Big Brother is Telling you Where to Focus THE WORK
Big Brother is Telling you Where to Focus THE WORK
UMass Boston's grand scholarly challenges show us exactly where the Leadership's priorities lie, and where yours are expected to lie.
As part of its all-encompassing strategic plan, the institution for Equity and Performative Social Justice, formerly known as UMass Boston, launched a questionnaire among faculty and staff to select six Grand Scholarly Challenges, in order to decide where we all have to focus time, energy and research resources, academic freedom be damned.
Many suggestions were made by Science and Math faculty - thinking that as we have such exciting research in data science, quantum computing and cancer, among others, some of these topics must get picked, right?
Wrong! in the end the following six challenges were selected through the transparent, democratic process. Kids, can you find what they all have in common?
Climate equity/justice and coastal ecology
Health equity: Cells to Societies
Local Problems - Global Solutions
Overcoming Compounded Economic Inequities
Learning for the Future
Democracy and Justice Through Collective Action
Data science? Nooooo. Quantum computing? Nooooo. Cancer research? Nooooo. Cybersecurity? Hell nooooooo. Where do you think you are? in an actual research university? Ha! Only equity, justice, collective action (because individualism is whiteness) and a couple of vague, meaningless items that can mean anything and nothing. This is where we are expected to focus our time, energy and research resources from now on, whether we like it or not.
Our Vice Supreme Leader says over and over again that UMass Boston’s strategic plan was devised following a “deep and broad participation” of the entire campus community, but what he really means is - “we looked deeply into the grievance studies scholarly challenges, while broadly ignoring the sciences”.
This is not surprising, as the Grand Scholarly Challenges committee, just like the entire strategic planning team, was carefully pre-selected and the feedback form probably went straight to spam, so that our Leaders can keep pretending that we all want what they want and feign indignation when we dare to push back.