Anti-Racist Rules for Distinguished Faculty
Anti-Racist Rules for Distinguished Faculty
Reflections on the "Reflections from Distinguished Faculty 2021" UMB public lecture, 11/22/2022
The 2021 Distinguished Faculty talk gave us a rare insight into the hive-mind of DEI-inspired STEM education and how it is being used to decolonize STEM and abolish any semblance of rigor, merit or standards. Here are the main talking points, coming soon to a classroom or to a research lab near you.
Every introductory STEM course must pass everyone. Why pass the large number of unprepared students who were bound to fail or would do better changing majors, you ask? The answer is simple. This way we can move the problem one course up, pocket the extra tuition money and use it to hire more Vice Provosts for Anti-Racist education with degrees from Oberlin. Win-win!
If someone misses a midterm, don't ask for a doctor's note because
women and minorities are afraid of doctors. This way we perpetuate the fear, cause more sickness and suspicion, and keep the academic standards low and nice. The rule does not specify what happens if a white student misses the midterm.
If a student comes and tells you about zir family obligations, change the curriculum. End up with only the first three weeks of class to prepare on your own and fill the rest with the off-the-shelf DEI and anti-racism materials. This way we ensure that more bridges fall and that our own slow-ish kids won’t have to struggle with the course material and compete with talented students who have actual real-life struggles.
Science as it is serves capitalism (corporations, military, pharma), and as such, needs to be re-imagined. Re-imagined as what, you ask? We tell you over and over again that we have no clue. The only thing we know is that it will be utopian, just let us abolish everything first and maybe think about it later. What could possibly go wrong? In the mean time we will ditch evil capitalism and fund our research with baked goods sales. Just don’t culturally appropriate other people’s food, eh?
The model of an expert teaching a class needs to be reimagined. Professor and students must participate on equal footing, despite the fact that you spent so many years of your life becoming an expert in your field and your students are barely out of high school and pay a lot of money to learn from you. This rule does not apply to administrators vs. faculty. This is NOT an equal relationship and they still get to order you around and micromanage every inch of your life.
Keep the COVID-era DIY “home labs” as regular classes. This is our favorite trick - the best way to make a permanent change is to start with a temporary emergency measure change taken during a time of confusion, fear and isolation. Besides, it went so well. Why change a winning horse?
Let’s recapitulate. A majority-minority institution denies its students a proper assessment, curriculum, training, scientific knowledge, and learning experience (both lectures and labs) … Wait, didn’t you say that the majority of them are minority students… Wait, isn’t it, hmm …racist?
The anti-racists who are behind the bullet points above would never admit to being racists. Yet, they may be more receptive to the lines of reasoning coming from their own team. Here is Baudrillard:
[P]risons are there to hide that it is the social [order] in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, that is carceral… Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest [of the capitalism lies] is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real… It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology) but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real…
- Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (1981)
Performative anti-racism1 is a simulacrum of the genuine anti-racism. As such, it is worse than racism: it makes us believe that the real problems that perpetuate the REAL structural racism - bad schools, low salaries, weak unions, etc. - are no longer real, while “colonialism in STEM education” is real.
…—throughout the political spectrum—… [“Harvard, Herschel Walker and ‘Tokenism’”, John McWhorter, New York Times, Nov. 29, 2022.]