The Warping Of A College Education
...and medicine and more.

John McWhorter piece in the NYT about how we're "routinely asked to use leftist fictions":

Our times often put me in mind of Tennessee Williams's "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," when Big Daddy says: "What is the smell in this room? Don't you notice it, Brick? Don't you notice a powerful and obnoxious odor of mendacity in this room?"

These days, an aroma of delusion lingers, with ideas presented to us from a supposedly brave new world that is, in reality, patently nonsensical. Yet we are expected to pretend otherwise. To point out the nakedness of the emperor is the height of impropriety, and I suspect that the sheer degree to which we are asked to engage in this dissimulation will go down as a hallmark of the era: Do you believe that a commitment to diversity should be crucial to the evaluation of a candidate for a physics professorship? Do you believe that it's mission-critical for doctors to describe people in particular danger of contracting certain diseases not as "vulnerable (or disadvantaged)" but as "oppressed (or made vulnerable or disenfranchised)"? Do you believe that being "diverse" does not make an applicant to a selective college or university more likely to be admitted?

In some circles these days, you are supposed to say you do.

The San Diego State University physics department is seeking a physicist. The job description asks candidates to show how they "satisfy" at least three of the following criteria: "(a) are committed to engaging in service with underrepresented populations within the discipline, (b) have demonstrated knowledge of barriers for underrepresented students and faculty within the discipline, (c) have experience or have demonstrated commitment to teaching and mentoring underrepresented students, (d) have experience or have demonstrated commitment to integrating understanding of underrepresented populations and communities into research, (e) have experience in or have demonstrated commitment to extending knowledge of opportunities and challenges in achieving artistic/scholarly success to members of an underrepresented group, (f) have experience in or have demonstrated commitment to research that engages underrepresented communities, (g) have expertise or demonstrated commitment to developing expertise in cross-cultural communication and collaboration, and/or (h) have research interests that contribute to diversity and equal opportunity in higher education."

They're all admirable activities and aims. However, they are vastly less applicable to becoming or being a physicist than to, say, social work, education or even disciplines such as anthropology and sociology. That an applicant to the university's physics department would be required to meet such benchmarks is a very modern proposition, and probably leaves most people now reading this job posting -- physicists or not -- scratching or shaking their heads. Yet this emphasis is increasingly found in fields related to the hard sciences: Earlier this year, for instance, leaders of the National Institutes of Health announced their "UNITE initiative," a "framework to end structural racism across the biomedical research enterprise."

The notion seems to be that practitioners and scholars, across disciplines, must devote a considerable part of their time to putatively antiracist initiatives. It's a bold proposition, but given how shaky its actual justification is, it is reasonable to think that lately this devotion is being imposed by fiat, as opposed to being an organic outpouring. And if the price for questioning that notion is to be seen as sitting somewhere on a spectrum ranging from retrogressive to racist, it's a price few are willing to pay. One is, rather, to pretend.

This is disgusting and is more appropriate to life during the tenure of the USSR.

We should be very worried that the current trend is away from reason, free inquiry, and debate and toward lying and pretending in order to kowtow to the tenets of Wokie-ism: the secular fundamentalist religion of today.

Here's how McWhorter puts it:

All of this typifies a strand running through our times, a thicker one than always, where we think of it as ordinary to not give voice to our questions about things that clearly merit them, terrified by the response that objectors often receive. History teaches us that this is never a good thing.