fbpx
Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Destroying Writing For ‘Antiracism’

Rutgers graduate writing program declares clear English prose to be implicitly racist
Screen Shot 2020-07-22 at 2.01.00 PM

If Rutgers’ biology department was going to start teaching Creationism, everybody would see this for what it is. But it suits the prejudices of ideologically aggressive progressive midwits, who don’t grasp that the university is destroying its reason to exist:

The English Department at Rutgers University recently announced a list of “anti-racist” directives and initiatives for the upcoming fall and spring semesters, including an effort to deemphasize traditional grammar rules.

The initiatives were spelled out by Rebecca Walkowitz, the English Department chair at Rutgers University, and sent to faculty, staff and students in an email, a copy of which was obtained by The College Fix.

Walkowitz sent the email on “Juneteenth,” which celebrates the commemoration of emancipation from slavery in the United States.

Titled “Department actions in solidarity with Black Lives Matter,” the email states that the ongoing and future initiatives that the English Department has planned are a “way to contribute to the eradication of systemic inequities facing black, indigenous, and people of color.”

One of the initiatives is described as “incorporating ‘critical grammar’ into our pedagogy.”

Here’s a link to the entire letter. Excerpts having to do with the Graduate Writing Program:

Subsequent to the appointment of the Writing Program’s first Associate Director for Diversity and Equity in the Fall of 2019, a six-member Diversity and Equity Steering Committee was formed in January 2020.

The committee is sponsoring a three-part summer session workshop on responsive teaching beginning June 29. The workshop will cultivate critical conversations for Writing Program instructors around the disproportionate impacts of covid-19; state power; racism; violence; white supremacy; protest and resistance; and justice. The goal of this 3-part workshop (June, July, August) is to come together as teachers now, so that we can invite students into these conversations in the fall. By the end of the workshop, instructors should have class plans almost completely designed with a toolkit of activities, questions, and prompts for the upcoming semester. We will also be addressing the opportunities and challenges of responsive teaching in a remote learning environment. This workshop series is intended to be collaborative and low-barrier so that we can maximize involvement and learn from each other.

More:

The Graduate Writing Program serves graduate students in all SAS disciplines as well as students in select programs outside SAS, has undertaken.  In response to current events, it will undertake the following initiatives:

  • Workshops on social justice and writing.  These will address topics such as the politics of citation and knowledge (the “Cite Her” movement and the “Gray Test” on citing women and people of color).
  • Increasing focus on graduate student life.  We plan to increase curricular content and also programming to focus on managing graduate student life especially for first-generation students, including issues such as the student-committee relationship, self-advocacy, etc.
  • Incorporating “critical grammar” into our pedagogy.  This approach challenges the familiar dogma that writing instruction should limit emphasis on grammar/sentence-level issues so as to not put students from multilingual, non-standard “academic” English backgrounds at a disadvantage. Instead, it encourages students to develop a critical awareness of the variety of choices available to them w/ regard to micro-level issues in order to empower them and equip them to push against biases based on “written” accents.

So graduate students will be trained in how to write woke propaganda. It’s not just Rutgers. A reader yesterday forwarded me a letter that Geeta Anand, the interim dean of UC Berkeley’s graduate school of journalism sent to incoming students:

At Berkeley Journalism, we received last week the recommendations of the five anti-racist working groups made up of 30 faculty and staff who volunteered for this important initiative. Our staff is putting these voluminous recommendations into a readable format that allows for our community to comment on them and make additional suggestions, and we will make these public tomorrow.

Over the coming weeks, I will meet with our faculty, advisory board and student affinity groups to discuss the recommendations. We will form a steering committee made up of the facilitators of the anti-racist working groups as well as two student and two alumni representatives. We will send out a form next week for people interested in participating on the steering committee to let us know of their interest. The steering committee will work with the school’s executive committee on revising the recommendations, based on input from stakeholders, and implementing them.

