Update on the Tyranny of Political Correctness at the University of Delaware

Betrayal of Liberty on Campus

by Jan Blits

Let me briefly explain. This will serve as a warning to those of you who don’t yet have such programs on your campus. You’ll see why the threat to all schools is real.

Until very recently, those who ran college dorms were interested in student housing, dining, safety, study breaks, health, home—sickness and other such matters. However, many of those running dorms, today, have a new, grandiose mission, which they’ve appropriated for themselves. These Residence Life administrators regard themselves as educators—in fact, as their institution’s real educators. While faculty, in their view, do nothing more than fill students with facts, the Residence Life administrators shape the whole human being, they say. Faculty may shape careers, but Residence Life shapes souls. In their view, the college or university has no higher mission than soul-craft, and Residence Life is best prepared to fulfill it.

If you look at the publications of their professional organization (the American College Personnel Association), you’ll see that they proclaim “a shift in thinking.” They say that the traditional distinction between “academic affairs” and “student affairs”is misguided. Residence Life officials must unite the two. They must “create living-learning environments that fully engage students at meeting desired learning outcomes.” The key phrase is “learning outcomes.” It means the administrators’ desired political results. ResLife administrators are to create so-called “education” programs that change students’ opinions, beliefs and actions so they agree with the administrators’ own political views. The aim is to “turn” students, as I quoted, earlier. Success in a traditional Residence Life program used to be measured by the number of students attending an event and how much they liked it. Success in a new “educational” program is measured by how much the (captive) students’ opinions, beliefs and (most of all) actions have changed to meet the desired political outcomes.

Now, some people defended the program by arguing that administrators have the same academic freedom as faculty. ResLife administrators should therefore be as free as faculty to educate students. This argument may sound plausible, especially to those who support academic freedom (as I do), but it overlooks something crucial. No faculty member (at least at my institution) may do what Residence Life attempted. Academic freedom does not mean that anything goes, that I may do whatever I like with my students. Academic freedom permits me to teach, but not to indoctrinate.

Read the whole speech.

Academics with Far Too Much Time on Their Hands

As Technology Evolves, New Forms of Online Racism Emerge

New forms of online racism are emerging as video games add audio-chat features, and as popular online games draw a more global audience.

 

That was the message of a panel of academics and journalists at this year’s South by Southwest Interactive conference, an annual event that brings together video-game designers, social-media leaders, and cultural critics looking for the latest technology trends.

 

A famous New Yorker cartoon has long summed up the anonymizing power of cyberspace: “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” But in some popular video games and in social virtual worlds like Second Life, chat features have been added in the past few years, essentially proving the cartoon outdated. The addition of human voices has led people to make assumptions about the players based on their speech, often on the basis of race. That’s according to research cited at the conference by Lisa Nakamura, a professor of Asian-American studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Read more.

The Australian Jim Wallace, Not the American Jim Wallis

Greens are attacking religious freedom

by Jim Wallace

THE move by the Greens to give territories as small as Norfolk Island the power to set legislative precedents on social issues such as euthanasia and gay marriage is an attempt by gay-green activists to render us all the same.

During more than 40 years of pursuing its objectives, the homosexual lobby has trumpeted its differences. "Queer" and "proud" were calls to include homosexual lifestyle in the diversity that is modern Australia.

But now the tactic has changed. Not only do they want to be the same as everyone else, they're not prepared to suffer diversity in anyone else, particularly if it is religiously inspired.

The latest target has been religious freedom. Admittedly they don't discriminate - anyone's religious freedom will do.

Churches are portrayed as wantonly discriminatory for refusing to employ someone who doesn't subscribe to their values. So might any corporation, particularly after the money spent on defining corporate values.

Read more.

_______________________________

I wish that Jim Wallis would have the understanding of Jim Wallace.

