Do you take issue with any of the definitions on this list of terms given to students at Columbia University?

I think you just threw red meat to seawulf so I won’t be following this question for long.

NOT GOING TO FOLLOW !

@janbb Oh for sure he’ll probably eat it up. I’m more interested in the thoughts of Democrats and moderates.

Folx, ugh.

The first time I saw folx was just a few months ago. I was oblivious. When did that start? It is shocking to me it is used in any type of formal document. Isn’t it short for folks? Folks is such a casual word in my opinion. Did the word people fall from the lexicon?

That list is confirmation that Columbia University is indoctrinating students, not looking for open thought or dialogue. It is a formal declaration of that indoctrination.

Since that list specifies “CCSW,” it makes me wonder if the list is given only to Social Work students at the college, or is it given to all students?

The list has a clearcut left wing bias, and I say this as a progressive.

It is interesting that, although they define terms using “white”, there is no definition for white. The term black is lumped together with colored and indigenous and is defined as non-white. Something is not quite right about this.

@jca2 I’m guessing just social work. I’m assuming the economics department would not use that definition.

@LostInParadise Interesting about the White thing. I missed that. I actually take issue with lumping Jewish people in with white in some circumstances. When we talk about White Supremacy, the WS wants to kill us white Jewish people, but minorities of color seem to only see Jews as white and often they stereotype us as part of the elite.

I noticed in the last ten years or so all “people of color” are being put together in one group. Not sure how they think of “very white” Hispanic people.

@seawulf575 the social work students need to be up on current terms, so if someone comes in to their social worker and says I’m in love with a cisgender man, the social worker knows what theyr’e talking about.

@JLeslie My father, who is Hispanic, is quite white but I guess technically he’s a person of color. It’s odd.

@jca2 It depends on who is asking. On the census he is white. In the minds of the hateful he is probably a person of color. What would Black people say? Or, Asian? Would they see him or you as a person of color or a minority? I doubt it. What about media outlets like MSNBC or CNN? I don’t know.

I don’t know either.

East Asian people, to me, are white but I know they’re not considered white by many groups.

lol. For once, I agree with @seawulf575, although I don’t think it’s a University policy. It’s just something in the social work department.

The list sounds like a bunch of made up definitions to get people upset.

@jca2 On the census East Asian and South Asian are Asian for race. West Asian are white.

@RocketGuy I don’t they are trying to make people upset. @jca2 made a good point that students need to be up on the terms not only to understand the jargon used in text books, nut also in real life when interacting with clients. Capitalism stood out to me, because I’m surprised it’s on a social work glossary to begin with, but I guess I can see it might come up, but the definition for capitalism is horrible and troubling in my opinion. Especially if social work students have little to no exposure to classes on different types of economies and government systems. I don’t know what the curriculum covers.

@jca2 Let me give you a for instance of what I’m talking about:

Capitalism per the list: – A system of economic oppression based on class, private property,
competition, and individual profit.
○ See also: Carceral System, Class, Inequality, Racism

Capitalism per a dictionary: An economic system in which the means of production and distribution are privately or corporately owned and development occurs through the accumulation and reinvestment of profits gained in a free market.

There is a huge difference. Just about every description on that list is like this. It is a racist list….period. It is designed to promote division in society. It is designed to poison people against one another. THAT is indoctrination, not education. It is the finest example of why DEI is so divisive as I have ever seen.

@Caravanfan CSSW is the Columbia School for Social Work. If you look up just the first part of the link provided, Socialwork.columbia.edu, you see it is an entire school inside Columbia. One that they take great pride in. It isn’t just one class. Hell, you can get a Ph.D in this. This list is part of what they are teaching to the students.

@seawulf575 That’s what @Caravanfan said. That it’s in the school of Social Work. I said it above too. Plus, I added my bet is the business school probably doesn’t use that definition. The school of journalism would be interesting to know. I went to college and I don’t remember there being a glossary of terms like this. I wonder how common that is. In my day it would have been on a sheet of paper, but we didn’t have that, we just had a glossary in various text books.

Social Work curriculum deals mostly with psych, health, they aren’t really studying capitalism, but it still bothers me from the standpoint that these students are part of society. I bet half the students don’t even read over the complete list, but rather use it when a term comes up if they need to reference it.

I googled it to see if I could find some info on it, more than what’s written on the PDF.

