Universities are getting more narrow-mindedly woke, hiring people whose minds fit in an ideological straitjacket. One example is the University of Michigan hiring faculty members who view all racial disparities as caused by racism. Recently, it hired five professors to focus on “inequality and structural racism”, as part of its Anti-Racism Faculty Hiring Initiative designed to “tangibly impact … society,” according to an Oct. 28 statement by the university.
Some will use “data science methods to detect, understand and reduce structural racism within health care, as well as racial health care disparities,” officials stated.
The College Fix reports that the five faculty members are the first of two dozen “anti-racism” scholars to be hired by the University.
Mark Perry, a scholar with the American Enterprise Institute and professor emeritus of economics at the University of Michigan Flint, says “most colleges are spending way too much money on DEI efforts.” He described the University’s spending as “incredibly wasteful.”
“Those efforts are part of advancing the new DEI religion in higher education and directly contradict the core mission of a university – to educate students, teach critical thinking and expose them to intellectual diversity,” Perry stated.
The College Fix notes that in “Perry’s latest analysis of “diversicrats” at the University of Michigan, he found 126 employees at the school dealing with diversity, equity and inclusion in some way, with a total compensation estimated at $15.56 million for the 2021-22 academic year, enough money to recompense over 900 in-state student tuition bills.”
“Those misguided and expensive DIE resources could be better spent by reducing tuition instead of feeding new layers of costly administrative bloat that end up getting passed along to students in the form of higher tuition and fees,” Perry says.
This is just the first wave of hires expected to join the college’s staff under the anti-racism initiative. Even before the University of Michigan established its anti-racism program, the college was already ranked as one of the most DEI-bloated colleges in America, according to a Heritage Foundation report.
The Supreme Court has said that racial disparities are not presumptively due to racism, because reality shows otherwise. Researchers have often found that racial and gender disparities are explained by factors other than prejudice. But at universities across America, such conclusions are now taboo. Faculty are at risk of losing their jobs if their research discloses that something other than racism explains a racial disparity.
Never mind that the highest court in the land has concluded that many racial disparities are not due to racism. In a 6-to-3 ruling, the Supreme Court said that it is “completely unrealistic” to think that in the absence of racism, minorities will be represented in a field “in lockstep proportion to their representation in the local population.” (See Richmond v. J.A. Croson Co. (1989)).
Other universities are also hiring lots of “anti-racism” scholars. If you are an antiracist who is hostile to “western scientific ways of knowing,” such as objectivity and the scientific method, that will help you get a job in the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. As economic historian Phil Magness notes, “This ‘faculty job’ at a tax-funded public institution is nothing more that overt far-left ideological activism in a field that almost nobody even wants to study.” Here is the job description:
POSITION DESCRIPTION
The Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Department (https://cres.ucsc.edu/) at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) invites applications for a an Assistant/Associate Professor of Critical Race Science and Technology Studies (STS). We seek a scholar whose research falls in any area of Critical Race STS—including scholars trained in indigenous, critical ethnic, Black, gender, and/or trans studies whose work critically engages the embedded racism, sexism, and colonial violence of science and scientific worldviews and their correlate, enlightenment humanism. A demonstrated record of research that de-centers Western scientific ways of knowing and challenges extractivist capitalist practices is especially welcome as are commitments to queer and indigenous ecologies, trans-species studies, and race-radical approaches to STEM. In addition to teaching responsibilities for the new Science and Justice minor, which CRES is developing in collaboration with the Science and Justice Research Center, this position requires a clear commitment to and willingness to lead programmatic and curricular development for the new interdisciplinary minor. Ideal applicants will demonstrate an approach to science and technology grounded in histories of and innovative methods of analyzing anticolonial, decolonizing, liberationist political thought and praxis, push the boundaries of the fields they inhabit, ask provocative questions, and relate critically and creatively to norms of knowledge production. Potential areas of research and teaching focus, among various areas of expertise, include but are not limited to environmental racism; climate justice; genomic justice; war technologies; medicine; public health; governance of science and technology; science policy; criminology, surveillance, and policing; border control; educational technologies; new media studies; critical data studies; histories of antiracism and anticolonialism in science, including the impact of grassroots collective and communal movements against racist science; and CRES engagement with the creative arts that facilitates a nexus between creative and critical inquiry.
