NAU Implements a 4-Course "Diversity" Requirement

This is madness.

   There's not really any such thing as learning about "diversity." There's nothing to learn. Everything anyone needs to know has been a staple of universities my entire life: to attend a university, you've got to learn to tolerate all kinds of people you may not like, and all kinds of views you may not agree with. And that's basically all there is to it. 

   What "diversity" courses and "training" and so forth actually do is: indoctrinate students--and faculty--with hard-left politics and philosophy. On the political side, that means: identity politics. On the philosophical side, that currently means: some tangle from the postpostmodern mishmash: poststructuralism, postmodernism, radical feminism, queer theory, or some version of critical theory. Currently probably: some version of critical race theory.

   And that's obviously what NAU is up to. This is like having a four-course Scientology or astrology requirement. Or 12 hours worth of communist indoctrination. It's certainly not learning about these theories--the people who teach this kind of stuff don't understand it and probably don't even know the standard criticisms. Much less are they capable--or willing--to lead students through the finer points of the theories' weaknesses. They can spout the dogma, but the very fact that they've been trained in disciplines in which this nonsense has taken over means that they almost certainly don't have the analytic abilities required to criticize it. One reason this stuff is so destructive is that it is built on shitty methods of reasoning, and students in the afflicted disciplines learn to think in these shitty ways. Talk to a professor who is devoted to this pseudo-scholarly religion and you'll see that just about the entire method boils down to: make up some interpretation, pretty much no matter how absurd, on which your opponent or his theory is racist. Learning this sort of thing actually makes students dumber than they were the day they walked onto campus.