NY Times has an opinion piece 12/7 and this is what it says. I didn’t read the entire thing yet because it’s long.

During orientation at the Columbia School of Social Work at Columbia University, the country’s oldest graduate program for aspiring social workers, students are given a glossary with “100+ common terms you may see or hear used in class, during discussions and at your field placements.”

Among the A’s: “agent and target of oppression” (“members of the dominant social groups privileged by birth or acquisition, who consciously or unconsciously abuse power against the members or targets of oppressed groups”) and “Ashkenormativity” (“a system of oppression that favors white Jewish folx, based on the assumption that all Jewish folx are Ashkenazi, or from Western Europe”).

The C’s define “capitalism” as “a system of economic oppression based on class, private property, competition and individual profit. See also: carceral system, class, inequality, racism.” “Colonization” is “a system of oppression based on invasion and control that results in institutionalized inequality between the colonizer and the colonized. See also: Eurocentric, genocide, Indigeneity, oppression.”

These aren’t the definitions you’d find in Webster’s dictionary, and until recently they would not have been much help in getting a master’s in social work at an Ivy League university. They reflect a shift not just at Columbia but in the field of social work, in which the social justice framework that has pervaded much of academia has affected the approach of top schools and the practice of social work itself.

Will radicalized social workers be providing service not just based on the needs of their clients but also to advance their political beliefs and assess clients based on their race or ethnicity?

When a student group, Columbia Social Workers 4 Palestine, announced a teach-in about “the significance of the Palestinian counteroffensive on Oct. 7 and the centrality of revolutionary violence to anti-imperialism,” Mijal Bitton, a Jewish spiritual leader, asked on X, “Imagine receiving services from a Columbia-educated social worker who believes burning families, killing babies, and gang-raping women is a ‘counteroffensive’ and ‘revolutionary violence [central] to anti-imperialism.’” Administrators barred the event from the school, but organizers held it in the lobby on Wednesday. Ariana Pinsker-Lehrer, a first-year student, set the protesters straight. “You’re studying to be social workers,” she told the group, “do better.”

Since the time of the pioneering activist and reformer Jane Addams, social work has been guided by a sense of mission. Social workers, who are the most common providers of mental health care, as well as the people who carry out social service programs, help the country’s neediest people. Whether social workers are caseworkers in government agencies or — as is the case with most Columbia graduates, I was told — therapists or counselors in private practice, their clients are often the elderly, the poor, veterans, homeless people, people with substance abuse issues and domestic violence survivors.

According to the National Association of Social Workers, “The primary mission of the social work profession is to enhance human well-being and help meet basic and complex needs of all people, with a particular focus on those who are vulnerable, oppressed and living in poverty.”

Other leading schools, like the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy and Practice at the University of Chicago and the School of Social Work at the University of Michigan, have embraced social justice goals but without as sharp an ideological expression as Columbia.

The Columbia School of Social Work updated its mission statement in 2022 to say that its purpose is “to interrogate racism and other systems of oppression standing in the way of social equity and justice and to foster social work education, practice and research that strengthen and expand the opportunities, resources and capabilities of all persons to achieve their full potential and well-being.” What was once its central mission — to enhance the world of social work — now follows an emphatic political statement.

Melissa Begg, the dean of the Columbia School of Social Work, said that while the school’s mission has always been about social justice and “equitable access,” its mission has evolved because “racism is part of the country.” The school, she explained, is trying to build an awareness of and give students the tools they need to address a diverse range of needs. As she put it, “If you think of slavery as the original sin of the United States, it makes sense to center that reality as part of the school’s mission.”

In 2017 the Columbia social work school introduced a framework around power, race, oppression and privilege, which the school called PROP. This began as a formal course for all first-year students to create what Begg referred to as “self-awareness.” In subsequent years, the PROP framework was applied to the entire curriculum of the school, and the PROP class became a required course called Foundations of Social Work Practice: Decolonizing Social Work.

According to the course’s current syllabus, work “will be centered on an anti-Black racism framework” and “will also involve examinations of the intersectionality of issues concerning L.B.G.T.Q.I.A.+ rights, Indigenous people/First Nations people and land rights, Latinx representation, xenophobia, Islamophobia, undocumented immigrants, Japanese internment camps, indigent white communities (Appalachia) and antisemitism with particular attention given to the influence of anti-Black racism on all previously mentioned systems.”

