Florida’s Stop Woke Act is an unconstitutional, misguided, ham-handed effort to dictate what academics cannot teach. But what about its converse, California’s regulations dictating what academics must teach? Unsurprisingly, few voices have been raised in opposition even though it’s little more than the flip side of unconstitutionality, except for FIRE bringing suit on behalf of six community college professors.
“I’m a professor of chemistry. How am I supposed to incorporate DEI into my classroom instruction?” asked Reedley College professor Bill Blanken. “What’s the ‘anti-racist’ perspective on the atomic mass of boron?”
This isn’t quite as snarky as it might seem to some. There is a very real disconnect between those who believe with as much faith as their knees can take that there is no academic subject that can’t be infused with an anti-racism message, even if it means foregoing the actual substantive academic subject in lieu of a rant about the racists who created it and a sharp critique of the error of learning as some offshoot of white supremacy.
Each of the professors teach at one of three Fresno-area community colleges within the State Center Community College District. Under the new regulations, all of the more-than-54,000 professors who teach in the California Community Colleges system must incorporate “anti-racist” viewpoints into classroom teaching.
The regulations explicitly require professors to pledge allegiance to contested ideological viewpoints. Professors must “acknowledge” that “cultural and social identities are diverse, fluid, and intersectional,” and they must develop “knowledge of the intersectionality of social identities and the multiple axes of oppression that people from different racial, ethnic, and other minoritized groups face.” Faculty performance and tenure will be evaluated based on professors’ commitment to and promotion of the government’s viewpoints.
The regulations may be tied in a bow of kindness and empathy, but it’s little different than turning public colleges into religious schools, infusing subject matter with the ideological certainty that any discussion that waivers from correct doctrine is unacceptable.
An official glossary of terms released by the state makes plain that the “anti-racist” views it mandates are highly ideological. Indeed, the definition for “anti-racism” states that “persons that say they are ‘not a racist’ are in denial.” California declares that “color-blindness,” or the belief that “the best way to end prejudice and discrimination is by treating individuals as equally as possible, without regard to race, culture, or ethnicity,” is itself a problem because it “perpetuates existing racial inequities and denies systematic racism.”
Even a professor saying something as benign as “I grade my class based on merit” is suspect under the regulations. “Merit is embedded in the ideology of Whiteness and upholds race-based structural inequality,” the glossary claims. “Merit protects White privilege under the guise of standards … and as highlighted by anti-affirmative action forces.”
The point here isn’t that FIRE, or anyone or organization dedicated to academic freedom and, well, good education, takes sides for or against DEI or Stop Woke, as FIRE took the lead in challenging Florida’s law and obtain the injunction precluding it going into effect,
FIRE’s California suit comes almost a year after FIRE filed a lawsuit against Florida’s “Stop WOKE Act” as it applies to college classrooms. In that case, Florida’s legislature, like California Community Colleges, sought to dictate what views public university professors can express when teaching. In November 2022, a federal court granted FIRE’s motion for a preliminary injunction to block enforcement of the Stop WOKE Act, calling it “positively dystopian.”
“Whether it’s states forcing professors to teach DEI concepts or states forcing them not to teach concepts that lawmakers deem ‘woke,’ the government can’t tell university professors what views they are or aren’t allowed to debate in the classroom,” said FIRE attorney Jessie Appleby.
What makes this particularly important is that criticism of Florida’s law was pervasive, in the media, by academics and on social media. Hear much about California’s regs, which are every bit as wrong, but wrong for the woke team? To the unwoke, this is rank hypocrisy. To the woke, it’s not a problem because their tribe are on the right side of history and pushing their ideology into the malleable minds of children can’t possibly be wrong.
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Few voices have been raised in protest because the relevant powers that be in California politics and education accept and promote the idea that free speech (and due process) are barriers to achieving the greater good. Not surprising really, authoritarian, dictatorial, and totalitarian regimes do not tolerate free speech and due process getting in the way of their ideological view of the proper social and economic order.
Social democrats used to recognize and promote the following: we recognize there will be some inequality in society. People have different talents, cultural groups teach different life skills and values. Thus, everything will never be totally equal. We can, however, use government to make sure that people aren’t discriminated against on the basis of race or sex, that one religion is not favored by government, that people have a certain minimum economic base, and that the most fortunate must bear the largest burdens proportionately in society. Government will stay out of people’s lives to the extent possible and try to let the citizens decide on what is good for them in their daily lives (beyond removing poisons and the like from the water, consumable products and skies – and regulating businesses who to ensure basic levels of safety, competition, honesty and decency). Societies give protections to individual liberties (speech, due process) to protect individuals and the collective “makes room” in democracy for these individual differences and rights.
Too much modern progressivism (it ain’t liberal) believes that protecting individuals from oppression and persecution is not as important as equalizing outcomes and group rights. It is, in many ways, just a modern expression of the divine right of kings – a reason to have a divinely (or otherwise annointed minority of philosopher kings and queens rule over all in their wisdom. Modern authoritarian Trumpism or rightist philosophy is much the same. In that sense, it may be we are living in a post democratic, neoaristocratic era.
Maybe Reedley College professor Bill Blanken is part of the white supremacy?? He probably knows that boron in its pure elemental form is typically black or dark brown but that boron nitride is white powder. He could discuss the reasons that boron nitride is trying to join the ranks of the illustrious white compounds like table salt and sugar but won’t, for unknown reasons.
(ok, maybe this has nothing to do with the point of the column, again, but offered in the spirit of Seaton)
In the same spirit, as a math major, let me point out that Pi and the Euler Constant e have great Privilege despite being irrational and trans (transcendental).
Somewhere I read that a professor criticised a design project saying “it smells of the lamp”, meaning the the aroma of midnight oil. I think that is a part of the problem here: too much theory, not enough reality, too many words, not enough communication.
Surely the authors of this policy consider themselves to be Not-Racist and anyone who denies their own racism is in denial, that means that the leftist media supports a policy written by a group of racists.
These folks have such severe Politicized Brain Disease that they can’t recognize all the ridiculous logic traps they set for themselves and how moronic they make their philosophy look.
I think not, therefore I am.
I can’t wait to see the first computers, airplanes, bridges, and fusion reactors that are designed, built, and operated using feminine logic, and social justice principles. We already have a very long history of medicine that has been informed by religious principles, and it really doesn’t work very well.
Well, the “water advocacy and management in Hawai’i” that was informed by M. Kaleo Manuel’s take on “indigenous knowledge” does not seem to have worked out all that well for the people of Maui — indigenous or otherwise. I wonder if people will notice.
Some may argue over whether or not this merely constitutes some updated form of an honor code for educators, a Hippocratic Oath for the classroom. Pushing back against that concept will always be uphill. It’s not hard to see how such things can be relevant in a chemistry classroom even if protons and electrons don’t care. What other commitments to ethics are required that people don’t chafe against?
A more productive resistance would be to push back against all the ways this DEI formulation is a stupid new upgrade to white supremacy. It’s a fundamentally conservative approach to race that wants to exploit racial categorizations and coopt whiteness instead of dismantling them. Rather than reject white supremacy’s deleterious assertions (e.g., race is determinative of behavioral traits, racial bias is desirable, ethics depends on identity) we have to upend the value system in a transparently irrational way to celebrate and keep them.
Liberalism has lost the plot. Compliance demands resistance.
Neutrons need to seize the day.