”Decolonizing“ Higher Education means expunging Social Justice Warriors
Professor Edward Feser is one of the keenest minds contributing to our public discourse in higher education today. Here, he takes on the campus dullards who call for so-called “decolonization” of the university, an institution they played no role in creating and that they intend to transform according to a crypto-Maoist formula that they are quite open about.
Here’s his recent take on the campus apparatchiks:
Who are these colonizers flooding into the university in order to destroy it?
Make no mistake, Professor Feser refers to an identifiable cadre of modestly educated interlopers that is striving to colonize the university with an authoritarian and anti-intellectualist ideology. That bureaucracy is called “student affairs” and it is permeated with critical racialist ideology.
Their “transformation” plans are spelled out in their literature. A document that details their long-term agenda appears below; Campus Racial Justice and Decolonization.
If you’re a leftist mediocrity who wants to be considered a “college educator,” but without the chops to become faculty, this is the ticket for you.
Snag a “master’s” in education and join the campus bureaucracy as a self-proclaimed “college educator.” Once you’re ensconced in the bureaucracy, you can harangue students by teaching in the “co-curriculum.” This fake curriculum is not overseen by faculty, and only rarely are authentic faculty involved in it.
While it has little educational value, it is tremendously important to campus thought reformers.
This is where the ideological sausage is made, unrestrained by either faculty or oblivious high-level administrators and boards of trustees, and answerable only to like-minded ideologues in the student affairs bureaucracy and their enablers in schools of education.
This “co-curriculum” is an interesting construct, virtually invisible to campus outsiders and morphing to the occasion as needed. It serves as important component of the goal of “milieu management” of the campus, the ideological messaging of students 24-7. “Milieu managment” is their term, and the co-curriculum is essential to its achievement.
This is a common deception, this “co-curriculum” with its rickety workshops and “difficult dialogues” designed to elevate the primitive bureaucratic groupmind to a status on par with the curriculum.
In this way, ambitious middling bureaucrats avoid the rigor attached to joining the actual faculty, but can still “teach” with a “Master’s degree in Education” while serving as an enrollment manager, as a clerk, or even as a human lactation expert. I detail and document this dynamic extensively in my book BRUTAL MINDS.
These bureaucrats — “college educators” — have their own off-campus professional guilds, where the neo-Marxist ideology is espoused openly. These are the American College Personnel Association (ACPA) and Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education (NASPA).
The ideological focal point is Student Affairs, or “SA.” These are the stormtroopers of doctrinal primitivism, who seek to control the faculty by way of the university bureaucracy. This is manifested most obviously in the DEI apparatus, a Soviet-style apparat that has quickly taken root on the campuses and performs a function similar to that of the Soviet NKVD commissar system, designed to ensure ideological conformity in the Soviet Union’s military.
These student affairs and DEI cadres are the actual “colonizers” of the Western Enlightenment University, the outsiders whose self-professed mission is to “Boldly Transform Higher Education” into a safe-space for unchallenged Marxist, Maoist, Freirean doctrine running under the banner of social justice education. A document that spells out the ACPA’s colonizing mission is the Bold Vision Forward: A Framework for the Strategic Imperative for Racial Justice and Decolonization.
These off-campus clubs are important as leftist ideological fever swamps, surely, but they obtain crucial importance in their role as establishing the content and standards of education school advanced degrees nationwide — “student affairs,” “higher education administration,” and “educational leadership.”
These are the bogus degrees that train future bureaucrats for their campus roles. And thus the circle of vice is closed, and the bureaucracy increases its influence year-by-year.
If we really want and need to “decolonize” the American University, we can begin with mid-wit interlopers with their primitive alien doctrines.
READ deeply on the entire topic at BRUTAL MINDS