What does it mean to teach "social justice" and "diversity"? University of British Columbia deepens its project of academic tyranny

Before we turn to today's news in the Vancouver Sun, let us ask ourselves, what could it possibly mean to teach, in the context of a teachers' college, "social justice" and "diversity"? What could it mean to be a professor, at the centre of a room of students, telling them that when they become teachers they too must instill in students a respect for "social justice" and "diversity"?

Is the form of a lecture, or mere seminar leader - i.e. telling people what is just and diverse - consistent with raising people to be just and diverse in their habits? Or does our submission to the lecturer's authority mitigate against our acquiring the appropriate habits? And what happens when the lecturer/class leader is aware of such a possibility and avows, in response, that she will do all she can to insure she only speaks in the name of empowering those who are somehow oppressed by our inherited norms and habits, as they pertain to teaching?

I think first asking such questions will help us divine what we are being told by this news report:

Social justice and diversity issues would get unprecedented attention in every course offered by the University of B.C.’s education faculty if a major program overhaul that began several years ago is approved.

“It’s safe to say that every aspect of our program is going to be changed,” associate education dean Rita Irwin said in an interview. “We want to be as responsive as possible to what’s happening in schools. Right now, we’re doing our best to do that, but we think there’s a need to reconfigure.”

It won’t simply be a matter of the university following the lead of B.C. high schools and offering an optional course similar to Social Justice 12. Rather, social justice and diversity are expected to become dominant themes in all education courses, Irwin said.

“If only one class deals with it, then teacher candidates can kind of set it aside. What we’re trying to say now is that you can’t set it aside. You have to understand that it infuses everything you’re doing.”

You have to understand... that I have authority because I speak for those you would forget, if you could...

For example, she said students taking a mathematics course might also end up discussing class, gender or race.

But what could this mean? That in trying to learn the intricacies of algebra, students will be distracted and lectured on the problematic nature of a discipline in which boys have historically done better than girls? in which Asian students tend to better than others? that algebra is somehow testament to the brilliance of Islam or the Arabs in learning how to link together the disparate bits and pieces of their own culture? But how could any such questions be negotiated while actually learning algebra? And perhaps more important, how can any classroom difference be negotiated by ordinary students supposedly interested in "justice" and "diversity", if they have to defer to a central authority? and is a deferral to central authority not inevitable when we define the problem as a greatly scandalous one of "class, gender, or race", when it's no longer a matter of inter-personal differences but an invidious difference of world historical signficance?

Irwin stressed that the redesign has not yet been approved by the university senate. “We’re pretty confident it will go through, but theoretically, it’s not quite through yet,” she said, adding she doesn’t expect changes will take effect before 2012.

The proposals are so far-reaching that Irwin described the process as the “re-imagining” of the UBC education degree. Part of that includes an expectation that education graduates would be “teacher inquirers” with an understanding of a wide range of education issues. As an example, Irwin said they would comprehend the arguments for and against the categorization of special-needs students.

“We want them not to think of teaching in a technocratic, instrumental way but ... [as something] that’s constantly evolving. They need to be attentive to the society around them, they need to be lifelong, life-wide learners, they have to take into consideration what new research in education is saying.

“We really want them to be questioners [and] people who are going to be engaged.”

And what if our questioning leads us to a realization that teaching "social justice" and "diversity" is the epitome of technocratic instrumentalism and as such the great enemy of individual questioning? What if those in authority who are telling us to question authority do so because this is a devious way of asserting their lingering authority in an age that likes to think it has learned the lessons of how dictatorships work. I mean, "Class! Can you tell me of one twentieth-century dictatorship anywhere in the world that didn't justify its authority in the name of saving the people from their oppressors, be these Jews, Freemasons, kulaks, bourgeois, the educated, the technocratic, Americans, white colonialists, etc. etc.? Does a dictatorship ever exercise power in the name of personal responsibility, unless it is pointing to a failure of someone's personal responsibility because said person is allegedly serving the cause of some oppressive group?

And even when you are aware that so much authority justifies itself by declaring the previous holders of authority to have been just so reliant on scapegoating and oppressing, can you yourself escape the cycle of scapegoating and oppressing if you propose to teach "social justice" and "diversity" instead of, say, individual responsibility in the context of maximally free political and economic markets?

