As an academic community of global and local citizens, we are committed to becoming an anti-racist and health-promoting institution that honors and uplifts the cultural wealth of our students. We intend to engage reciprocally in equitable practices and partnerships with the communities we serve. We support various and diverse forms of knowledge production that enrich the lives of all communities, especially those historically undervalued and underserved. We are a public urban university dedicated to teaching, learning, and research rooted in equity, environmental sustainability, social and racial justice, innovation, and expansive notions of excellence.In common with the corporate counterparts of these things (strategic planning being, like total quality management or disruption or management by objectives) just the latest way to give the impression of being au courant while wasting time on faddish things, rather than, oh, teaching students, it's a word salad ticking all the proper boxes whilst signifying total surrender of the curriculum to the critical theory types.
My biggest gripe with critical theory is that nobody seems interested in testing any of the hypotheses. But at Peanut Beacon Hill U, it's not the testing that matters, it's the acceptance of critical theory priors as Academic Policy. Look how that gets into the proposed vision statement, that being the other part of strategic planning by which deanlets and facilitators justify their salaries and stipends.
We aspire to become an anti-racist and health-promoting public research institution where:
Diversity, equity, shared governance, and expansive notions of excellence are core institutional values.
Wellness and an ethic of care are embedded throughout our campus culture and all policies and practices.
We invest in a resource-rich learning environment to support the development and success of students of plural identities and from diverse socio-economic, racial, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds.
Climate, environmental, and racial justice align with sustainable economic and planning decisions with local and global effects.
Community engaged scholarship, service, and reciprocity are embedded in University practices that promote the economic, social, and cultural well-being of the communities we serve
We hold ourselves and each other accountable to ensure these values drive all decision-making in research, pedagogical innovations, resource allocation, and the development of policies and practices.
I'm not sure what "anti-racist and health-promoting" means, "Pedigogical innovation" in support of "expansive notions of excellence" means special education. That might be OK if you see yourself as the university of last resort in a city that's got a few other universities with "Boston" in their name. Faculty members atWe believe this document is deeply flawed in content, direction, and representation. Moreover, we believe that the absence of significant changes to this draft would bring serious damage to the College of Science and Mathematics, to the reputation of UMass Boston as a beacon of knowledge and education, and to the demographically and ideologically diverse group of students we serve - particularly those who see education as a means to rise socio-economically.Indeed, and it's not as if such fealty to the holy words of the church of intersectionality is going to draw students away from Oberlin or Brown. "The message is that at UMass Boston academic freedom and the search for empirical truth will be subjugated to a narrow ideological viewpoint which has a radically divergent agenda. Importantly, this message will actively deter prospective faculty and students from even considering UMass Boston as a place of study or research." I'd note, also, that there's a lot of that critical studies jargon supposedly confined to advanced study in law or social sciences in those proposed statements.
We believe the Mission and Vision Statements trample on the fundamental role of the university: to facilitate the creation, curation, and dissemination of knowledge. To elaborate, we believe that the main goals of a university are to empower the pursuit of knowledge, to cultivate lifelong learning, to foster the exchange of ideas, to encourage critical thinking, to unequivocally support free inquiry, and to instill respect for a diversity of ideas and viewpoints.
Under no circumstances can political or ideological activism be the primary purpose of a public university. This is not to say students, faculty, and staff cannot be activists. Quite the contrary: individual people are the agents of social change, and as such they should be encouraged to organize and fight for a better society. Moreover, the public university can play an active role in educating students on pressing issues of social injustice as well as effective methods of activism. However, in this regard the role of the university is to empower people to take action themselves - not to coerce students, faculty, or institutional units to do so.
It is important to emphasize that the fundamental role of the public university can neither be political nor ideological activism. In part, this is due to the illegality of compelled speech in public institutions and our legally binding commitment to academic freedom as outlined in the so-called "red book" on academic personnel policy. Additionally, ideological activism cannot be a central goal of the university because at times it will conflict with education and research. The search for truth can never be subjugated to social or ideological beliefs.
We raise these points about the purpose of the public university because we believe the current drafts of the mission and vision statements radically depart from these fundamental tenets, and instead promote a chilling environment for the pursuit of truth. This is most evident in the Vision Statement which discusses diversity, equity, expansive notions of excellence, wellness, an ethic of care, plural identities, climate justice, environmental justice, and racial justice, and then states that "We hold ourselves and each other accountable to ensure these values drive all decision-making in research, pedagogical innovations, resource allocation, and the development of policies and practices. That is, these values - which have very distinct ideological interpretations - must drive the direction of every researcher and department on campus, and as a community of scholars we will hold people accountable when their research does not actively promote these values.
The rot also spreads to Texas.
[Finance professor Richard] Lowery said the university’s promotion and hiring policy, implemented in April 2021, already peddles diversity, equity, and inclusion and even appears to discriminate against candidates on the basis of political orientation. Given UTAustin’s track record, Lowery said he’s confident the “academic freedom” proposal will be a trojan horse for the radical indoctrination of students. It won the support of the University Faculty Gender Equity Council, the Council for LGBTQ+ Access, Equity, and Inclusion, and the Council for Racial and Ethnic Equity and Diversity.Legislators are noticing.
“So many of the faculty view themselves as activists first and educators and researchers second and third at best. There is this mindset that we need to be bringing about this specific set of social changes dictated by this odd theory that they’ve built up, not provide education or look objectively at facts. This activist core drives so much of the university,” he told [Fox News].
The Wyoming Senate voted Friday to end funding for the University of Wyoming’s gender and women’s studies program, The Hill reported.That is an overreach of authority for the legislature. It's predictable, though, that when untested theories using trendy research and teaching methods become the vision and mission of the entire university, that somebody is going to say no. To return to Mr Merisotis, how can higher education either help students develop that "ability to sort truth from misinformation" or that "respect for the idea that the well-being of our neighbors and communities is something to be cherished and shared, not envied or denied" starting from the premise that some among the students have committed Original (Secular) Sin, and they probably get privilege-shamed in the bargain?
By a vote of 16 to 14, the senators passed an amendment to the budget to stop using state money to fund what Senate Education Committee chairman Charles Scott, a Republican, called “an extremely biased, ideologically driven program that I can’t see any academic legitimacy to.”
Republican state senator Cheri Steinmetz brought forth the amendment after reading the program’s goals, which included providing students with an understanding of queer, feminist and social justice theories to be applied to “service and activism,” according to The Hill.
That puts Matt "Dean Dad" Reed's sensible observations in a different light, doesn't it?Peanut Beacon Hill's treatment of "community engaged scholarship" isn't "stigmatizing the simple fact of disagreement" per se.
[T]o the extent that we reduce education to training, we neglect the crucial task of preparing citizens to run the country.Convince me, dear reader, that
In fact, there’s a move afoot now to stifle any discussion of “divisive” topics at all. By stigmatizing the simple fact of disagreement, these proposals aim to strike at the heart of democracy. Given freedom to speak, people will disagree; James Madison noted that in the Federalist Papers, and it’s still true. The only way to prevent disagreement—or deliberation, if you prefer—is to deny the freedom to speak. That’s the point of those proposals, and anyone with a commitment to democracy needs to recognize that.
We routinely measure the starting salaries of graduates. We publish graduation rates—badly measured, but still—and sometimes employment rates. I can’t remember seeing a survey of the voting rates of a given college’s graduates.
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