A recent report issued by the Heritage Foundation and a YouTube video produced by Booksmart Studios provide insight into the fundamental problems with the way in which universities have dealt with has been called ‘The Great Awokening.’
The problems with university Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) trainings run much deeper than the limitations of training versus education. The real harm stems from the worldview behind DEI efforts that divide people into oppressor and oppressed. https://t.co/ekrosZrt5A https://t.co/VGozrHMdSY
— Heritage Center for Education Policy (@HeritageOnEd) December 27, 2021
The Heritage report exposed the “inclusion delusion” that leads American universities to create, fund, and expand divisive diversity and inclusion offices in compliance with Woke dictates.
Authors Jay Greene and James Paul argued that “university DEI staff are better understood as political activists with a narrow and often radical political agenda rather than promoters of welcoming and inclusive environments.”
Greene and Paul looked at “the Twitter feeds of 741 DEI personnel at 65 universities to find their public communications regarding Israel and, for comparison purposes, China.” They discovered that these officials tweeted three times as often about Israel as about China, and that 96% of the former were “critical of the Jewish state.”
The “hyperbolic and obsessive criticism of Israel” expressed in the examined tweets proves that “DEI staff at universities actually function as political activists, articulating and enforcing a narrow and radical ideological agenda,” Greene and Paul wrote.
Nevertheless, as Heritage reported in July, “promoting DEI has become a primary function of higher education, with DEI staff making up an average 3.4 positions for every 100 tenured faculty.”
The same conclusions are reached by Carleton College professors Amna Khalid and Jeff Snyder in a Booksmart Studios video examining the DEI “trainings” that colleges and universities have “enthusiastically embraced” following the death of George Floyd.
There are 10 ways to tell woke training and genuine education apart, according to Khalid and Snyder:
- training “makes assumptions” while education “challenges assumptions”
- training “is packaged” while education “cannot be contained”
- training “reward compliance” while education “rewards curiosity”
- training is “having to say something” while education is “having something to say”
- training “tells you what to think” while education “teaches you how to think”
- training “answers questions” while education “poses questions”
- training is “generic” while education is “all about context”
- training “simplifies the world” while education “reveals its complexity”
- training “promotes conformity” while education “promotes independence”
- training is “performative” while education is “transformative”
“Training is woefully inadequate when it comes to confronting social problems” because it is superficial and divisive, the professors argued.
In his 2010 book Brainwashed: How Universities Indoctrinate America’s Youth, Ben Shapiro pointed out that “the vast majority of the professoriate is leftist” and that its aim was to brainwash its students “to believe fervently in the tenets of liberalism.”
In 2021, as Victor Davis Hanson and others have pointed out, the federal government itself is subsidizing woke diversity and inclusion offices that seek to turn students into progressive activists.