The faculty also hopes to encourage specific areas of interest, such as UBC’s social-emotional learning experiment that began this year as the first in North America and possibly the world, Irwin said. (Social and emotional learning is a process for helping students develop the knowledge, understandings and skills that support learning, positive behaviour, and constructive social relationships.)

Nope, no one can accuse them of promoting technocratic authority...

Speaking for myself, I think we would have a lot more justice, and genuine diversity in our society if we made teaching a profession that anyone could enter on their own merits, regardless of whether they had passed through perhaps the most PC institution in our society and perhaps the universities' least intellectually serious faculty - the teachers' colleges. I think we would have a lot more justice and diversity if instead of worshiping professors we respected, in our own individual and barely public ways, people like Laura Wood, The Thinking Housewife.

In the linked article, Wood argues that schools are becoming dominated by feminine values that, on the one hand, marginalize boys and their needs, and on the other set up girls to expect the world but in a way that is to insure at some point in the future a great personal fall and disappointment when the girls learn the world is not what they have been led to believe, that they cannot have everything.

Class! Can there be any doubt that what the University of B.C.'s education faculty proposes is to further assert feminine classroom authority, an unquestionable maternal authority, in the name of "social justice" and "diversity"? Again, I ask you how can these values be asserted without asserting a centralized authority without which all that we are taught to be totally scandalous - the invidious distinctions we ascribe to "class, race, and gender" - cannot be mediated. I mean, once we believe "social justice" and "diversity" MUST be a part of everything we do, are we left to do anything without deferring to whomever has the power to make the necessarily arbitrary dictates on what is and isn't a scandal to "equality" and "justice" in the "diverse" classroom? Can individual students who don't aspire to serve in the ranks of a victim-naming priesthood really be empowered by such a curriculum? How can I discuss my difference with you if what divides us is all the hidden power of the "class, race, gender" system? Must I not defer to the authoritative diagnosis of the alleged evils before we can start to talk? and would not such a deferral mean we won't really talk, but rather you will lecture me on my "privilege" and I must either go along with that or get out?

Can real differences and diversity emerge under such a regime, or can we only ritualize and freeze in place some set of authoritative social distinctions that only slowly changes according to the politics in the backrooms of the teachers' colleges? Does "social justice" and "diversity" mean anything other than that we must become more, not less, dependent on the University of British Columbia Faculty of Education?

I think those who truly wish students to be able to make a difference have to focus on the individual person. But alas, that is an idea firmly rooted in Western, Judeo-Christian traditions. And that is the great scandal of our times...

In the meantime, practical students will be pressured more and more to ask only "what are the hoops we have to jump through" to please the technocratic authority that disguises itself in the names of "social justice" and "diversity" and anti-technocratic authority? And the real teachers and good people who make their way in the world despite all the evils of academic officialdom will be stuck with the task of asking how to turn the "what are the hoops?" question into a genuine moment for learning.

What are you praying for?

I've been puttering about for a day or two wondering what to write to announce our weekly meeting, every Thursday, 7-9pm in the atrium of the central branch of the Vancouver Public Library, in front of Blenz Coffee. Please join us if you can and would like to discuss the renewal of the Canadian covenant.

I've been trying to decide if I want to make anything of the seemingly small matter of our local university's recent gesture of "welcoming diversity," particularly to the extent it is focussed on members of a certain authoritarian politics/religion. Muslim Footbaths at University of BC growls one headline from a notoriously "Islamophobic" blog, going on to quote from our local tabloid:

“It’s no different from upgrading washrooms to accommodate transgender students or students with disabilities,” said UBC spokeswoman Janet Mee.

The plans stemmed from a consultation last December in which UBC asked students how to improve washroom facilities. “We approached [the Muslim students association] to ask them what their ablution needs were,” Mee said. “We included that in a project that we were working on around accessible, gender-inclusive family friendly washrooms.”

Alsalaman said his association and the university have a very good relationship that includes the creation of the prayer room and the installation of a lock to the room after a dark brown patch was discovered on the floor of the room late last year.

“The footbath installation will not be difficult and not cost very much,” Alsalaman said. “We are asking that it only be in the two washrooms near the prayer room. It’s not that big of a deal and is very important to us. We feel more welcome.”