As part of their coursework, students are required to give a presentation in which they share part of their “personal process of understanding anti-Black racism, intersectionality and uprooting systems of oppression.” They are asked to explain their presentation “as it relates to decolonizing social work, healing, critical self-awareness and self-reflection.” Teachings include “The Enduring, Invisible and Ubiquitous Centrality of Whiteness,” “Why People of Color Need Spaces Without White People” and “What It Means to Be a Revolutionary,” a 1972 speech by Angela Davis.

This decolonization framework, in which people are either oppressor or oppressed, often viewed through the prism of American ideas around race, is by no means exclusive to the Columbia School of Social Work. But its application in the program illustrates the effects of the current radicalism on campus and the ways in which those ideals can shift an entire field of practice.

Addressing race should be an important part of a social worker’s education, as it is in many social sciences. The history and practice of psychotherapy, related to social work, was long infected with insidious and harmful ideas around race, which were often tightly bound to the eugenics movement and characterized African Americans and other minorities as mentally deficient and childlike; current practitioners are by no means immune to racism themselves.

Caregivers need to be sensitive to the effects of racism and other biases on their clients’ health and well-being. But professional organizations have become much more dogmatic about those concerns in ways that endanger the effectiveness of social work.

The National Association of Social Workers now stipulates that “antiracism and other facets of diversity, equity and inclusion must be a focal point for everyone within social work.” In October, Thema S. Bryant, the 2023 president of the American Psychological Association, published a column titled “Psychologists Must Embrace Decolonial Psychology.” In it she wrote, “Decolonial psychology asks us to consider not just the life history of the individual we are working with but also the history of the various collective groups they are a part of, whether that is their nationality, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion or disability.” The profession, she explained, needed to include a range of goals, from appreciating “Indigenous science” to shaping “systems and institutions” in addition to individuals and families.

Psychotherapy already carries a certain amount of political or ideological bias. A number of recent surveys have shown that mental health practitioners, including social workers, tend to be overwhelmingly liberal, progressive or socialist, according to a new book, “Ideological and Political Bias in Psychology,” edited by Craig L. Frisby, Richard E. Redding, William T. O’Donohue and Scott O. Lilienfeld.

“Until roughly five years ago, people seeking mental health care could expect their therapists to keep politics out of the office,” Sally Satel, a practicing psychotherapist and the author of “PC, M.D.: How Political Correctness Is Corrupting Medicine,” wrote in 2021. “Mental health professionals — mainly counselors and therapists — are increasingly replacing evidence-driven therapeutics with ideologically motivated practice and activism.”

“White patients, for instance, are told that their distress stems from their subjugation of others,” Satel wrote, “while Black and minority patients are told that their problems stem from being oppressed.”

Take counseling, which is similar to social work in its focus on mental health but ostensibly focuses more on individual therapy and less on navigating support systems, for example, obtaining assistance from public agencies. The code of ethics adopted by the American Counseling Association in 2014 states that “counselors are aware of — and avoid imposing — their own values, attitudes, beliefs and behaviors. Counselors respect the diversity of clients, trainees and research participants and seek training in areas in which they are at risk of imposing their values onto clients, especially when the counselor’s values are inconsistent with the client’s goals or are discriminatory in nature.” But the next year, the association’s governing council endorsed guidelines on “multicultural and social justice counseling” that stipulate “social justice advocacy” and divide clients and providers into “privileged” and “marginalized” categories meant to guide professional engagement.

Therapists are supposed to be able to listen and not be judgmental about feelings and ideas that are taboo, Andrew Hartz, a New York-based psychologist, told me. It’s not helpful for patients to feel judged by their practitioner: “Even if the goal is to make the patient less racist, it’s not effective.”

This past summer, Hartz founded the Open Therapy Institute to provide training without ideology so neither clients nor therapists would feel judged for their beliefs. “I was trained in the city and in city hospitals, so I saw mostly nonwhite patients,” he said. If he had used the current decolonization framework or categorized his patients by ethnicity and race, he explained, it would have distracted him from being an effective resource. “I’m trying to think about ‘What are they feeling and how can I help them?’ Not ‘I’m an oppressor, and they’re a victim,’ and so I’m walking on eggshells. That’s not going to be good therapy.”

