“Bates College faculty have decided to postpone its ‘Race, Power, Privilege, and Colonialism’ requirement for three years due to fear of the Trump administration’s ‘targeting’ of educational institutions’ DEI measures,” reports The College Fix:
The original plan was to begin the mandate (which would require all students to take “at least two courses related to race, power, privilege and colonialism” in order to graduate) with the next school year’s freshman class (class of 2030); it now will take effect with the class of 2033, according to The Bates Student.
At the November ad hoc RPPC Committee meeting which made the decision, academics noted the delay would serve to “center care” — to protect “faculty, staff, students, and Bates as an institution from federal attention and targeting.”……….
Some of the original proposals from those working on the RPPC mandate included intertwining race, power, privilege, and colonialism into Calculus I (“situate [them] centrally and attend to them throughout the course”), requiring a biology course to cover “the fact that there is nothing biological supporting [social construction of race] hierarchies and historical injustices,” and requiring a statistics course to cover how the field was “a driver of the eugenics movement.”
Bates College has a toxic intellectual climate with little free speech. An article in The Federalist chronicles how professors at Maine’s Bates College are afraid to disagree with the assertions of left-wing students out of fear of being punished by college officials. Keith Taylor, a geology professor, was subjected to a “mock hearing” led by Dean of Faculty Malcolm Hill due to challenging a student to “provide evidence that […] Bates is anti-black and based in white supremacy” after alleging just that. Taylor was “ordered to apologize” for supposedly exhibiting “racial insensitivity,” but he declined. As a result, he was fired.
Anthropology Professor Loring Danforth was reprimanded by the dean for questioning a student’s assertion that Bates sits on “stolen” Native American land. “Do you mean legally? Technically? Morally? Historically? Traditionally?” Danforth had asked the student. He then asked “Do Native Americans own the land your parents’ house in Connecticut is on, or do your parents own it?” These reasonable questions did not warrant a reprimand or administrative reprisals.
T. Glen Lawson, a now-retired Bates chemistry professor, said the school’s “environment is toxic and freedom of expression and academic freedom have both been suppressed in the past few years.”
Classes on race and colonialism often peddle the false notion that countries are underdeveloped due to colonialism. In reality, Third World countries that were not colonized are less economically advanced than those that were colonized, as the father of modern Liberia, William Tubman, noted. Tubman, who served as Liberia’s president from 1944 to 1971, observed that Liberia was economically poorer than its neighbors because it had not had “the benefits of colonization.” Colonization of Third World countries usually made them more agriculturally and economically productive, eventually curbed the practice of slavery, and led to the abolition of barbaric practices like suttee (the burning of widows on their husband’s funeral pyre). On the other hand, many people were killed by colonizers in places like the Congo, Namibia, and Tanzania.
Through colonization, Western countries exported stable, innovative forms of government to the Third World, including democracy, individual rights, government accountability, and separation of powers between different branches of government. The governmental-stability benefits are described in a 2023 study in Kyklos, the International Review for Social Sciences, by economist Trung Vu.
Most people in many pre-colonization African societies were slaves: For example, the slave population accounted for two-thirds to three-quarters of the total population of Songhay-Zarma people, who created the Songhai Empire. That empire was the successor of the similarly heavily-enslaved Mali Empire celebrated in progressive high-school textbooks, whose most famous leader, Mansa Musa, went on a pilgrimage to Mecca with an entourage of 12,000 slaves to cater to his every desire.
