"Highlights of Diversity Forum 2013: Day 1."

Highlights of the highlights:

1. UCLA Professor Sylvia Hurtado said — as paraphrased by the UW student newspaper — that universities "must place student identities at the center of diversity initiatives... revise their practices to accommodate students’ various identities, and employ more advisors and caseworkers whenever possible."

2.  Columbia University Professor Donald Wing Sue talked about "microaggressions" (which was a topic on this blog a few days ago here).  Sue said: "When you are unaware of what the dynamics are and you do not have a critical race consciousness, you can not facilitate a dialogue."

3. UW Diversity Planning Committee seeks to be "a resource for the state" and also to have "the people of the state be a resource for us."

4. How to get more "underrepresented students" to go into STEM fields? There are FIGs (First-Year Interest Groups) and Mathology Boot Camp and BioHouse and Bio-Commons.

5. Vice Chancellor Darrell Bazzell said: "If we are truly to be serious about diversity and creating a diverse environment... Then we must have a diversity plan.”

"Now that leading mayoral candidates Bill de Blasio and Joe Lhota have both vowed to add two Muslim holidays to the public school calendar..."

"... advocates for other religious and ethnic groups are clamoring for their days to be recognized too."

“I think the city has to recognize (Chinese New Year),” said [Assembly Speaker Sheldon] Silver, a Democrat whose district includes Chinatown in lower Manhattan. “We don’t want to take away from the learning days, but we have to adjust the calendar appropriately to include all of the major populations that we have.”

All the major populations... what about the minor populations?

[City Councilman Daniel Dromm] introduced a resolution in July to close school on the holy day of Diwali, a festival of lights celebrated by Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs and Jains.

A spokesman for Lhota said he’d consider adding other holidays. De Blasio has said he supports adding the Chinese New Year, but his campaign wouldn’t comment on Diwali.

Where will it all end?

Imagine putting education first.

"I am not in graduate school to learn how to encourage poor souls in their sexual experimentation..."

"... nor am I receiving generous stipends of taxpayer monies from the good people of the Great State of Wisconsin to play along with fantasies or accommodate public cross-dressing."

To all and sundry alike I explicate, as best I can, such things as the clash between the Taira and the Minamoto, the rise of the Kamakura shogunate, and the decline of the imperial house in twelfth-century Japan. Everyone is welcome in my classroom, but, whether directly or indirectly, I will not implicate myself in my students’ fetishes, whatever those might be. What they do on their own time is their business; I will not be a party to it. I am exercising my right here to say, “Enough is enough.” One grows used to being thought a snarling racist–after all, others’ opinions are not my affair–but one draws the line at assisting students in their private proclivities. That is a bridge too far, and one that I, at least, will not cross.

"What's left to say about affirmative action?" Glenn Loury asks John McWhorter...

... on the occasion of the imminent Supreme Court opinion on the subject. Loury identifies himself as a former opponent of affirmative action who is now a defender. McWhorter says he's never had any problem with putting a "thumb on the scale" in order to get "a certain proportion" of diversity, but he objects to redefining "what qualifications are."

"Why would the Bronx High School of Science invest not in electron microscopes but in a museum of Jewish history when 62 percent of our kids are Asian?"

Winnie Hu in the NYT quotes Valerie J. Reidy, the principal of the Bronx High School of Science. The school, Hu notes, "started in 1938 as an all-boys school that served primarily Eastern European Jewish families in the Bronx, [but] its nearly 3,000 students today are more likely to be Asian and come from Queens and across the city."

While many schools teach Holocaust courses, few if any have assembled a trove of 900 artifacts, most of which were donated by alumni and local residents or bought at auctions over more than three decades. The 1,000-square-foot museum will include three exhibition galleries, an archive and a classroom. It is just steps away from the boys’ locker room that has been in the spotlight since three students on the boy’s track team were accused this winter of hazing a freshman teammate....