This position is in critical race theory (CRT). CRT is a radical ideology that is hostile to the free market economy, equating it with racism: “To love capitalism is to end up loving racism. To love racism is to end up loving capitalism…Capitalism is essentially racist; racism is essentially capitalist,” says the best-selling book promoting critical race theory, How to Be An Antiracist. That book is a “comprehensive introduction to critical race theory,” gushes the leading progressive media organ Slate.
The “key concept” in Ibram Kendi’s book How to Be an Antiracist is that discrimination against whites is the only way to achieve equality: “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination,” writes Kendi in that book. Kendi is a leading “critical race theorist.”
K-12 students are also being required to take classes in critical ethnic studies or critical race theory. Hispanic students in a California school district were forced to learn critical race theory. They hated it, reported Reason Magazine.
“Less than half of high school students in St. Paul Public Schools (SPPS) are proficient in math or reading but” soon all of them “will be required to take a Critical Ethnic Studies (CES) course before they can graduate,” reports the Center of the American Experiment:
The graduation requirement will first apply to the class of 2025, who will take the one semester class as 10th graders in the 2022-2023 school year, according to school communication.
Course concepts will include: identity, intersectionality, race, dominant/counter narratives, racism, white supremacy, racial equity, oppression, systemic oppression, resistance and resilience, social/youth-led movements, civic engagement, hope and healing, and transformation and change.
Critical race theory is so popular in education schools that a study found that the most assigned authors were Critical Race Theorists at three leading education schools. A college of education blacklisted a school district for opposing Critical Race Theory, cutting off its supply of student teachers. The College of Education at California State University, Fullerton, wrote:
The placement of student teachers in Placentia Yorba Linda Unified School District (PYLUSD)… would place us in conflict with our goals to prepare teacher candidates with pedagogical approaches rooted in diversity, equity, inclusion, social justice, race and gender theories… and tenets of Critical Race Theory.
Detroit’s school superintendent, Nikolai Vitti, says critical race theory is deeply embedded in his school system: “Our curriculum is deeply using critical race theory, especially in social studies, but you’ll find it in English language arts and the other disciplines. We were very intentional about … embedding critical race theory within our curriculum.”
Virginia’s largest school system, the progressive Fairfax County Public Schools, encouraged teachers to apply critical race theory. The Washington Times reported that a “slide presentation” in 2021 “instructed social studies teachers in Fairfax County Public Schools that ‘critical race theory is a frame’ for their work.”
The progressive Arlington County, Virginia schools have students read books by critical race theorists such as Ibram Kendi. Arlington distributed hundreds of copies of Ibram Kendi’s book Stamped to students at Wakefield High School. The book contains many errors and celebrates a Marxist anti-Semite. It also peddles conspiracy theories and is dismissive about Martin Luther King and Frederick Douglass. At Arlington’s Washington-Lee High School, most students in 9th grade English were assigned to read either Stamped or a much longer book that would require more work to read. Virtually all students chose to read Stamped as a result.
The Loudoun County, VA public schools paid a contractor to train their staff in critical race theory, giving it $3,125 to conduct “Critical Race Theory Development.”
Under Virginia’s Democratic governor Ralph Northam, Virginia’s official “Roadmap to Equity” published by its Department of Education in 2020 thanked critical race theorist “Dr. Ibram X. Kendi” in its acknowledgments section, as having “informed the development of the EdEquityVA Framework.” Kendi says he was “inspired by critical race theory,” and that he cannot “imagine a pathway to” his teachings “that does not engage CRT.” In 2015, under Governor Terry McAuliffe (D), Virginia’s Department of Education instructed public schools to “embrace critical race theory” in order to “re-engineer attitudes and belief systems.’”