Social workers help a broad range of populations, one in which race and systems of oppression often play less of a central role than individual counseling and support in navigating complicated social service systems — Syrian refugees in need of resettlement and Appalachian residents navigating health care insurance, foster children, survivors of domestic violence, teenagers grappling with substance abuse and poverty. They work with military veterans, victims of natural disasters, police officers suffering from workplace stress and the elderly. The job requires long hours dealing with populations that others have largely written off — the homeless, the formerly incarcerated, the infirm.

Like many helping professions — nursing, elder care, teaching — social work is not only one of the noblest vocations; it’s also one of the least remunerative. While the two-year residential program at the Columbia School of Social Work costs an estimated total of $91,748 a year with room and board, the median annual salary for its 2021 graduates, per a 2022 survey, was $62,000. (The school does not provide full information on how many students receive financial aid.)

Many students go to social work school because it’s often a less expensive route to becoming a psychotherapist in private practice, which many do as a licensed clinical social worker. It’s less expensive and faster than getting a doctorate in psychology or psychiatry. It’s also hard to pay off those student loans working in a governmental agency. More students are entering private practice, Begg acknowledged, as did everyone else associated with the school; several characterized it as an overwhelming majority.

The intention of the current curriculum at the Columbia School of Social Work, Begg emphasized to me, is to prepare social workers for hard work, not to shut out prospective students with any kind of ideological litmus test. The glossary of terms handed out at orientation, she said, was created by students for students and was not a “public-facing document.” She wanted to “make a clear bright line between our curriculum and our glossary.”

It’s supposed to be used “internally by our community within the context of a conversation” and as a “jumping-off point for conversation” for students to “expand their horizons.”

That noble intention may not be matched in practice.

Social work education has always been tied to social justice, said Amy Werman, who graduated from the Columbia School of Social Work in 1982 and has been teaching clinical and research courses there since 2009, full time since 2015.

But in the past few years, she said, the student body has become more radical. “Many students see themselves as social justice warriors, and protesting is the litmus test of being a real social worker,” she told me. She said she couldn’t remember a single protest at the school when she was a student. “Now,” she said, “I feel it’s a rite of passage.”

On Nov. 8, about a month after Hamas slaughtered about 1,200 people in Israel, dozens of students occupied the school’s lobby, banging on drums and yelling “Intifada! Intifada!” from 10:30 a.m. until early evening. Several Jewish students told Werman they didn’t feel safe. Students I spoke with said they thought that the blatantly political slant of the PROP curriculum encouraged the radical tenor of recent student activism.

“I lead with my Jewish identity and my identity as a woman, my subjugated identities,” said Werman, who discusses in orientation and in class her experience in Israel providing social services to Bedouins, Israeli Arabs and Israeli Jews, even after students have complained about her discussion of Israel in their evaluations of her.

“When Jews speak up in our school,” she said, “they are met with, ‘You have white privilege, so shut up. You are a colonizer. You are an oppressor. You are responsible for the deaths of innocent Palestinians.’”

When Asaf Eyal, a 2017 graduate of the school and now the director of a major New York City human services organization, arrived on campus, he said, he was bombarded immediately with messages from both the curriculum and from fellow students about his privilege as a white colonizer.

During the school’s required class in power, race, oppression and privilege (an earlier rendition of the course on decolonizing social work), Eyal, a former combat soldier from Israel, was shown videos of Israeli soldiers in which they were labeled the oppressor. In classroom lessons, the oppressed, he said, were always Black people. “Do you know there are Black Israelis, Black Jews?” Eyal, who had worked with Ethiopian Jews, asked his classmates.

“The school is infected with a political agenda that should not be in place, especially on Day 1,” Eyal told me.

Now, he said, he questions the education he got there. “I don’t come into my shelter every day and think about who is the oppressed,” he told me. “I think about helping people.” In October, after four years volunteering on behalf of the school, Eyal resigned from his role overseeing fieldwork assignments.

“Is this a school of social work or an indoctrination agency for extreme ideology?” Eyal said. “We’re missing the purpose. It’s not our purpose.”

@jca2 Quite a long read. But it basically confirms my assessment. Face it, any time someone says “white privilege”, their stance is already racist. They are against white people for the crime of being white. There is no difference between that and the Jim Crow nonsense that happened in the early 1900’s where blacks were viewed as being less than whites by fact of their skin color. I might also point out that both the Jim Crow and the SJW nonsense today are both products of Democrats. For what it’s worth.