It's a little thing but it raises the question if, on principle, state-funded Canadian universities have any business paying for religious facilities (religious denominations do fund their own institutions on various Canadian campuses, including UBC). I remember a controversy at McGill recently when the university, whose charter affirms it to be a secular institution, refused to create a permanent prayer room for Muslims, not that it refused to allow them to pray in makeshift settings. I can understand how UBC might have felt that all the foot washing going on in regular washroom sinks was creating a mess and it's better to create a special place for this sort of thing. After all, UBC like many universities with their post-national liberal elites in charge, is now in the business of trying to attract money from all over the world and there is a lot of money in the Arab oil states flowing into Western universities (money which many argue is accepted with the implicit understanding that criticism of the Islamic totalitarian religion/politics will be muted in these universities). Anyone who has checked out the building boom at UBC - which includes many multi-million dollar condos that seemed to me on a recent visit to have several owners from mainland China (how many people working in the Canadian economy can afford such homes?), and thus presumably with connections to the highly oppressive Communist Party oligarchy without which it is rather hard to get rich in China - might come to the fast and easy conclusion that UBC is not too particular about the people and values it welcomes to campus in the guise of "welcoming diversity".

Don't get me wrong, I too have connections with connections to the Chinese Communist Party, and I derive some (small) income (not to mention other social benefits) from them. In business today, most people can't avoid trade with China, just as we support the promotion of Wahabi Islam every time we buy gas to support our own economic activities. But at the end of the day, one has to put business partners and friends aside and remind oneself of his own ethical values and his nation's. And one kind of hopes one's local university will take a lead in reminding him of what Canada has, in the past, stood for: the sacralization of the individual as above the claims of the group, including religious groups.

This has meant we have created public institutions that pay attention to the promotion of individuals in public and economic life, while keeping the claims of specific religions or special interest groups carefully circumscribed. We can't of course entirely separate the individual from his religion but traditionally we have made universities and other institutions places where you go as an individual, and member (or visitor) of the Canadian nation, and not as an active representative of some other kind of sub community. In the past, Muslims have made their way through the system.

And we don't expect that all taxpayers should have to pay for special interests that go beyond providing services in order to foster the growth of individuals, indeed to free them from the bounds of traditional, group-centred, restraints. With some exceptions, e.g. the state support for Catholic schools in Ontario and Quebec, we have generally felt that the promotion of specific religious or political interests should be the duty of individuals who want to make such a commitment. And keep in mind that Islam is both a religion and a traditional, authoritarian, political system.

So what to make of UBC's director of access and diversity, Janet Mee, proclaiming:

"The university is absolutely keen and willing to consider any request that comes forward from the Muslim Students Association."

Is Mee unaware of the kinds of radical political positions that Muslim Students Associations promote at various universities? Does she not see any essential difference in using public monies (the university is in large part publicly funded) to a) support a specific religious-political movement and b) guarantee that all students can be respected as individuals with a basic human right to safely use a washroom for its standard purpose:

Bathroom needs became an issue last year after members of the university's Pride association, representing gays, lesbians, bisexual and transgendered students, raised safety concerns with Mee's department.

She said transgendered students have reported feeling harassed or embarrassed when forced to use traditionally segregated bathrooms on campus.

From this specific concern, Mee took an opportunity to mix things up and moved on to a much vaguer justification for providing, among other things, religious facilities:

"I hope it says that we want to create an inclusive and welcoming environment for all students"..."It has to do with a greater awareness of the needs of diverse students and probably a greater desire on the part of large institutions to understand their students," she said.

Janet Mee, UBC's house mother of diversity, reminds me of a great article by Thomas Bertonneau

The politically correct university, under the domination of the primordial mother, becomes affective and jealous in its basic structures; it replaces the individual (because he is individuated, hence a priori outside her realm and a threat to it) with the group. "If the person can substitute a group identity for an individual one, social organization becomes possible at the level of the group [and] an ideal of oneself as a member of a group can serve as one’s ego ideal" (121). The individual who rejects identification with a group now becomes the focus of the group-consciousness, of the collective narcissism, and indeed, by constituting such a cynosure, actually permits mediation among groups which might otherwise experience destructive friction. Each group depends on the primordial mother to keep at bay the individual renegade; at the same time, they look to the primordial mother for the sustenance of their collective ego-image. She answers the demand through "the idea of the child who needs love the most, the one who has been least loved in the past, the victim" (121 [emphasis added]). The "marginalized" minority is diversity’s unwanted child in the collective plural. Hence the incessant clamor by this or that demographic segment of the university’s enrollment for favors and privileges—and for punishments to be meted out to those who deviate from the one path:

