FIFTY YEARS OF FAILURE.

The culture studies types have poisoned the political environment for a long time.  Tear down the guardrails, then fret about incivility or what have you.  "Perhaps that adversarial culture might earn more respect if it produced any work of great insight, but you'll have to look elsewhere to find it.  There may be a reason scholars of a certain inclination assert the existence of multiple oppressions of Race, Class, and Gender, or revert to dog-whistle words about "issues of ...".  Dig deeper, and there's no there there."

Daniel Henninger of The Wall Street Journal wrote that "No Guardrails" essay, and he's back, noting that nobody was listening.

A primary claim made repeatedly this week is that the U.S., which means the American people, are guilty of perpetual “systemic racism.”

It is evident from the coverage that most of the demonstrators were born after 1990. By then, the Great Society programs had been in place for 25 years, and now it is 55 years. Annual budget appropriations totaling multiple trillions of dollars on Medicaid, food stamps, welfare, public housing, rent subsidies and federal aid to public schools have produced . . . what?

Since the 1960s, essentially little has changed in the neighborhoods at the center of those long-ago urban riots. By current telling, they are about as poor, as crime-ridden, as under-educated and in poor health as they were when LBJ said he would change them. That means five decades of stasis and stagnation in America’s most marginalized places, virtually all of it under Democratic—now “progressive”—political control.

The failure of the liberal model is by now so embarrassing that the current owners of that model have created an alternative universe of explanations, such as blaming it on American settlers in the early 17th century or the nonexistence of “justice.”

This is worse than 1968, because the political system is now engaged in a systemic act of forgetting. Let’s forget that this policy failure has happened or why.

Hat tip:  Steven Hayward at Power Line.

The extension to higher education is straightforward: is doubling down on the Student Affairs rhetoric about diversity, inclusion, and equity, which we have been hearing for the past thirty years, apparently to little effect, the best approach?  Maybe not.

[T]hose among us who see education as the one true lever for societal change are called upon now to incorporate a more holistic and fully representative narrative in the degree programs offered at our colleges and universities. That would begin with fully acknowledging that not everyone embraces the discourse on privilege and systemic discrimination. Many Americans do not wholeheartedly subscribe to the dominant narrative of racism as the key determinant of all matters related to equality and justice, as it is repeated verbatim in every article and conference paper or social media post. There are other voices, and not just those who are attracted by white supremacist thought or who continue to hold fast to the idea of American exceptionalism. In and out of academe, many Americans want to grasp what it means to live in a pluralistic and equal society, one that also remains firmly based in capitalism and ideas of individual freedom.

Put another way, there are controversies, and the role of people in higher education, whether on faculty, or within the administration (read that article in full, dear reader, it is another administrative power grab, e.g. "Higher education professionals want to take the lead now and engage more deliberately and jointly in revising our programs so that they are intellectually inclusive, skills focused and fully transferable, thereby moving significantly forward to achieving true equity not only in access but also in outcome for all students.")