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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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