The Dolores Umbridges of Marxist Education

From The Problem with Universities Demanding "Diversity Statements" by Mark J. Perry.

he quotation of the day on university corruption and the lack of diversity when it comes to ideology is from Walter E. William’s column this week "More University Corruption":

For most of the 20th century, universities were dedicated to the advancement of knowledge. There was open exchange and competition in the marketplace of ideas. Different opinions were argued and respected. Most notably in the social sciences, social work, the humanities, education, and law, this is no longer the case. The most important thing to today’s university communities is diversity of race, ethnicity, sex and economic class, on which they have spent billions of dollars. Conspicuously absent is diversity of ideology.

Students are taught that all cultural values are morally equivalent. That’s ludicrous. Here are a few questions for those who make such a claim. Is forcible female genital mutilation, as practiced in nearly 30 sub-Saharan African and Middle Eastern countries, a morally equivalent cultural value? Slavery is currently practiced in Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Chad and Sudan; is it morally equivalent? In most of the Middle East, there are numerous limitations placed on women, such as prohibitions on driving, employment and education. Under Islamic law in some countries, female adulterers face death by stoning. Thieves face the punishment of having their hands severed. Homosexuality is a crime punishable by death in some countries. Are these cultural values morally equivalent, superior or inferior to Western values?

The latest diversity trend in higher education is the increasingly frequent requirement of including a “diversity statement” when applying for an academic position, and in some cases when applying for tenure and/or promotion. Here’s what Dr. Jeffrey Flier, Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor and Higginson Professor of Physiology and Medicine, and former Dean of the Faculty of Medicine at Harvard University said on Twitter last November:

As a dean of a major academic institution, I could not have said this. But I will now. Requiring such statements in applications for appointments and promotions is an affront to academic freedom, and diminishes the true value of diversity, equity of inclusion by trivializing it.

Along with Dr. Flier, here are some reasons I find those diversity uniformity statements objectionable.

What is called a “diversity statement” is essentially a pledge of allegiance to higher education’s orthodox and uniform agenda in its ongoing battle against a color-blind, gender-blind, merit-driven academia. Successful diversity statements will be expected to support an unspoken ideology that emphasizes group identity, an assumption of group victimization, and a claim for group-based entitlements. Diversity statements compromise both academic freedom and academic standards as “purity tests” of an applicant’s worthiness in adherence to a uniform, leftist-liberal-progressive view of “diversity.”

Anger on the right about the postmodernist critical theorists in universities can get a little tedious even when their concern is warranted.

However, I came across this example from the Psychology Department of the University of Florida. It is practically Soviet in its quiet menace. Not a university but a reeducation camp.

TO DIVERSITY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE

The Counseling Psychology Program at the University of Florida is a multicultural and diverse community. As members of the Counseling Psychology community, we strive to learn from each other in an atmosphere of positive engagement and mutual respect. To this end, the program endorses, and our training reflects, the APA Board of Educational Affairs Statement on Preparing Professional Psychologists to Serve a Diverse Public (see Appendix A of the Student Handbook). Students in the program are required to read this statement and confirm that they will abide by it, and they are evaluated accordingly.

Our commitment to diversity and social justice means that we strive to attend to issues of power, privilege, and oppression in courses, research, clinical practica, and professional service. In these efforts, we are guided by feminist and multicultural principles summarized by Goodman et al. (2004) as a useful compass for social justice work in counseling psychology. These principles are:

1. Ongoing self-examination, including vigilance regarding power dynamics and the assumptions and values underlying our views, goals, and commitments.

2. Sharing power, including transparency about power differences, engaging in collaborative processes when appropriate, and fostering the power of marginalized individuals and groups.

3. Amplifying and attending to the voices and experiences of groups and individuals with relatively less power.

4. Consciousness raising by attending to how individual or group difficulties may be shaped by political, societal, institutional, interpersonal, and other contextual power dynamics.

5. Focusing on people’s strengths and engaging these strengths to address challenges, including working toward social change.

6. Promoting self-determination with the people we work with by developing tools that are informed by the needs and experiences of the constituent communities.