Decision making in the PC university loses even the intention of being rational. Argument about possible courses of action no longer involves consideration of the actual effects policies will have. The process turns instead to the competitive avowal of one’s goodness and the imputation of badness to one’s opponents. But that is only the beginning of the matter. The separation of decision making from the consideration of results, together with the a priori establishment of some views as morally good while others are morally bad, has other consequences. It leads to a situation in which the intentions of the actor, and, indeed, often only the purported intentions of the actor, are the only matter of importance, removing the means from moral consideration. (124)

The politically correct university is not only, as Schwartz notes, a "psychological regression" (159) into infantile narcissism, it is likewise a cultural atavism, a relapse into archaic, indeed sacrificial, forms of communal organization that belong more properly to the Stone or Bronze Age than to the twenty-first century of the Christian Era. I return here to the work of Gans, who argues in Signs of Paradox that the Holocaust represents a cultural turning point in the Western moral imagination, by verifying in a massively empirical way the essential Christian revelation that communal solidarity based on persecution and victimization is evil. "Our ideal moral certainties are re-grounded in the opposition between (Nazi) persecutor and (Jewish) victim" (188). But it is really a good deal more complicated than this, because:

The descent of the absolute into the empirical world is the moment of its undoing. As soon as we posit an absolute difference between victim and persecutor, the underlying symmetry of their relation reasserts itself. When the SS torturer becomes the villain of the war film, he is turned into a sacrificial figure, a scapegoat, [a] structural equivalent of the Jud Süss in Nazi cinema. In the already tiresome clarity of this asymmetry, culture has been abandoned to youth; adults are too world-weary to participate wholeheartedly in the eternal and now transparent structure of victimary resentment.… Group resentment has replaced individual resentment —the point of essential difference between the high and the popular—as the primary object of cultural deferral. (188-189)

Gans remarks how

a long-lost Dionysian frenzy reappears in the ecstatic forms of postwar popular culture, in its music and dance, the audience of which more than that of any other popular form incarnates "the people." These central dramas of the youth-culture are not coincidentally the most subject to black and other minority influences. The rhythms and chord progressions of popular music dissolve individuality in a real or imaginary group movement that is the historical heir to sacrificial ritual. They create, in an imaginary context, the resentful unanimity of the sparagmos. (189).

Schwartz’s "Revolt of the Primitive" and Gans’ atavism of a minoritized "youth culture" are, I believe, aspects of the same epochal cultural transformation. The primordial mother is the ringleader and youth (always in a rainbow coalition of sexually ambiguous misfits) are her press gang. Schwartz interprets the phenomenon more pessimistically than does Gans, who notes, but does not particularly stress, the sacrificial character of the new, resentment-driven forms of collective identification. Yet Gans does admit that "what is new in our era is the promotion of non-integrative local theories…. as though they were the only theories conceivable and it were no longer possible for the human community to think of itself as a whole" (198). He also notes how "feminism and other minority approaches, which maintain their link with universal thought only through the unacknowledged mediation of the Christian centralization of the victim, are fast driving out other forms of cultural interpretation" (198). Gans’ "non-integrative local theories" are nevertheless deeply troubling, not least because their most recent prototype appears to lie exactly in the ferocious biological dualism of Hitlerian anti-Semitic policy, as "non-integrative" as you can get. Paradoxically, of course, the proliferating new Übermenschen find their superiority to all others in their own alleged victimization, which then becomes the pretext to victimize all who would deny the in-group’s special (mother-authorized) victim-status. The lèse, as it were, proves the majesté. Where the lèse does not exist, which means just about everywhere, it is necessary to invent it. There is much burning of the Reichstag. Schwartz catches the same paradox, noticing that the eidos of women in the regime that they now obviously control is a contradictory one, simultaneously a picture of "passive, hopeless victim" and "exemplars of the primordial mother" (158).

Am I blowing a little foot shower out of proportion? Maybe it all depends on whether you think the Muslim Students Association will now happily go its way, keeping their religion/politics - focussed on Jihad and Sharia - a private matter, or, on what you think they are going to demand next. Maybe they will declare some visiting speaker, a "homophobic" Jew, say, a threat to their sense of security.