The Holocaust museum was inspired by the late Stuart Elenko, a teacher who brought an unusual level of passion to his course on the Holocaust. In 1978, Mr. Elenko started displaying Holocaust artifacts in a former microfilm room in the back of the school library....

“I think Mr. Elenko’s idea originally was to make history come alive for his students,” said Sophia Sapozhnikov, who currently teaches the Holocaust course. She noted that Mr. Elenko even held mock Nuremberg trials in his classroom to encourage students to explore the meaning of justice and moral responsibility.

Obviously, any high school — even if it specializes in science — must teach history, and having on site a significant historical archive — of any kind — can orient the school's history teaching toward methodologies that parallel or resemble the methodologies of science.

Is it a problem that the archive represents the alumni, rather than the current students? What is this concept of representation? In present-day education, we might tend to assume that each group is served by learning about itself, so that the black students deserve intense coverage of black history and so forth.

Perhaps the most scientific approach is to study things other than oneself, something new that requires exploration. But in that light, a problem might be that the subject of the Holocaust dictates such a strong point of view that students will fear that any sort of experimental attitude will be punished. Just last week, we saw a teacher in New York get into trouble over an assignment that required students to compose their own Nazi propaganda.

Presumably, the real purpose of the Holocaust archive is to teach "the meaning of justice and moral responsibility" — as the teachers of the Holocaust course have done over the years. That's something that public school teachers can do well, though they might do poorly. If I were teaching morality to very intelligent teenagers — which is what the students at the Bronx High School of Science are — I would want them to study problems that make it harder to tell what's right and wrong, that build up their powers of moral reasoning. I would avoid the material that lends itself to indoctrination. But I see the dangers there too. If everything is in the gray area, you're teaching that morality is a matter to be determined individually. Some things are unquestionably wrong, and that's a foundational lesson.

The WSJ should not have allowed a high school senior to harm her future self...

... by publishing an op-ed attributing her college rejections to her nonpossession of diversity factors — says Kira Goldenberg in the Columbia Journalism Review.

Pity the well-off white girl who has not had to struggle with identity politics or face prejudice because of who she is (wait until she realizes the “real world” still has a glass ceiling). Blaming groups that lack the inherent privilege of caucasian heterosexuals for your own bad luck in a crapshoot is a gross distortion of affirmative action, which is imperfect but remains necessary, in some form, as long as historical inequities persist. And considering the Supreme Court was hearing gay marriage cases last week, persist they do.

Goldenberg purports to care about Suzy Lee Weiss's potentially regrettable "youthful contribution to her Google search results, one that eternally allows future employers and boyfriends to find her arguing against affirmative action and disdaining diversity." Goldenberg says the WSJ was "irresponsible" to allow this naive child to display herself on the internet as "bitter" and "egocentric."

Goldenberg is, ironically, also displaying herself on the internet, and I'd say she's displaying herself as overaggressive and unfair. I just read Weiss's op-ed and it's lighthearted and self-effacing — the opposite of egocentric. She's saying I'm an ordinary kid with nothing special to put on my application, and then she mocks herself for being "[a]n underachieving selfish teenager," chattering out a bunch of phony excuses, and she signs off saying that she needs to go watch TV.

I wouldn't be surprised if Weiss shares Goldenberg's attitude about diversity policies. It seems to me that Goldenberg flipped out at one line — "If it were up to me, I would've been any of the diversities" — and completely lost her capacity to perceive humor.

Talk about embarrassing yourself on the internet!

Clemson's disability awareness day criticized for feeding stereotypes and stirring pity.

The event — awkwardly titled Walk & Roll in My Shoes — was to have professors/administrators paired with disabled students and somehow simulating the disability. Put a person who doesn't need a wheelchair in a wheelchair and so forth.

“I think that a simulation event of any kind -- whether it’s try on poverty for a day, or try on race for a day, or try on a queer identity for a day -- raises problems,” said Jillian Weise, an assistant professor of English. “It assumes that a nondisabled participant can understand disabilities totally and completely by wearing goggles or by wearing headphones.”

