Kennedy School Institutes Leftist Re-Education Class During Orientation

If you're not concerned about the new forms of insanity cropping up on the extreme left,  you should be...

“The substance of the training, while still under discussion, is to prepare students to understand the broad impact of identity on their decision-making and to engage them in constructive tools for dialogue,” Mody says. She’s reluctant even to name a text she’d put on the syllabus, though she’d like to mandate faculty training in privilege and power too. She likens it to the math classes masters candidates are sent to so they can apply economic theories.“If you don’t have an understanding of sociology, political science, critical race theory, feminist critique, and revisionist history,” Mody warns, “it’s going to be very difficult to talk about certain groups’ experiences, and why these other groups continually have this advantage in society.”

This sounds dangerously like political brainwashing. It's not that it wouldn't be good for students--at the Kennedy school or anywhere else--to think about race, sex and class. But does anyone seriously think that those opportunities do not exist in the contemporary academy? Students have to work hard to avoid such classes...they're everywhere in the university...

But the suggestions above--that "training in privilege and power" (and presumably, all sorts of other leftist buzzwords...)--do not involve merely getting students to think more about those things. To insist that students study critical race theory, "feminist critique" and revisionist history is to insist that they study pseudo-disciplines that come with political orientations already built into them. It is tantamount to demanding that students attend re-education camp.

And to analogize these disreputable pseudo-disciplines--which are widely recognized as intellectually bankrupt fronts for political activism--to mathematics is utterly absurd.

(Note the absurdity of suggesting that students entering the Kennedy school might not learn any political science while there...  Political science and sociology are simply thrown in to distract from the objectionable nature of the other areas listed.)

Note the desire to brainwash the faculty as well...though I reckon most of them don't need it... If they're putting up with this crackpot idea to brainwash students, they've probably already gone over to the Dark Side... Presumably, however, there are enough relative centrists and conservatives that they'd face a revolt if they actually tried to force the faculty to do such a thing. It would certainly never fly at my university, and we, the faculty here, have nothing like the status, stature, and power of the heavy-hitters the the Kennedy School...

But if the faculty wouldn't put up with being sent to re-education camp themselves, then they should be even more opposed to subjecting students to such a thing...

I expect liberals will stand idly by while this happens. Liberals are afraid to fight the left, and, in fact, do not even seem to understand the illiberal nature of the left. They'd never stand for this sort of thing if they didn't agree with its political ends. Any analogous initiative by conservatives would be fought tooth and nail. And that fact alone is a good indicator that a violation of liberal principles is afoot.