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Have you ever taken a diversity seminar? I'm surprised by your lack of cynicism.
70% will eye-rolling harassment boilerplate libspeak ("LaShondra and Xavier Alejandro Jose were talking about the latest Marvel Movie, but then Pete said that Black Widow's tits were too small. Is this sexual harassment?").25% will be progs smuggling in obnoxious consensus-building ("Science says that only white people can be racist.").
~5% will be the teacher saying something truly heinous and deranged ("My three year-old cried when Trump called E. Jean Carroll a liar.").
You're not predicting that academia will suddenly find conservatives to teach the "Justice" course, right? The text about allowing disagreements is just boilerplate.
In a college setting, most people will go along with whatever is presented. But most people won't have their minds changed either. Probably the average college student will agree with the majority of what's being taught, in a loose sense. A few students will speak out. In my experience, those students will tend to be men, especially non-whites who have one foot in another culture but are functionally American. Some of them will go a bit too far and say something that gets them in trouble. The rest will be passed through, because the university doesn't really want to deal with angry students complaining that Professor Socjus is failing them for saying tax cuts aren't racist.
There is no self-aware life-preparing edge. The people who will implement this course believe that academia and activism are compatible, not that they'll cynically teach students how to navigate lying in the workplace.
Any such course is almost certainly a waste of everybody's time. But for a certain kind of bureaucrat and moderate lib, diversity seminar kumbayah sing-alongs are catnip. They really just believe that DEI is good, and if we implement more DEI, we'll get more good.
I predict that there will be extremely low standards of rigour at these courses, and most students won’t bother actually attending to express disagreement.
It really depends on the druthers of the professors involved. In my college experience, engineering and more "serious" classes were lax about attendance, blow-off courses were mid-lax about attendance, humanities and college make-believe busy-work courses were much more strict. The less objective material that could be learned from a textbook at home, the more a professor might tend to enforce attendance.
Secretly, those who disagree with the material will be some of the likeliest to show up, because even if they individually keep their heads down, they will want to see someone else argue against the material. (My own bad habit of arguing against the material taught me that there was always a sizeable number of students who would approach me quietly later and thank me for saying something.)
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By the grace of the Lord God Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen, I have not. I am too old (and never went to college) so this stuff was not around in my youth. It may well come up in work, but I might just about be retirement age and not have to sit through this by then.
It being Caplan's place of employment, I wondered if there was a tiny chance that it wasn't all Persons Of Hair Colour. Can anyone tell me what George Mason U is like from that angle?
Ah, the cynicism is there from my side. As I said, the poor divils are going to go out into the workplace where this stuff is all around (at least for another few years) so they'll be exposed to it anyway, better that the more hard-headed of them get early exposure so they know how to bluff around the corporate requirements.
I had to take a BS cultural diversity class in college. The professor was a black female adjunct who started off day one by trying unsuccessfully to create racial and sex-based divisions between the students. In day three or four, she snapped at me in class for “questioning” her and thereby “undermining her authority.” I was frankly stunned. I pretty regularly asked questions in other classes if something sounded off to my ears and even directly argued with professors. In all those previous classes, the professors loved it (at least I was engaged, which couldn’t be said for many of my classmates). After I challenged her for including inaccurate information in her presentations, she stopped uploading them to the class site. These were insane errors too, like claiming that Max Weber, close friend and colleague of Martin Luther, invented the Protestant Work Ethic as a way to discriminate against Jews and Catholics, which in turn served as a model for later Jim Crow laws (I swear I’m not making any of that up). Her final straw was when she said something blatantly wrong in class, and one of the other students turned around to me and asked, “Is that right?” The fire in the prof’s eyes was quite a sight to behold. She naturally failed me, but fortunately, I’d been meeting with my advisor after every class to document the issues, so I was able to get the grade overturned on appeal.
That’s the kind of bullshit that these diversity classes make people put up with. If you have even the slightest inkling that the professors teaching those classes will treat students fairly or allow multiple points of view, you need to spend more time with The Nybbler. Maybe some his cynicism will rub off.
Someone should have asked him for his longevity secrets.
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Damn. I saw some questionable things done by ideological professors, but never anything like that. Certainly nothing that impacted my grade so forcefully, though there were a few times I say, got a B on a paper when a paper of similar quality in another class would have gotten an A, and the topic of my paper directly disagreed with the professor's ideological position. But never anywhere close to failing.
There were definitely some eyebrow-raising religious things too, I remember the most ideological professor I took a class from suggested once that the Trinity was an exclusively Catholic belief, while most Christian denominations venerated saints (this really depends on how one defines "most").
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George Mason U is more conservative than the modal university, but let's not overstate it.
GMU's law school is a well-regarded pipeline to legal jobs in DC. This has given the school a solid network of grateful, connected alumni, and made it a mild bastion for conservative ideas. The law school was renamed for Scalia in 2016, and Koch brothers money followed. For a certain kind of shallow person, that association was all the proof necessary of the school's conservstive bent, which reputation has actually probably done more to lean the school toward the conservative side than would have otherwise happened. (For example, Brett Kavanaugh was given a faculty position there after his confirmation to the Supreme Court.)
The Economics department supposedly has a libertarian bent. There was a minor scandal where it came out that the Kochs were allowed to pick candidates for the department in exchange for their donations.
GMU is the largest public school in Virginia. Despite Virginia's recent reputation as a blue state, it still elects Republicans to lead the state government, and this has kept its political hands at least somewhat tied. But political comprimises are never really respected in American universities -- Youngkin's restrictions have all been challenged in court, and will probably not be respected even if he wins. (It's the same as college administrators across the country admitting that they will work around the recent ban on affirmative action as best they can.)
The school automatically admits top-performing students from across Virginia regardless of anything else, which restricts a certain level of affirmative action admissions gamesmanship in the student body. But I really don't think that makes much of a difference. Selective schools like the Ivies are not especially more woke than broad-body state schools.
GMU is still a university in the modern day, still comprised of a professor class that networks and affiliates across universities, still broadly left, still operating a modern DEI and Title IX regime. That it has carved out some role for conservatives makes GMU one of the more intellectually free schools in the country, but I suspect this is a low bar.
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