Weise, who walks with a prosthetic leg, said the event negates the personal experiences of living with a disability, instead promoting a superficial understanding of disabilities through a kind of parody. Relegating students with disabilities to the role of “shadows” will also fail to raise awareness, Weise said.

“We need to be more visible, and ‘shadow’ implies a nonperson, a nonentity, and the word ‘shadow’ is related on a literary basis to ghost, to death,” Weise said. “At this moment, we need to see persons with disabilities being successful and in positions of power.”

"Obama pushing to diversify federal judiciary amid GOP delays."

Headline at The Washington Post — for article that has the top placement on the front page).

In Florida, President Obama has nominated the first openly gay black man to sit on a federal district court. In New York, he has nominated the first Asian American lesbian. And his pick for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit? The first South Asian.

Reelected with strong support from women, ethnic minorities and gays, Obama is moving quickly to change the face of the federal judiciary by the end of his second term, setting the stage for another series of drawn-out confrontations with Republicans in Congress.

This is such a ridiculous Obama puff piece. Obama pushing to diversify the federal judiciary? Like it's an Obama innovation?! I can't remember when Presidents didn't go out of their way pick federal judges from various minority groups.

WaPo is obviously using this diversity hook to criticize Republican resistance to liberal nominees. Does anyone in their right mind believe the GOP objects to these nominees because of their particular diversity factors.

It's a very long article, and the childish level of the Obama PR is so embarrassing I feel I should simply look away....

The new wave of nominations is part of an effort by Obama to cement a legacy that long outlives his presidency and makes the court system more closely resemble the changing society it governs, administration officials said.

Oh, administration officials said? Just take dictation, why don't you? Did these officials use the phrase "cement a legacy that long outlives his presidency" or did you concoct yourselves?

By the way, what U.S. President doesn't have a legacy that long outlives his presidency? How much "cement" is really needed for us not to forget a President?

But I do get the point of Presidents trying to extend their political power by relocating it in the judiciary. That's no innovation. That's an old, old tradition in America....

The Multicultural Student Center at the University of Wisconsin shifts from "a focus on cultural diversity to one of social justice."

The University's website reports what it calls a "transformation."

“We’re building on the legacy of this campus,” says [MSC director Donte] Hilliard. “A social justice approach is our interpretation of the Wisconsin Idea. If the borders of the campus are the borders of the state, or the world, the educational access that we get by being here in Wisconsin includes a responsibility to help transform our surroundings into more just, equitable places.”...

"It’s comforting to think, 'If we just fix the race or gender issue, the rest will be fine…' No. Oppressions are linked. We can’t get racial justice but keep destroying the environment. In America, who lives in neighborhoods with the worst environmental problems? Poor people – who are, overwhelmingly, people of color."

(If you don't know what "Wisconsin Idea" refers to — here, it has its own Wikipedia article. It's a tradition going back more than 100 years.)

"American Diversity" class insufficiently heartwarming for some Wisconsin parents.

Daily Mail brings news of a local high school where kids were taught that "minorities had historically been oppressed by white people."

According to handouts..., 'white privilege' in the class was defined as a 'set of advantages that are believed to be enjoyed by white people beyond those commonly experienced by non-white people in the same social, political, and economic spaces...'....

[One] parent became alarmed after seeing the handouts provided to her 18-year-old son... “I felt it was indoctrination,” she said. “This is a radical left agenda and ideology that is now embedded in our school.”

I hate the use of schools for to indoctrinate children, but what exactly is the problem here? The students should be taught American history, and racial oppression is a big part of telling the story fairly and accurately. Maybe the name of the class — "American Diversity" — is misleading, in that it suggests a happy rainbow. That said, I'm not surprised to see parents fretting that the teachers are doing political indoctrination. I understand and share this mistrust.