@seawulf575 I can’t argue about it because I don’t know that much about it, and I didn’t read the article, so you don’t have to say “face it” because it may be something I agree about (after I read more and understand more).

@jca2 Thank you for posting the article. My dad was the one who mentioned the list, he must have learned about it from the NYT’s article. If he mentioned NYT’s I missed it.

In my opinion the school has gone too far. I understand the point in the article that historically (like 100 years ago) social work was critical of minority groups and in some instances an arm of the government trying to change their culture to assimilate to what the people in charge felt was the best way, which was pretty much the WASP way. Easily the last 50 years that hasn’t been the case though.

I wish my aunt was alive. She was a social worker in NYC and mostly liberal and progressive in her political viewpoint. She got her masters in the ‘60’s. She was one of the most empathetic people on the planet. My guess is she would take serious issue with the extreme Columbia has gone to.

If it’s school-sanctioned re-definition of commonly accepted terms, I would find that to be problematic.

@RocketGuy School-sanctioned is an understatement. They created a whole school and degree program with this redefinition as the core.

Looks like they set up a CSWE-accredited program: https://socialwork.columbia.edu/academics/degrees-we-offer/
https://www.cswe.org/accreditation/

I don’t take issue with the list, other than a couple of things. I think they should define “folx” and describe why it is being used and they should clarify why quotation marks are used. Some definitions, like capitalism, are inflammatory and focus on its role in oppression. Social work largely addresses people facing marginalization, so understanding systems and tools of oppression is important and valuable. Like others said, it is also valuable to understand the various identities, as they will be used by various clients. It is not a list that would be used widely outside of the school, except perhaps sociology, psychology, public health, etc. This is a relic of our times and, someday, people will look back on this list and be able to identify that it is from our current era.

Social work used to be a tool of oppression, itself (e.g., promoting capitalism, institutionalizing individuals, removal of children from families, etc.). So I’m glad that they have worked hard to change their stance in recent decades.

@Rocketguy Columbia School of Social Work has been around at least 30 years.

Columbia is an Ivy League university. Like Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Brown, etc.

@Cupcake Discussing and learning how capitalism can oppress some groups is completely different than defining it that way. If the students buy into the definition on the list they will what? Want the government to own all businesses? These are definitions not lessons.

I’m sorry if this is a disappointing answer, but I don’t care?

I’m fairly burned out on freaking out about universities. The people who undermine public education at every turn and want everyone to homeschool and avoid college are the same people obsessing over every little thing that happens on a college campus like it’s life or death. Columbia is a private university; you don’t think they teach equally “inflammatory” concepts at Bob Jones or Liberty? And I don’t care what goes on at private evangelical universities such as those—they can teach whatever they want. If Columbia and the Ivys are given too much social value, then let’s stop valuing them. Stop paying $300,000 to get your mediocre children accepted in a handful of places. I’m an academic so I have an obvious axe to grind, but the entire tuition racket is unstable and eventually things will give.

But no, I don’t take issue with it. If the people who are funding Columbia take issue with it, then they can put pressure on the university to change it or cut their funding. An opt-in program that most people are never going to be subjected to is none of my business.

@Demosthenes You are perfectly welcome to your viewpoint. But you are obviously not a parent. I want a good public school system that isn’t an indoctrination center. I’ve had my children, in 2nd grade, come home asking me how I was going to vote on a particular topic. When I asked why they were asking, they told me their teacher told them that if the parents didn’t vote for the issue, they didn’t love their kids. Imagine that. Needless to say I went into the school the very next day and unleashed on the Principal and the teacher about even discussing things like that with 2nd graders, much less pushing a view point and using coercion as a method.

Our schools in this country (and even the universities) have pivoted from teaching children how to learn the lessons that can actually help them in life and have focused more on pushing DEI garbage. Many of the schools fail the children entirely, graduating children that can’t read or write and can barely do basic math. But hell they can talk all day long about white privilege and trans issues. Universities are teaching people how to think, but rather what to think. Opposing viewpoints are punished, not discussed.

For too long, this sort of indoctrination has been going on and has been denied by the left as not happening. Here is solid, in writing proof that it is going on.