Meanwhile, here are five actions that our school will pursue immediately:

  • Creating a race in journalism class for the spring semester

  • Putting in place equity and inclusion training for the fall semester for all of our faculty, lecturers, staff and students

  • Fundraising to substantially raise student financial aid to enable more BIPOC students and first-generation students to attend Berkeley Journalism

  • Pushing now for the university to create two new full-time faculty positions focused on race and journalism and democracy and inequality

  • Creating a speaker series for the fall focusing on covering issues of racism and inequality

Yes, because that’s just what the graduate students of journalism at Berkeley need: training in how to be woke. Not how to be better journalists in a radically changing world, but how to think even more about racial difference, and weaponizing racial difference for the culture war.

The left-wing journalist David Rieff, commenting on the Rutgers fiasco, said:

I feel the same way about the decline of professional journalism programs, and professional journalism. For all of my professional life, I have defended journalism to conservative friends, acknowledging that yes, it’s a liberal profession with liberal biases, but it’s still a worthwhile endeavor worthy of support. I don’t really believe that anymore — rather, the worthiness is the exception rather than the rule. I could be wrong, of course, but it’s very hard not to despair, seeing what is happening, and how something important to the common good has been corrupted by ideology. Again, I could be wrong about this — you know how prone I am to frustration and gloom — but the intellectual decline of journalism has paralleled the intellectual decline of the humanities, and mostly for the same reasons.

It’s about trust, isn’t it? I see now in a way I didn’t really see before how important it is to be able to trust journalists (and, in turn, teachers). When I was active in mainstream journalism (1989-2010), I knew that it was a pervasively liberal professional environment, but in most cases, I also had confidence that my colleagues tried their best to be fair. That’s really all you can hope for. As much as the relatively few of us conservatives in mainstream media would bitch and moan about our liberal profession, there was still a basic bond of trust there — because of fidelity to professional standards, based in a generally liberal worldview about the meaning of the free press, and the purpose of journalism.

The old values are clearly in retreat, most prominently at places like The New York Times and the Washington Post, in favor of engaged progressivism. Part of my anger and frustration is over the heavily politicized reporting, but part of it is that I no longer have confidence that even the things that don’t seem overtly political are trustworthy. That’s because the rising powers within journalism don’t seem to believe that objectivity is a standard worth pursuing. The Times‘s Pulitzer-winning 1619 Project is a condensed symbol of all that is wrong here: using journalism not to illuminate the truth, but rather to invent a past that is useful to radical left cultural goals. If they accept and laud this kind of thing, what does that tell us about the way they approach journalism in general?

We saw in the James Bennet fiasco what the woke mob at the Times thinks of opinion journalism: that the purpose of the Times is to reaffirm the views of progressives, and that they see anyone to the right of them as so toxic that they don’t even deserve to be listened to. I don’t for a minute believe that all the writers and editors at the Times believe this way. But I think they are too afraid to stand up, in part because they have seen their leadership — Dean Baquet and A.G. Sulzberger — knuckle under to the militants.

Similarly with humanities instruction in colleges. Can you imagine paying money for and giving your life over to a graduate writing program that immersed you in ideology, and basically taught you how to write propaganda? What Rutgers is proposing is what you would expect from a Bible college that was focused on training missionaries. There is nothing wrong with training people who want to be missionaries in the skills of writing the kind of things missionaries will have to write. But it’s not what a place like Rutgers should be doing. They are destroying their reason to exist. I will quote again the great Helen Margolius Kovaly, whom I cite in this passage from Live Not By Lies:

Heda Margolius Kovály, a disillusioned Czech communist whose husband was executed after a 1952 show trial, reflects on the willingness of people to turn their backs on the truth for the sake of an ideological cause.

It is not hard for a totalitarian regime to keep people ignorant. Once you relinquish your freedom for the sake of “understood necessity,” for Party discipline, for conformity with the regime, for the greatness and glory of the Fatherland, or for any of the substitutes that are so convincingly offered, you cede your claim to the truth. Slowly, drop by drop, your life begins to ooze away just as surely as if you had slashed your wrists; you have voluntarily condemned yourself to helplessness.