I’m glad Jim Wallace understands the strategy of “multiculturalism and diversity” that, when necessary, morphs to take on its new form of the Green Movement and Sustainability Movement. Actually, multiculturalists and diversiphiles always planned to render everyone the same; their social engineering has always been designed to make everyone in their own image. It’s their way of playing God. Multiculturalists have always had in view the imposition of a single culture, their own. Their whole agenda is cloaked in a ruse, “multi-culturalism” when it should be “uni-culturalism.” Diversocrats have always had as their agenda the expulsion of bona fide diversity and the socially engineered imposition of sameness, everything after their own likeness, which is their way of playing God. Again, their entire plan is disguised with deliberate equivocation, for “diversity” is their code word to make their agenda palatable to the ingenuous among us who fail to recognize the purposeful equivocation. Lamentably, the ingenuous among us includes most people. And the diversocrats’ design in exploiting “diversity” has been to render any argument with the rest of us, who have caught on to their agenda, a dispute passed off as a squabble over semantics or worse, a devilish opportunity to charge opponents of their agenda as opponents of real diversity—racism, bigotry, sexism, etc. Of course, the same is true with those who have chosen to identify their agendas “Green” and “Sustainability,” as though we who oppose their agenda crave filthy drinking water, desire toxic waste to foul the earth, want noxious fumes to fill the air we breath, eagerly wish for the earth to heat up to kill off millions of people, and long for the oceans to rise to drown out millions more. Being a conservationist, as I have been my whole life, is not acceptable to Greenies and Sustainabilocrats, for my conservationism is born out of my Christian faith which is antithetical to the innate paganism that energizes the Green Movement and Sustainability Movement.

The Humanly Demeaning Policy of Engineered Diversity

A few years ago Christian Research Journal published one of my essays titled, “In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit of Diversity: Multiculturalism Goes to College.” The form of the essay on-line does not include a crucial sidebar which I post below the following introduction.

I write this entry and post the sidebar below because I was reminded of its significance during a recent conversation with a fellow  educator concerning misconceptions regarding “diversity.”

“Diversity” is a noun that once had a basic meaning: “the fact or quality of being diverse; different.” The word, of course, properly refers to the factual existence of real differences that occurs naturally throughout all creation, including among humans. However, throughout the past thirty years the word has been deliberately exploited by politicians, political activists, activist educators, journalists, religious and church leaders, and many others as they have imposed their own meaning onto the term, “diversity,” to advance a political agenda by social engineering and manipulation which entails artificially imposing a forced diversity of peoples upon the societies wherever they hold power and influence.

Who could possibly oppose “diversity”? Right? Diversiphiles, as Peter Wood identifies them, trade upon the slipperiness that they have imposed onto the term “diversity.” If diversiphiles exploit to their advantage equivocating uses of "diversity," they do the same with opposition to their agenda. They do not offer thoughtful responses to dispassionate, well-reasoned, well-documented, and well-argued  critiques of their diversity agenda, which is to manipulate artificially engineered “diversity.” Instead, they accuse critics who offer intelligent critical exposés of their agenda with a variety of false charges, even welcoming invidious accusations that critics of their agenda oppose the integration of diverse peoples and instead demand and preach some form of homogeneity even advocating racism and white supremacy.

The ingeniousness of the new coinage of the term “diversity” as shorthand for the diversiphiles’ agenda is that (1) it self-validates their new found virtue with a sense of moral superiority; (2) it provides a source of authority to suppress and to silence objections; and (3) it catches the ingenuous among us unawares by luring them to accept uncritically, to advance religiously, and to defend loyally the social engineering project. This social experient on human beings does not prize authentic diversity that already factually exists among humans but instead exploits people by treating them not as individual human beings but as members of a so-called “protected class” that requires preferential treatment in the form of “affirmative action” in order for people of those “protected classes” to find their way in life on a “level playing field.” It is just as Peter Wood so aptly observes.

Pursued as a social policy, diversity is a form of systematic injustice and it makes us accomplices to injustice. To treat people as objects, as though they are the residuum of their race, class, gender and other superficialities, and not as individuals who define themselves through their ideas and creative acts--that is injustice (Diversity: The Invention of a Concept, 47).

