Real America pit stop #5, a true story about how students were forced to freely learn what they chose to know (and the great Florida higher education gaslight)
"He looked around a room full of staff (and the regrettably small number of faculty who bothered to attend) and reassured us that no one is really teaching critical race theory anyway, so the whole effort to ban it in colleges won’t really change what we do. "
I see multiple problems with this. Just the first couple....
1. As you noted, some professors do teach the concepts as part of their disciplines.
2. Cowardly administrators allow outsiders with agendas to define what does and does not count as "CRT." I may not have my students read am article on CRT, but if I assign an eye-witness account of Tulsa in 1921, then BOOM, some RW bigot will scream CRT! and that lesson is gone. Stuffed down the memory hole.
Administrators are using a narrow definition of an idea to reassure faculty that they won't be attacked by those using a wide definition of the same idea. It doesn't work.
Tulsa 1921 is a such good example to illustrate the chaos we're experiencing now, when a "primary source" showing what people did to people can be re-categorized as a "doctrine" or a "theory," and when administrators who have their own concerns can so glibly manipulate the conversation to avoid protecting the faculty (and students) from right wing attacks.
In one of the interviews I've read with Christopher Rufo, he lays his strategy right on the table-- to intentionally make CRT a confusing catch-all label for many things on the right-wing hit list. Once the term CRT has been established as "double-plus-ungood" all they have to do is continue attaching things to that criminalized concept.
What we're "really" doing in our classes is not actually what matters, so this is a very thin sense of security to offer faculty!
"He looked around a room full of staff (and the regrettably small number of faculty who bothered to attend) and reassured us that no one is really teaching critical race theory anyway, so the whole effort to ban it in colleges won’t really change what we do. "
I see multiple problems with this. Just the first couple....
1. As you noted, some professors do teach the concepts as part of their disciplines.
2. Cowardly administrators allow outsiders with agendas to define what does and does not count as "CRT." I may not have my students read am article on CRT, but if I assign an eye-witness account of Tulsa in 1921, then BOOM, some RW bigot will scream CRT! and that lesson is gone. Stuffed down the memory hole.
Administrators are using a narrow definition of an idea to reassure faculty that they won't be attacked by those using a wide definition of the same idea. It doesn't work.
Hi Mark!
Tulsa 1921 is a such good example to illustrate the chaos we're experiencing now, when a "primary source" showing what people did to people can be re-categorized as a "doctrine" or a "theory," and when administrators who have their own concerns can so glibly manipulate the conversation to avoid protecting the faculty (and students) from right wing attacks.
In one of the interviews I've read with Christopher Rufo, he lays his strategy right on the table-- to intentionally make CRT a confusing catch-all label for many things on the right-wing hit list. Once the term CRT has been established as "double-plus-ungood" all they have to do is continue attaching things to that criminalized concept.
What we're "really" doing in our classes is not actually what matters, so this is a very thin sense of security to offer faculty!
Thanks for contributing!