Multiculti U.
link
Heather MacDonald is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute...so consider the source...
But I generally agree with most of what she writes. I don't see any reason to throw elbows at affirmative action in this piece (even though I myself am conflicted about it (as I believe everyone should be...))...I think that's just a distraction from a piece largely composed of sound points.
Even my extraordinarily mainstream and, well...as much as I distrust anyone who uses the word...bourgeois university is filled with emails and notices and workshops and announcements and retreats and offices and fliers and administrators and classes and whatnot devoted to "diversity." Honestly, I can hardly stand to hear about it anymore. After years of propaganda, I now basically switch off or walk away as soon as the diversity and multiculturalism sermons start to play. Not because I'm against those things, but, rather, because I'm against propaganda, brainwashing and sermonizing.
At any rate, as MacDonald notes, universities could save a lot of money if they cut out some of the extravagant diversity-oriented bells and whistles. They're politically-motivated extravagances, especially at colleges, the most liberal places on Earth.
Heather MacDonald is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute...so consider the source...
But I generally agree with most of what she writes. I don't see any reason to throw elbows at affirmative action in this piece (even though I myself am conflicted about it (as I believe everyone should be...))...I think that's just a distraction from a piece largely composed of sound points.
Even my extraordinarily mainstream and, well...as much as I distrust anyone who uses the word...bourgeois university is filled with emails and notices and workshops and announcements and retreats and offices and fliers and administrators and classes and whatnot devoted to "diversity." Honestly, I can hardly stand to hear about it anymore. After years of propaganda, I now basically switch off or walk away as soon as the diversity and multiculturalism sermons start to play. Not because I'm against those things, but, rather, because I'm against propaganda, brainwashing and sermonizing.
At any rate, as MacDonald notes, universities could save a lot of money if they cut out some of the extravagant diversity-oriented bells and whistles. They're politically-motivated extravagances, especially at colleges, the most liberal places on Earth.
posted by Winston Smith at
4:45 PM
4 Comments:
I think she's a sloppy thinker, Winston, based on this quote from Media Matters:
Right-wing media figures like Fox Business host Lou Dobbs and Manhattan Institute fellow Heather Mac Donald have referred to immigration reform as "de facto amnesty" and "outright amnesty." [Fox Business, Lou Dobbs Tonight, 1/28/13]
http://mediamatters.org/research/2013/02/01/10-myths-conservative-media-will-use-against-im/192494
That, and the fact that she gets published by NRO, home to such luminaries of 21st Century intellectualism as Katherine Jean Lopez and Jonah Goldberg, leads me to think that she probably is exaggerating the problem she's talking about.
DA,
I can't vouch for anything else she's written, but she's onto a real problem with this piece. Perhaps she's exaggerating the problem in the U. of CA system...but even if she's off by half, it's still pretty bad.
The fact that past columns she's written were quoted approvingly by VDARE.com and that she seems to have some "race" issues of her own re poverty leads me to suspect that she's off by way more than half.
Ok, so let me get this straight.
To help black people out of crippling poverty, we shouldn’t do any targeted relief efforts to stop poverty and give people more opportunities, but rather should instead urge every single black person to marry another single black person (except not the same sex, because that ruins the magic fairy dust) and if there is a discrepency because we throw black men in jail like they were fucking candy then too bad, so sad, remaining women will be personally blamed if this policy fails.
This marriage between two impoverished black people will do what exactly?
How will combining the indebted struggling to get by finances of two people help in any way? Now both people’s personal finances are imperiled by the perceived need to take care of the other person and since these aren’t marriages of love, then there will be guaranteed friction, possibly violence because there hasn’t been the establishment of trust, mutual respect, and genuine good will which are traits already tested and strained when you’re both broke.
Okay, they’ll now have “morals”, in Heather’s deluded eyes. Okay, how does that put food on the table? How does that expand their options more than the YMI and other programs? They’ll have more time for their kids? Okay, so they’re even cutting work hours? So they need to take care of more people with less money? Somehow I suspect that’s not going to take anyone out of poverty.
Oh, wait, let me guess, she’s one of those wingnuts who think that there are just infinite jobs out there, but the poor are just too lazy and unmotivated to get themselves a living wage paying job because welfare is giving them free Cadillacs or some such shit. And so marriage and its magic moral powers will give people the motivation to get one of these magic free jobs that are totally everywhere because now they have to help take care of people they love…
Except if, in this fantasy world, welfare is the option giving them more money and also letting them spend quality time with their kid to prevent them from falling into bad habits like crime, why would they take the magic job? Surely they would then be making the rational decision for the betterment of their kids.
You know what Heather, I’m starting to suspect you might not be making even a coherent argument by wingnut standards (and that’s saying something) and just wanted a lazy means of combining three hates and self-justifications (poverty relief is wrong and George Soros is the devil and corrupts everything he touches, black people are poor because they did wrong against God by being so black, and gay people are somehow ruining everything and damnitt some day we’ll come up with a halfway plausible reason why).
http://www.sadlyno.com/archives/35503.html
"Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?"
Wouldn't the best way to check her article be to check it directly? That is, to see whether or not she's exaggerating the amount of money spent on "diversity" in the U. of CA system?
Obviously the race/marriage thing is kooky. But there aren't similar *arguments* in the multiculti piece--in fact, there aren't many novel arguments at all there. The real contribution of that is the numbers, which should be largely checkable.
As I noted, she does digress with some tsk-tsking about affirmative action, and she supports one of her claims to the effect that racism isn't an issue at Berkeley by quoting one semi-unnamed student...so there are things we can look at directly. But it's the numbers that are the real contribution here.
Though I guess you could say that the big less-empirical point is that diversity-mongering has become a racket in universities. Regardless of the numbers, this is good point. It's one of the many things universities do now that's not clearly related to their alleged intellectual goals. Students should, indeed, be exposed to learning about all sorts of things, including other cultures. But it isn't clear that political indoctrination has a place at universities--even if you agree with what students are being indoctrinated into. We don't insist that our students accept and profess how important history is, nor how interesting math is, nor that evolution is true...but universities do pretty much insist that you value "diversity" and "multiculturalism."
I rather wonder who long before the currently-less-fashionable lefty conviction that multiculturalism is actually bad because it encourages "cultural appropriation" becomes more fashionable... I'll bet money that that will start showing up in the re-education sessions...
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