The Grift That Keeps on Grifting: the Troubling Issue on Campus

“One of the most common questions posed by those trying to fight this is: What can we do to stop this? As someone who works in education and higher learning, I can provide three potential options…”

As fall approaches, a new school year begins on campuses across North America with the vision of hope. That is misleading, of course, because hope in education has been relegated to a computer screen and a choppy Skype or Microsoft Teams call. Although there is data that online learning is not the most effective form of pedagogy, there might be some benefits to students not being on campus, given a troubling issue that has been happening at colleges for quite some time now.

What is this issue? First, let us travel to the University of Michigan, Dearborn Campus where the school was criticized recently for promoting segregated cafés on campus: one for BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) and another for “Non-POC” (non-people of color). Another incident from the United Kingdom saw Larissa Kennedy, president of the National Union of Students, suggest that undergraduate students should stay home unless they are “poor, black, disabled, gay, or transgendered” to reduce the transmission of the Coronavirus (COVID-19). Another involved a campaign at Rochester Institute of Technology to pressure white men specifically to devote themselves to the “anti-racism” agenda.

What this seems to be—at least in the American context—is a clear violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination in public based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin. So why is it being allowed? It all has to do with the shift towards far-left progressivism on college campuses over the past two or more decades. It originated from the intersectionality of Kimberlé Crenshaw, morphed into the white privilege of Peggy McIntosh, and then progressed to Ibram Kendi’s concept of anti-racism. Programs such as gender studies, feminist studies, and critical theory were the original homes for these teachings, but they have now expanded into fields such as law, business, education, and—in some instances—STEM (see the #ShutDownSTEM movement). This has attracted much criticism, especially from individuals such as Bret Weinstein, James Lindsay, Peter Boghossian, and Helen Pluckrose, all of whose writings I highly recommend.