They took out the "Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion section off all of them. Like I know you could make the argument that these policies are just for show, but it just feels weird that even in higher education, where you’re naturally going to have a wide selection of students from different backgrounds, are getting rid of them.
I worked for a state university for a decade. they had a DEI office that had been renamed over the years, but started back in the 1970s to help minority students adjust to campus life.
last year the president of the university–who increased his salary to 6x of what it was when I started–unilaterally dissolved it after some cranks in the state house publicly complained about DEI/woke culture war crap.
50 years and gone overnight.
employees were confused and angry, but he had spent the previous six months neutering the shared governance model and paying off tenured facility with market adjustment raises. everybody else (+90% of all workers) got zilch. you could say the university shafted 90% of the workers and gave their raises to the already most highly paid and powerful managers.
I rapidly started looking for another job, but straight up I think the state schools are going to rapidly follow what happened with WVU last year. its gonna be a total tear down and re-concentration of value within state institutions to a tiny minority of administrators running the training & internship programs regional capitalist formations want and soliciting corporate partnership as every public service mission and program is gutted and left for dead.
this has been a long time in the works and the willing collaborators have been found and painstakingly installed in the necessary positions over the decades.
the pieces are all in place and I think the changes are going to be so fast from here forward, many these institutions will be unrecognizable in 10 years.
straight up, University of Georgia, School of Ecology brought to you by Gibson Truck World.
universities are getting so fucked up everywhere in the western world
Paraphrasing an article about google changing their motto away from “don’t be evil” to something else: “It would be kind of weird and a little scary if your coworker had a sign that said ‘I will not kill anyone today’. Now imagine how it would feel to walk into the office and notice he had taken it down.”
The removal of the diversity window dressing feels menacing like that. Another poster suggested it could be a means of preventing a future shitshow and that tracks too. But even if there isn’t malicious intent the sudden tidal shift away from even pretending to care is a little bit spooky.
I’m going to keep screaming it. This is not a one-off. This is an enduring shift, a marked turn the bourgeoisie have taken with Trump. They have shifted from decades of doing this to abandoning it. They ignored him last time, this time they’re embracing this culture war reactionary turn. They’re taking the mask off, just like Trump. No more democracy rhetoric, we want Greenland because it’s rich in minerals and allows us to police the arctic so we’re just going to take it. That kind of naked early-mid 20th century imperialism and power-plays, no more window-dressing or convoluted excuses and ethical arguments just might makes right.
Of course, the faux progressivism is no longer worth maintaining, it will be returned to the average fascism of ye olden days.
I’m seeing so many alarming things that not a lot of other people are pointing out or honing in on yet and I hope I’m wrong but it looks more and more like all part of the same shift.
For one. Everyone seems to laugh at Europeans and assume they’re just being trod on by the US as helpless dogs regarding Ukraine and energy and Russia. But what if, alarmingly we actually read that as liberal Dem-Cent, as liberals holding the party line, as liberal die-hard ideological commitment to the project? Not so funny then huh? And even if those people get kicked out, who are they going to be replaced with? Reactionaries who idolize fascists in every case and who represent in Europe the same kind of turn we now see in the US.
For another, bourgeoisie potentially shrugging at tariffs even when it hits them hard. This has yet to unfold so I could yet be wrong but it’s potentially showing they still have very high class consciousness and very high class solidarity and are not going to do in-fighting as tons of people constantly predict here and on the grad that weakens them and allows China to continue their plan. That in fact, they might form up ranks, do the decoupling thing, do some old school naked colonialism to make up for it in profits overall for the class. And if they do that, well China is not in a good place then are they? Not if the west starts couping Africa, just seizes Greenland, wields its considerable economic might to prevent most countries from daring to join a BRICS currency or evade sanctions they impose to strangle China because no one wants to break ranks and get the empire’s fist in their face first. Neither is the proletariat if their plan is siphon white people from Europe to the US via increasingly bad economic conditions, kick out non-whites, play up the white supremacy, crank up things like greedflation, crack down further on labor, seize and tighten control on free speech to an extent they’ve not done in 50 years and turn up the reactionary culture. In fact the reactionary culture has been brewing for some time online, maybe it’s ready to serve.
Divided the liberals and capitalists are weak, united in purpose, moving together as a bloc, making big changes, u-turn like should be terrifying to anyone who is not of that group or wants a better world, a multi-polar world, workers rights, etc. Some will say too little too late but I don’t think so, they still have tons of momentum and capital, a very commanding place of power coming down from their utter unipolar hegemony.
I’m not saying we’re doomed, well we kind of are fucked because of climate change and this AI nonsense among other things erasing any meager hope, but it’s going to be a long fight. And honestly I think the empire is counting on climate change coming in on their side and fucking up China badly and the models say it is going to be least bad for the US, pretty bad in places like China among many others. That’s also why this talk of annexing Canada has me thinking. Probably just trade bluster but what if it wasn’t. What if they’re already planning out the rest of this century and adapting to climate change by moving some things more northernly?
Oh and another thought. Greenland allows policing arctic shipping. Panama Canal which Trump also wants polices shipping from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The US is at heart a naval power. It doesn’t have the land power potential that Russia, China, EU have via Europe/Asia/Africa trade and civilization. The US is trying to pull the world’s oceans into its “small yard high fence” concept of living with multipolarity to enable them to police trade, enforce sanctions, threaten anyone anywhere who defies them. The US already has many plans in place for keeping west Asia (middle east) destabilized and thus denying China an overland route to ship their goods to markets in Europe, Africa, west Asia which means they can lock them down with just island rings and sanctions on ships carrying their goods via these various ocean passageways. There is the wrinkle that they could ship through or along the coast of India but India is run by Hinduvata fascists who hate China as much as the US so they’ll gladly join the US or inflict costs for transit so high as to leave China non-competitive. China’s only remaining route is shipping north through Russia and central Asia the long, long, long way around at great expense via limited rail (or building a ton more rail) which is one more reason why the US is keeping Europe hostile to Russia and plans to erect a kind of trade barrier between the EU and Russia and certainly wouldn’t let the EU allow Chinese shipments via Russia through the EU to say Africa (as if they wouldn’t already be massively too expensive at that point).
I wonder if this is the reason for the austerity programs seen in various different countries over the last few years. History shows that when times are financially hard, the population turns more right wing and fascist.
deleted by creator
Did they previously have something like that??? Was it like an “equal opportunity employer”-type statement at the bottom or something?
It was just a quick blurb about how it’s not okay for students or the professor to discriminate based off race, ethnicity, gender, or sexuality.
Syllabus…sillAbus…silly bus
Syllabus? Syllbme.
:kelly:
It may just be so they don’t get some appointed trump freak harassing the institution and yanking their funding. Most universities are staffed at the top with people that want inclusion.
While DEI is obviously important, I haven’t had a section for it in my syllabus years. A syllabus is meant for things like the required course material, the grading policy, and the schedule of topics. Students already don’t read syllabi, they read it even less if it contains information not immediately pertinent to the course.