@seawulf575 This is an MSW program; not grade school. These are adults who can challenge the teaching and form their own opinions.

“Indoctrination” as you call it goes on the most in Florida where the governor is dictating what can and can’t be taught or even read.

@janbb Except students in a university cannot challenge the teaching or form their own opinions. They are often punished for doing so. They would fail classes unless they accept definitions like those presented.

As for FL, I guess it depends on where you look. 10th overall in the country and 1st in Higher Education doesn’t sound too bad. And what you are squawking about with DeSantis is where he blocked the SJW indoctrination that was going on. That, in my book, is appropriate and even beneficial.

@seawulf575 Of course university students can and should challenge the teaching. There are dozens of pathways to do this (e.g., class discussions, course feedback, department chairs, assistant deans for students/learning/curriculum, college deans, provosts, student-led surveys/petitions, university-wide surveys, college feedback sessions, teacher rating websites, protest, etc). It is expected. Of course university students have their own opinions. Critically evaluating their own opinions and beliefs is a huge component of a university education, and just the life stage of a young adult. What you are saying is absurd.

My qualifications to speak to this issue – having a PhD and teaching at the university level.

@JLeslie “If the students buy into the definition on the list they will…” seek to identify ways in which their clients are experiencing oppression. It’s not the big deal that you are making it out to be.

“Indoctrinate” is one of those words that is slowly but surely losing all meaning. If you mandate that the history of slavery and racism should be taught in a way that doesn’t place culpability on certain people or make students feel a certain way about the actions of their forebears, that is a form of indoctrination just as it would be to teach that white Americans bear collective guilt for slavery and racism. It doesn’t cease to be indoctrination just because you believe it to be factual. You’re still teaching with a bias and an agenda. Personally I’d rather we all stop trying to insist that we’re unbiased and only relaying “the facts” and instead focus on recognizing those biases that inform how we view the world. That’s a more valuable skill to teach than this pretense of objectivity.

@Cupcake Apparently, my view is not quite as absurd as you think. Others have done much more research into this idea. Their findings (often using all or some of the avenues for feedback you listed) show a HUGE pattern of censorship of views on campuses in the US and the UK. There are other studies that mirror what I’m saying.

I did find an interesting statement on one page that pointed to so-called “experts” who appeal to the authority of their credentials to put them in the position of being right in debates. This brings me into your credentials. As a PhD and teaching at the university level, is it possible you are part of the problem and not open minded enough to see it? The issue is that administration and professors are a huge part of the problem. So using your credentials does not show that you are an expert on it. It shows you have experience in that area. But if you ask a thief if he is a thief, the answer you get is no. If you have honestly not seen any examples of censorship of ideas on campus, yours must be the one and only campus in the world where it is clean.

@Demosthenes I really appreciate all of your answers and mostly agree with what you wrote.

My opinion is that I don’t find anything inherently wrong with what they did. Like Demosthenes I don’t see it as “indoctrination”. But it’s certainly annoying.

I feel it undermines the mission of the university experience, which is to be a place to analyze society and not be steering the thoughts of the students in a very specific direction. My dad is an alum of an Ivy (Penn) and gets their magazine in the mail. He has noticed this shift over the years also, and that is not just one department, that is representing the university as a whole.

Fareed had a few minutes on the topic recently. He was sparked by the recent inquiries with the university presidents regarding campus demonstrations related to the Israeli Hamas war. Here’s the clip: https://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2023/12/10/fareeds-take-us-universities-education-gps-vpx.cnn

To be clear, I in no way am criticizing getting a university education. I think the attacks on education are horrible, especially the attack on public education both k-12 and college level.

@seawulf575 The point of fluther is that people with expertise in certain areas comment on questions in those areas. So when I am one of few (if any) people currently active on fluther and answer a question regarding university education, it is perfectly appropriate for me to list my expertise regarding my answer. For you to suggest otherwise is contrary to the purpose of the site.

Is it possibe that I am “part of the problem and not open minded enough to see it”? Sure. Likely? No. I won’t bother to list all the ways that I connect with students to ensure that I understand their perspective and that they feel comfortable presenting conflicting views in class. I have reflection meetings at the end of each class to get feedback. I send out anonymous student surveys throughout the semester. I elicit feedback after each exam. I meet one-on-one with each student and each group (if doing a group assignment) each semester. Students have my cell phone number and can text or call me at any time. I have argued with administration that our curriculum and faculty are not diverse enough, that it is a de facto assumption that everyone in public health is liberal, hates Trump, etc. I’ve gone to bat for many students, many groups, fought against the status quo. These are just the quick examples off the top of my head.

