Your nonsilence is admirable. Nowadays lowly and fringe status is something to strive for (as long as it is earned in the search for truth)! There are two silent treatments---one that you get when you ask someone to justify DEI and they are unable to explain it and justify it--the other is when people do not talk to you in the hallways because you do not support the DEI bureaucracy so they assume you are a racist based on Ibram X. Kendi's definition of a racist not the definition found in dictionaries of the English language.
In institutions dominated by Critical Social Justice Ideology, to profess and indeed to question anything that outlies the ideology-in-use is to end one's professorship. Believe me, I know this from personal experience.
We (and I use the word loosely) are restructuring the School of Integrative Plant Science. The new structure has four associate directions, one who will ensure that Teaching matters, one who will ensure that research matters, and one who will ensure that extension matters. Can you guess which one will be involved in faculty hiring and development (tenure and promotions)? The answer is, the fourth associate director, the one who will ensure equity and inclusion matters. What does this structure say about our (and I use that word loosely) priorities? I would say (and did say at the faculty meeting) that teaching, research, and extension are no longer priorities in this particular STEM group. SAD!!!!
I mentioned in a department zoom meeting that we were no longer social scientists; we had become part of the university's DEI propaganda team, first and foremost. Already an outcast due to my lowly status as an adjunct (who is going to hire a conservative to a tenure track position these days?), I am getting comfortable with the silent treatment. This all feels somehow like junior high school.
It truly is like junior high school only the bullies have grown up and they now have the power to destroy people's entire professional lives simply because they question or refuse to signal fidelity to the dominant ideology-in-use. Prepare to be iced out, silenced out, and pushed out by any means necessary should you dare to speak up. But please, keep speaking and broadening the audience because not everyone agrees even if they are too afraid to voice their opinion lest they suffer the same consequences.
Take care with the equity and inclusion folks and ask them explicitly what ideological framework are they using to define equity, especially if they speak about 'racial' equity.' the ideologies-in-use matter and there is more than one ideology despite what any expert may tell you. I outline some of this in my essay Race Ideology-in-Practice: Racial Equity in American Learning Environments available at: https://freeblackthought.substack.com/p/race-ideology-in-practice
Encouraging. Our “inclusive” colleagues would support you in the ability to think aloud and profess your opinions (only one caveat: they have to be based on their manual). As for students, I think (scratch that… I know) many of them are so convinced that every professor these days is an aspiring Marxist (using this term loosely), they do not dare to challenge them in or outside classroom lest they get punished, with full endorsement of the superiors. More traditional professors do not insert their politics into classroom (nor should they), so there is no way for students to know they can speak freely on any topic.
Solutions would be to follow the UChicago initiatives for free speech or have several exemplary merit-based colleges prove their worth in ranking and employment opportunities (as suggested in this forum before).
Dear Nancy,
Your nonsilence is admirable. Nowadays lowly and fringe status is something to strive for (as long as it is earned in the search for truth)! There are two silent treatments---one that you get when you ask someone to justify DEI and they are unable to explain it and justify it--the other is when people do not talk to you in the hallways because you do not support the DEI bureaucracy so they assume you are a racist based on Ibram X. Kendi's definition of a racist not the definition found in dictionaries of the English language.
In institutions dominated by Critical Social Justice Ideology, to profess and indeed to question anything that outlies the ideology-in-use is to end one's professorship. Believe me, I know this from personal experience.
We (and I use the word loosely) are restructuring the School of Integrative Plant Science. The new structure has four associate directions, one who will ensure that Teaching matters, one who will ensure that research matters, and one who will ensure that extension matters. Can you guess which one will be involved in faculty hiring and development (tenure and promotions)? The answer is, the fourth associate director, the one who will ensure equity and inclusion matters. What does this structure say about our (and I use that word loosely) priorities? I would say (and did say at the faculty meeting) that teaching, research, and extension are no longer priorities in this particular STEM group. SAD!!!!
I mentioned in a department zoom meeting that we were no longer social scientists; we had become part of the university's DEI propaganda team, first and foremost. Already an outcast due to my lowly status as an adjunct (who is going to hire a conservative to a tenure track position these days?), I am getting comfortable with the silent treatment. This all feels somehow like junior high school.
It truly is like junior high school only the bullies have grown up and they now have the power to destroy people's entire professional lives simply because they question or refuse to signal fidelity to the dominant ideology-in-use. Prepare to be iced out, silenced out, and pushed out by any means necessary should you dare to speak up. But please, keep speaking and broadening the audience because not everyone agrees even if they are too afraid to voice their opinion lest they suffer the same consequences.
Take care with the equity and inclusion folks and ask them explicitly what ideological framework are they using to define equity, especially if they speak about 'racial' equity.' the ideologies-in-use matter and there is more than one ideology despite what any expert may tell you. I outline some of this in my essay Race Ideology-in-Practice: Racial Equity in American Learning Environments available at: https://freeblackthought.substack.com/p/race-ideology-in-practice
Encouraging. Our “inclusive” colleagues would support you in the ability to think aloud and profess your opinions (only one caveat: they have to be based on their manual). As for students, I think (scratch that… I know) many of them are so convinced that every professor these days is an aspiring Marxist (using this term loosely), they do not dare to challenge them in or outside classroom lest they get punished, with full endorsement of the superiors. More traditional professors do not insert their politics into classroom (nor should they), so there is no way for students to know they can speak freely on any topic.
Solutions would be to follow the UChicago initiatives for free speech or have several exemplary merit-based colleges prove their worth in ranking and employment opportunities (as suggested in this forum before).
Good premise from Stanford. Cheers!