There are requirements to graduate from college. I can tolerate those for a foreign language and lab science, along with the credit benchmarks to earn a degree. That’s not controversial. Most of those credits are geared toward your major, with a few electives sprinkled in to get over the top. That was when college was normal.
Yes, it tilted to the Left, but it wasn’t insane with this Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion stuff. Being brainwashed by the tenets of cultural Marxism was never considered a requirement to graduate college. Still, two-thirds of higher learning institutions shove this down their students’ throats if they want to earn a degree (via NY Post):
Most American colleges and universities require the completion of courses that emphasize Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI)-related topics to graduate, according to a new report surveying public and private institutions.
Speech First, a group advocating for First Amendment rights on US campuses, released an investigation on Thursday that found 165 of 248 selected institutions — from American University to Williams College — mandate DEI-related classes to meet general education requirements.
The classes “place students into identitarian groupings based on racial, sexual, and political characteristics to create a rigid framework amongst students where they only see each other as either the ‘oppressor’ or the ‘oppressed,’” the executive summary of the 33-page report states.
[…]
“Consequently, this erosion of merit-based principles and build-up of anti-American sentiment has had detrimental impacts on the quality of education and has fostered an environment where conservative voices are systematically marginalized, discredited, and silenced,” the report states.
[…]
Notable private institutions shamed by Speech First included Boston College, Brandeis, Carnegie Mellon, Duke, Fordham, Georgetown, MIT, Purdue, Syracuse, Vassar and Wellesley.
What a hellhole. It also doesn’t help the DEI cause when, like some college presidents this year, the officers in this division are busted for plagiarism (via Washington Free Beacon):
The chief diversity, equity, and inclusion officer of Columbia University's medical school, Alade McKen, plagiarized extensively in his doctoral dissertation, lifting entire pages of material, without attribution, from sources that include Wikipedia, according to a complaint submitted to the university…
The allegations implicate approximately a fifth of McKen's 163-page dissertation, "'UBUNTU' I am because we are: A case study examining the experiences of an African-centered Rites of Passage program within a community-based organization," submitted to Iowa State University's School of Education in 2021. More than two of those pages are a near-verbatim facsimile of Wikipedia's entry on "Afrocentric education," which is not cited anywhere in the dissertation.
Other pages lift paragraphs from well-known African scholars, including the University of Rwanda's Chika Ezeanya-Esiobu, while making small tweaks to their prose, such as reordering certain clauses or changing a "were" to a "was."
Some of the scholars McKen allegedly plagiarized appear in the dissertation's bibliography but not in in-text citations. Others, like Ezeanya-Esiobu, an expert on "indigenous knowledge" who has worked with numerous international agencies, including the World Bank, aren't cited at all.
Some colleges have decided to get ahead of the curve and dissolve these departments. The University of Arkansas is in the process to dismantling this division. In Florida, Pasco–Hernando State College was forced to shut down its DEI initiative after a new law prohibited state funds from being directed toward these woke agenda items.
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