On Jan 9 The Free Press [formerly Common Sense with B.] published an article by John Sailer concerning the recent history of Gordon Klein, a longtime professor at UCLA. In June of 2020, in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death, a student apparently emailed Klein imploring him to grade students of color more leniently than their white peers given the recent spate of wrongful deaths suffered by blacks at the hands of the police. Klein refused, citing Martin Luther King’s dictum that people need to be judged not by the color of their skin but by the quality of their character.
Enraged, 20,000 people signed a petition to have Klein fired. The university’s authorities immediately caved and had him banned from campus. But 76,000 signed a counter-petition and he was re-instated less than three weeks later. How imperiled, one must ask, are the standards of Truth and Achievement that used to inform Western Culture, that the curators of a major American university would be willing to betray them because 20,000 simpletons asked them to do so.
Approximately a year later, Klein, eligible for some sort of raise, was asked to express himself on the subjects of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion [DEI] which have clearly become major priorities of UCLA. Refusing to subscribe to the university’s “educational” philosophy, he responded: “I intend to continue helping all students equally, regardless of their backgrounds.” Denied the benefits due him, he is apparently suing his employer.
Sailer’s article cites several instances of DEI replacing Academic Integrity as the informing principle of a “progressive” Western education. The Council for Higher Educational Accreditation, for example, states proudly that “the rich values of diversity, equity and inclusion are inextricably linked to quality assurance in higher education.” This is logistically absurd! Admitting people with inferior qualifications to any school or job simply because of their gender or the color of their skin entails a fundamental disdain for “quality assurance.” Identity and Achievement are Not synonymous and the Left’s conflation of the two is truly a hoax.
Sailer says he has interviewed dozens of academics concerned with the decline of America’s educational standards who are nevertheless afraid to express their views for fear of being terminated. Studies reveal that proficiency in areas such as literacy and math is significantly below what it was just a few years ago. This is of course to be expected in an absurd cultural climate that considers it “intellectually” acceptable to demonize the teaching of science, math and proper grammar as weapons of White Supremacy.
The Left’s definition of “diversity” is the most superficial one imaginable, reducing the species to a collection of disparate Identities based on skin color, gender, etc., while showing no concern whatsoever for the intellectual/moral diversity of every Individual on the planet. It is a perspective that is definitively racist and sexist. Yes, the stereotypes of the past, including those that continued to dominate the Post-Enlightenment West, were also impervious to the complexities of the species, various categories of people judged on the basis of utterly superficial definitions. But tremendous progress in this realm has been made over the last 50 years in most Western societies, this progress demonstrably a result of the traditional Liberalism that emerged from the Enlightenment. The irony of contemporary “liberalism” is that it has basically forsaken that tradition.
Dave Rubin, a gay man who once considered himself a liberal, is now a staunch “conservative” who nevertheless insists his values and principles have not changed at all. It is, rather, the Left that has changed, its submission to the materialistic determinism of Marx actually rendering human freedom one of its least concerns. The wonderful Candace Owens never stops celebrating her rejection of the narrative fed her as a young Black girl that she was a helpless victim of White oppression who could not possibly hope to succeed in racist America. Relying upon her inherent qualities as a strong, intelligent Woman, she has most definitely succeeded and deems the the Cult of Victimization relentlessly exploited by the Left an insult to her status as a Human Being.
It is as such an insult that rational “conservatives” view the contemporary Left. Yes, there are White racists and Male chauvinists among us. But the Left ludicrously incites Black racism and Female chauvinism in response. The world in general and human behavior in particular are radically more complicated than the contemporary Zeitgeist would allow. It is a Zeitgeist so devoted to the simplistic Marxist Doctrine of Oppression, that it has led the authorities at a major American university [UCLA] to reprimand one of its professors for insisting on treating all his students as Equals. Apparently Equal Rights are no longer an informing Principle of our Western Democracies!