IS IT TOO LATE FOR THE FACULTY TO RECLAIM STEWARDSHIP OF THE CURRICULUM?

Minding the Campus columnist Stanley K. Ridgley sees something wrong.  "Student Affairs: The Real Threat on Campus."  The presence of a parallel curriculum offered by Student Affairs has long been with us, and, I suspect, more than a few faculty members have been complicit.  At the University of Delaware, faculty curriculum committees took issue with Student Affairs creating courses, but I bet they would have been down for the learning objectives.  "The Perpetually Aggrieved among the faculty would no doubt be happy to continue the same ideological themes, albeit for credit."

It's still there, and Mr Ridgley flies the protest flag.

During a recent discussion of my book Brutal Minds, someone remarked, “It never occurred to me that deviant worldview training began at university welcoming events. I thought it emanated from professors, not office bureaucrats.”

Likewise, many folks routinely pummel the faculty for “indoctrination” in colleges and universities, when another, mostly anonymous group is responsible. A cadre of thinly educated support staff serves up most of the primitive, toxic ideologies for our students, including critical racialism and the euphemistically named “social justice education.”

How could this be so? Let’s explore.

Many are unfamiliar with the university bureaucracy known as “student affairs.” This bureaucracy disseminates the lion’s share of academia’s noxious ideologies through its so-called “co-curriculum,” which the average person outside the university has never heard of.  And that’s exactly how the fake faculty in the co-curriculum like it.

This co-curriculum exists on almost every college campus. It includes fake faculty, fake courses, and, at some schools, even a fake transcript. The point of this elaborate façade is to blur the distinction between the actual curriculum taught by actual faculty in academic affairs, and the faux curriculum taught by fake faculty who call themselves “college educators.” Many, if not most, of the persons who teach this fake co-curriculum are campus clerks, advisors, coordinators, DEI commissars, enrollment managers, and other “student affairs” staffers who hold the increasingly ubiquitous “master’s degree in higher education” and various online certificates.

That's not a secret. Parents and students might not be aware of the non-curriculum re-education, but faculty have known about it and often go along with it.  Mr Ridgley suggests that students and parents be woke to the con.

The actual professoriate is often ignorant of the student affairs bureaucracy and, in most cases, has no influence on—and certainly no oversight over—this “co-curriculum.” Typically, the only actual faculty who are concerned with this fake curriculum are education school types, usually those who administer the ed school graduate degrees in “student affairs” and “higher education management.”

The student affairs co-curriculum typically includes workshops, “Difficult Dialogues,” “Courageous Conversations,” “Privilege Walks,” and “Safe Spaces.” The bureaucracy behind it is permeated by a monolithic racialist ideology that 1) embraces the primitive Manichean ideology of critical racialism; 2) originates in education schools, which train the vast majority of these bureaucrats in Freirean/Maoist theory; and 3) informs two off-campus professional guilds—the American College Personnel Association (ACPA) and the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators (NASPA)—which maintain and augment the “antiracist” and “decolonization” efforts of academe’s ancillary support staffers.

Perhaps the habits of watching what the school boards and common school teachers were doing that developed during the corona tyranny will carry over into the college years.