We have more in common than you could imagine. Maybe stop assuming the worst about me.

@Cupcake Perhaps you are one of the good ones. But evidence shows that many, many universities, administrations, and professors are not. Your statement encompassed ALL universities and all students. If voicing your opinion gets you a failing grade, is that fair? If giving candid feedback gets you blacklisted and treated as almost a criminal, is that fair? It isn’t. And all this shows a prevailing trend on universities across the country to censor opposing viewpoints and to punish those that dare to air them.

And my crusty view of this is not limited to only liberal views on universities. There are other universities, usually smaller Christian ones like Bob Jones where a student cannot show support for any of the liberal issues without fear or reprisals. The liberal colleges/universities are just more prevalent.

The list of definitions provided in this question show a distinct pattern of pushing an agenda. That list is used in a class to set the ground work for the class. Students are supposed to use those definitions throughout their studies. That is indoctrination, plain and simple. If a student dares to speak out against those definition, are you going to tell me the professor is going to let it go? No. At the very least that student will be talked to, telling them they have to accept the definitions if they want to complete the course. That’s how the course was set up. That is institutional indoctrination at this point.

@seawulf575 Just wondering what’s your evidence that it’s happening at a lot of colleges? Half the colleges (more or less) are public. I would think public colleges are less susceptible to a bias in the curriculum. Many of the private schools are very small and influence smaller numbers.

@JLeslie I gave two citations a couple of responses ago…a Newsweek article and an Intelligent study summary…both of which show on numerous universities this censorship and fear of reprisal exists. It isn’t just private colleges. You could easily do an internet search and find all sorts of articles that address this including some that talk about lawsuits brought by threatened students against the universities. It is a widespread issue.

But to turn it around a moment, where are the citations that show all universities are fair an unbiased, that no censorship of ideas exists and it is only one or two specific ones that are exhibiting those behaviors?

@seawulf575 I wasn’t saying how many, I have no idea. Obviously, I am somewhat concerned about this too, but I am equally concerned about the attack in education and what seems to be a movement to encourage children not to seek higher education.

I’m the first to want vocational education available at the high school level and trade schools for high school graduates, and for society to respect those careers as much as any other, but that is for those who have an affinity for and seek those jobs. Sometimes some people have little choice which bothers me.

Promoting vocational education is different than slamming university education and calling it a waste of money. Especially when people who don’t have four year educations they really don’t know what that education is like. In fact, I would say young adults who commute to campus have a different experience than those who live on campus and are fully immersed. Those who go to 1,000 person schools have a different experience than 10,000+.

Dumbing down the population (we could look at that as a double entendre) is the work of bad people who seek control.

I do think that something has to be done about tuition prices, but even that is different than saying university education is a waste or indoctrination. It just needs to be fixed, and it’s not all schools. Some in-state tuitions are still reasonable, but many aren’t.

In order to show that “all universities are fair and unbiased” there probably would have to be a survey of all universities’ faculty, administration, students and policies. That sounds like an exhaustive survey/study. Does one even exist? Otherwise, who can really speak for “all universiities? Some might know what goes on at some, but not all.

@jca2 There have been studies like that. I have referenced a few. Unfortunately they don’t support the claim that all universities are fair and unbiased. And it did include administration, faculty, and students. It looked at universities in the US, Canada, and the UK.

@JLeslie I have, for a long time, felt we put too much emphasis on having to get a college degree. Without that slip of paper, your chances of moving up in a company is almost nil. I have also been a big proponent that not everybody needs to go to college. Like you, I have felt that vocational schools are a great way to establish a career. Plumbers, electricians, carpenters, Automobile mechanics, etc all make good money. Enough money to support a family.

The cost of college is ridiculous. It is limiting on people getting the skills necessary to survive. Poor people have to get scholarships of some sort to be able to pay. Community colleges are an option but even those are getting pretty expensive.

But in all these things, I still feel it is wrong to use the guise of education to push a political agenda and it is horrible to punish someone if they believe something different than you.