by Professor
Doom
I’ve written before of the microaggression lunacy
affecting our
campuses. It contributes to the culture of fear that is the lot of a typical
teacher in higher ed—everything you say can now be viewed as offensive enough
for termination, even if the offense is too small to be seen by any normal
person. How do you protect yourself against the undetectable threats?
One of the early researchers into
microaggression has
gone so far as to apologize for the contributing to the hysteria, and what it
has led to:
Keep in mind that universities now
maintain "bias response teams" that investigate students and
professors suspected of saying the wrong thing. These teams occasionally
recommend perpetrators for additional sanctions. But the academic who
modernized the idea of microaggressions never imagined they would be weaponized
in such a way.
Imagine the kind of terror working like
this entails: teams of administrators scour everything you say, everything you
write (your very lecture notes and syllabi are subject to this scrutiny),
seeking anything that might be considered offensive by someone, somewhere,
under some circumstance…and that includes circumstances that may never actually
happen in locations that don’t exist to people that are never encountered.
While many attribute this lunacy to the
Cultural Marxists and Social Justice Warriors running amok on campus, and I
concede some truth to the claims, there is a simpler explanation. Our campuses
are wildly bloated out with staff and administrators, with nothing to do.
Decades ago, most workers in our schools were teachers, but now teachers are a
shrinking minority on campus. All too often, our campuses are now composed of
four types of buildings: sportsball complex, auditoriums capable of holding
hundreds of students, a cubicle warehouse for the faculty, and, the most common
building on campus: a bureaucratic hive for administrators and their support
staff.
Many have tried to figure out what,
exactly these people do to contribute to education and research (you know, the
whole reason our institutions of higher education exist), to no avail. We know
they have nothing do to. They know it too, and so spend much of their time
trying to justify their existence.
And so, when the microaggression lunacy
started, admin seized upon it, to create those “rapid response teams” to deal
with imaginary issues. Alas, this only created make-work jobs for a handful of
useless admin, and so they need to take it to the next level:
That’s right, in addition to the ethics
training we receive every year, and the sexual harassment training we receive
every year, and a few other pointless seminars faculty must attend, we’re now
going to get this new “training.”
Suffolk University's acting
president, Marisa J. Kelly, announced late Tuesday that all
faculty members would be required to go through training about
microaggressions, the stereotype-based comments and actions that many minority
students and faculty members say regularly make them feel unwelcome in higher
education and elsewhere.
It’s just Suffolk for now, but I promise
the gentle reader that other campuses will seize on this make-work project for
admin, and microaggression training will spread across the country in short
order.
The whole underlying theory about
microagression is it hurts minorities. As a white male, I’m pretty much a
minority on campus…but this means nothing as only “protected minorities” can be
victims of microagression. This whole emphasis on “minorities must be
protected” is just idiotic. Most people on campus today are female, as most
students are female. So if admin were honest about this need to protect
minorities, we would protect all males as “minorities”…I won’t be holding my
breath on that, nor do I even ask for it. Bottom line, however, as a culture
we’ve been subdivided with so many racial and gender labels that every single
group is a minority. There will be no end to the microaggression madness, at
least no end achieved by “training,” training which will inevitably be based
around learning how to spot ever more ways to be offended.
The funny part is how admin have painted
themselves into a corner here. Are they serious about the threat of
microaggression training? If so, then that means they’ll have to keep the
classes small and give real assignments. I’ve never seen admin care about
teaching enough to do any of it themselves.
Is it just another make-work joke from
admin? Then we’re back in auditoriums…but that’s an admission that they know
they’re doing nothing but justifying their positions.
I
want to touch a little on what initiated this brouhaha, which Suffolk will now
spend a million dollars a year (or more), forever, on training faculty so it doesn’t
happen again.
A Hispanic (whatever that means) student
turned in a paper. The professor, simply doing the job, noted that the language
in the paper was a little un-student-like: the student used the word “hence.”
The professor indicated that he didn’t
believe this was natural language for the paper, and commented on it. It takes
only a single cry of “RACIST!” for admin to leap into the fray. I’m serious, this is what happened.
Now, I’m perfectly willing to accept the
student might have legitimately used the word, but, as I’ve mentioned so many
times, cheating is rampant in higher education now. There are a ridiculous
number of websites willing to write your papers for you, for a small fee, and
these businesses are incredibly successful—every time I check on them they are
still in business, collecting money from clients that, obviously, are cheating
college students.
Faculty really can do nothing to stop
cheating. Even to be suspicious of cheating in this environment can lead to
cries of racism, which is pretty bad. Now it’s not just the cry of racism to
endure, but faculty, all faculty, will be forced to undergo mandatory
microagression training, forever.
This endless amount of money will be
spent because one professor decided to get a little suspicious about cheating.
Didn’t he get the memo about not caring about cheating anymore? Can we send him
another memo and thereby avoid all this ridiculous training?
Every year from now, as all the faculty
at Suffolk sit through a tortuous meeting on the tiny, tiny, ways they might,
possibly, insult someone, somewhere, I bet they’ll be collectively thinking
“Thanks for caring about cheating, idiot!”
www.professorconfess.blogspot.com
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