This political agenda that is being advanced powerfully allures with its speech code of virtuous-sounding political correctness. The agenda’s speech code surreptitiously infiltrates the lexicon of any religious belief system, and in the process it imperceptibly transmogrifies religious expressions and belief systems, including Christianity, to adjust to its values, virtues, and message. It seduces many to suppose that its suppression of ill-mannered speech with “political correctness” is of a piece with Christian virtue and compatible with the Christian gospel.

The issue at stake has never been and is not now whether we should welcome diverse peoples among us and embrace them as our equals, our peers, our friends, and our colleagues. Rather, the issue is on what principles we should do so. We should never welcome diverse peoples among us on the principles that diversocrats exploit, namely preferentialism and paternalism. For, anyone who advocates any form of paternalism or a policy of preferentialism for a so-called “protected class” is worthy of rebuke, for such a posture is contrary to a credible Christian profession. Why? It is because preferentialism is sin (James 2:9). Preferentialism demeans the human who is made in the image of God. The gospel of Jesus Christ obligates us to love and to kindness toward all regardless of differences, whether racial, social, or sexual.

At last, here is the promised sidebar.

Made in the Image and Likeness of God

Observant individuals may ask, “What are the dynamics that render members of a minority group in need of paternalistic assistance from the majority group?”

Shelby Steele astutely addresses this question in White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era (New York: Harper Collins, 2006). Steele incisively explains that advocates of multiculturalism (e.g., America’s whites, members of the majority group) endeavor by “affirmative action” to regain a sense of human dignity against a stigma of “white guilt” for slavery, for Jim Crow laws, for discrimination, and for racism. Steele demonstrates the seductive nature of “affirmative action.” It does not truly provide authentic assistance to minority individuals. Affirmative action puts recipients in a double bind. To receive the patronizing preferential favor one has to bow to paternalism and accept one’s inferiority and dependence upon members of the majority group. Affirmative action’s design is to provide a sense of redeemed humanity, of renewed virtue, and of restored dignity to members of the majority group who seek to purge themselves of “white guilt.” Its seductive power resides in the fact that while preferentially offering handouts based upon ethnicity or skin color it provides a sense of virtue. It is not virtue at all; it is paternalism and patronization. He writes:

So post sixties American liberalism preserves the old racist hierarchy of whites over blacks as virtue itself; and it grants all whites who identify with it a new superiority. In effect, it says you are morally superior to other whites and intellectually superior to blacks. The white liberal’s reward is this feeling that because he is heir to knowledge of the West, yet morally enlightened beyond the West’s former bigotry, he is really a ‘new man,’ a better man that the world has seen before” (White Guilt, 148).

Steele observes,

Because dissociation is a claim of superiority, it generates a kind of collective narcissism—an irrational yet utterly certain belief in the moral superiority of post sixties, dissociational liberalism. In this liberalism one does not argue by logic or principle; one argues by dissociation. Only in dissociation are authority, legitimacy, and power available. This grounding in dissociation, with its assertion of moral superiority, is what gives today’s liberalism its narcissistic quality (151).

As Christians, it seems proper that we should go beyond this explanation, good as it is. Preferentialism is prejudice dressed up as Christian virtue. To redeem themselves from the stigma of America’s past, Christian advocates of “affirmative action” seek deliverance from “white guilt” through dissociation from racism. They embrace the seductive notion that to treat individuals of “minority groups” with preferentialism based upon ethnicity or skin color is both permissible and virtuous, if not godly and Christian, so long as preferentialism is positive (favors “affirmative action”) and not negative (advocates “prejudice” or “discrimination”). People who embrace this view fail to recognize that preferentially favoring individuals based upon ethnicity or skin color, though seemingly positive and godly, is simply another form of prejudice (James 2:1-13). Preferentially favoring individuals based on ethnicity or skin color is as sinful as prejudicially discriminating against individuals based on ethnicity or skin color because partiality, whether taking the form of paternalism or prejudice, looks to superficial human qualities as the basis for favorable or unfavorable action toward others (cf. 2 Cor. 5:13-21). Preferentialism, no less than discrimination, entails paternalistic dehumanization of individuals by treating them as members of an approved group rather than as individuals made in the image and likeness of God.

—A. B. Caneday