Microaggression, Macro-Crazy

City Journal ^ | Summer 2015 | By Heather Mac Donald

[Brad from Tennessee]

Early this year, the University of California’s president, Janet Napolitano, asked all deans and department chairs in the university’s ten campuses to undergo training in overcoming their “implicit biases” toward women and minorities. The department heads also needed training, according to the UC president, in how to avoid committing microaggressions, those acts of alleged racism that are invisible to the naked eye. A more insulting and mindless exercise would be hard to imagine. But Napolitano’s seminar possesses a larger significance: it demolishes any remaining hope that college administrators possess a firmer grip on reality than the narcissistic students over whom they preside.

The “Fostering Inclusive Excellence: Strategies and Tools for Department Chairs and Deans” seminar presumes that University of California faculty are so bigoted that they will refuse to hire the most qualified candidate for a professorship if that candidate happens to be female or an “underrepresented minority”—i.e., black or Hispanic. Attendees at the seminar were subjected to an “interactive theater scenario” called “Ready to Vote?” that showed white male computer-science professors on a fictional hiring committee belittling females and failing to “value diversity.” The author of the scenario, a professor of performance studies and ethnic studies at the University of California, San Diego, seems never to have attended a faculty-hiring committee meeting in her life. Nor, it would seem, has Janet Napolitano. . .

[SWAMPSNIPER]

[SunkenCiv]

They are both amusing and bemusing.

[generally]

Here’s an idea: How about a school for those interested in STEM subjects with ZERO requirements in the liberal arts. If students need to learn about literature or philosophy or non-rigorous subjects, they can take those classes somewhere else. That would have been my dream school when I was a student! I think it would make a lot of sense. You can have one school that focuses on STEM and another that focuses on other subjects.

As an employer, I don’t care if my scientists and engineers know about French literature or music or Impressionist art and I certainly don’t care about gender studies or ethnic studies. Yes, it’s nice to know about things outside your area of expertise and work, but you can pick those up easily just by reading, being observant, going to a few museums, etc. Passing classes in those squishy fields is most often an exercise in shoveling BS (that the professor agrees with) into a long paper.

[Impy]

Let’s all try to stop with our microaggressions and serve them up some megaturbosuperaggressions.

[dfwgator]

MICROAGGRESSION!