We acknowledge that the vision and principles articulated above are not achieved completely by any individual or training experience. Rather, this vision and the principles guide our shared responsibility for ongoing efforts to enact our commitment to diversity and social justice in our professional work.

For further detail, see Goodman, Liang, Helms, Latta, Sparks, & Weintraub (2004). Training counseling psychologists as social justice agents: Feminist and multicultural principles in action. The Counseling Psychologist, 32, 793-837.

Several striking things.

- The irony that they cannot see the contradiction between:

We strive to learn from each other in an atmosphere of positive engagement and mutual respect.

followed immediately by the demand of a loyalty oath to an alien repressive doctrine.

- The tone-deafness of:

1. Ongoing self-examination.

Do they not hear the echo of Marxist reeducation camps? From Wikipedia

The concept of "Self-criticism" is a component of some Marxist schools of thought, primarily that of Marxism-Leninism, Maoism, Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, and Stalinism. The concept was first introduced by Joseph Stalin in his work The Foundations of Leninism[23] in 1925, and later expanded upon in 1928 in "Against Vulgarising the Slogan of Self-Criticism". The Marxist concept of Self-Criticism is also present in the works of Mao Zedong who was heavily influenced by Stalin, dedicating an entire chapter of Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong to the issue.

In some communist states, party members who had fallen out of favor with the nomenklatura were sometimes forced to undergo "self-criticism" sessions, producing either written or verbal statements detailing their ideological errors and affirming their renewed belief in the Party line. Self-criticism, however, did not guarantee political rehabilitation, and often offenders were still expelled from the Party, or in some cases even executed.

In the Soviet Union, "criticism and self-criticism" were known as kritika i samokritika (Russian: критика и самокритика).

In the People's Republic of China, self-criticism—called ziwo pipan (自我批判) or jiǎntǎo (检讨)—is an important part of Maoist practice. Mandatory self-criticism as a part of political rehabilitation or prior to execution—common under Mao, ended by Deng Xiaoping, and partially revived by Xi Jinping—is known as a struggle session, in reference to class struggle.

Under the Khmer Rouge, self-criticism sessions were known as rien sot, meaning "religious education". In his memoir The Gate, François Bizot recalls observing the Khmer Rouge engaging in frequent self-criticism to reinforce group cohesion during his imprisonment in rural Cambodia in 1971.

- The irony of:

Sharing power, including transparency about power differences, engaging in collaborative processes when appropriate, and fostering the power of marginalized individuals and groups.

They, the Marxists of the university and therefore with close to absolute power, are demanding the relatively powerless students share power with others less fortunate. All while their powerful Marxist professors coerce, suppress, and punish (if they are not willing to commit to allegiance to Marxist precepts) those very same powerless students. Not only self-contradictory, ironical, unethical, and immoral but unseemly as well.

- The blatant professing of Marxism or the ignorance of the parallels with Marxism.

From Wikipedia's article on the New Soviet Man:

The New Soviet man or New Soviet person (Russian: новый советский человек novy sovetsky chelovek), as postulated by the ideologists of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, was an archetype of a person with specific qualities that were said to be emerging as dominant among all citizens of the Soviet Union, irrespective of the country's cultural, ethnic, and linguistic diversity, creating a single Soviet people, Soviet nation.

From the ideology's roots in the mid 19th and early 20th century, ideologists of Communism have postulated that within the new society of pure communism and the social conditions therein, a New Man and New Woman would develop with qualities reflecting surrounding circumstances of post-scarcity and unprecedented scientific development. For example, Leon Trotsky wrote in 1924 in Literature and Revolution about the "Communist man", "man of the future":

Man will make it his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise his instincts to the heights of consciousness, to make them transparent, to extend the wires of his will into hidden recesses, and thereby to raise himself to a new plane, to create a higher social biologic type, or, if you please, a superman.

- The blatant hypocrisy of:

Promoting self-determination with the people we work with by developing tools that are informed by the needs and experiences of the constituent communities.

In what logical universe is the requirement that students completely submit to a repressive ideology consistent with also insisting that those students promote self-determination.

These people are credentialed idiots of the worst sort. No wonder the conservative press obsesses about them.