You can surrender your moral responsibility to be honest out of misplaced idealism. You can also surrender it by hating others more than you love truth. In pre- totalitarian states, Arendt writes, hating “respectable society” was so narcotic, that elites were willing to accept “monstrous forgeries in historiography” for the sake of striking back at those who, in their view, had “excluded the underprivileged and oppressed from the memory of mankind.”

For example, many who didn’t really accept Marx’s revisionist take on history—that it is a manifestation of class struggle— were willing to affirm it because it was a useful tool to punish those they despised.

There will be a need, however diminished, for colleges that keep the true spirit of the traditional humanities alive through this suicidal age. There will also be a need for trustworthy journalism, though again, it’s likely to be diminished. In the meantime, let us try to find humor in the educated idiots who are so filled with ideological ardor that they will destroy the desire and the capacity to write clear English prose, for the “understood necessity” of antiracism.

UPDATE: A reader sends in a great example of dishonest journalism, this from the Washington Post:

School districts with large numbers of black and Hispanic students need more money to help students succeed but get less. That’s one conclusion of a new study that attempts to calculate how much money it would take to bring all students to the national average in performance.

Overall, the study found districts serving nearly two-thirds of all public school students face a “funding gap,” defined as the amount of money needed to bring students to the national average performance, as measured by test scores.

Notice that definition. It’s not the actual difference in funding; it’s the difference between what students received, and what the study’s authors believe the students need to reach parity on test scores. Because as we all know, students are automatons that simply require more money to score higher. The story continues:

The model finds that spending needed in high-poverty districts to reach average scores is twice as high as in affluent districts, Baker said.

For example, the study finds that spending in Baltimore and neighboring Howard County, Md., is about the same at just over $15,000 per student. But it estimates that Baltimore needs $20,224 per student, creating a gap of more than $5,000.

So they spending is the same in both counties — but according to the formula, you have to spend more in the less affluent, more black county to get the same results, so that means black kids are being cheated. Right?

It’s not a long story, so it’s not entirely fair to expect the reporter to go into detail about objections to the idea that there is a meaningful correlation between education spending and educational outcomes (here is one objection, if you’re interested). Nevertheless, it’s meaningful that she simply repeats the claims of this study without even a paragraph indicating that there are serious reasons to doubt this liberal think tank’s conclusions.

Furthermore, the reader points out the innumeracy in the writer’s framing:

It is impossible to get all students up to the national average on performance because that score is just that…an average! What the article/study is really saying is that the overperforming white kids getting the same amount of money should get less so that they score closer to the average. Which is insane.

But see, the story repeats without questioning the claims of a liberal think tank saying that racial minorities are not achieving what they should be doing academically because white people are not spending the money that they ought to be on them. It fits the ideological narrative: Egalitarismus über Alles.

UPDATE.2:  Transgender activists hate journalist Jesse Singal, who identifies as a progressive, and favors trans rights in general — but he has published articles calling into question some aspects of trans dogma, therefore he is in their eyes the Enemy. On NPR’s 1A show the other day, the host said that Singal has said transphobic things. Singal wrote them to protest. Now:

He goes on to say in that Twitter thread that it’s not the host’s fault, that she was just relying on research done by an assistant. Still, he says, it’s so frustrating when major media simply repeat trans activist talking points as if they were true. Singal’s podcasting partner Katy Herzog comments:

Totally agree. Keep in mind that Singal and Herzog are on the left. But they are honest journalists. Here’s a link to Blocked And Reported, their podcast. I would take seriously anything either of them had to say, even if I disagreed with it, because even though their political and cultural priors are different than mine, they both do their best to be fair and accurate.

Advertisement

Comments

Want to join the conversation?

Subscribe for as little as $5/mo to start commenting on Rod’s blog.

Join Now