheets". In other words, anonymous or not, students strongly tend towards giving good reviews. In my world of teaching, we recognize that a far better way to assess a course is to do retention testing months after the class was completed.

Not this student. I gave honest reviews. As did my friends. That was in a university setting with professors.