Whenever someone asks, “Is wokeness growing or abating?”, I always say “growing.” True, more people are speaking up against “wokeness” (which I loosely define as performative “Social Justice” that accomplishes virtually nothing), but yet it’s still spreading quickly through American institutions. In fact, it’s spread so widely that it almost seems like a parody of itself, so much so that it’s often hard to tell wokeness from satires on wokeness.
Here’s one example: a job advertised in the Chronicle of Higher Education for an “assistant professor of literacy” at California State University at Fullerton (CSUF). The relevant department is “The Department of Literacy and Reading Education.”
Click below to read the ad (and weep):
The entire ad involves the University patting itself on the back for being diverse and promoting diversity, and the diversity requirements (including a detailed statement that’s probably illegal) far outstrip all other professional qualifications.
Excerpts from the ad (emphases are mine)
The Department of Literacy and Reading Education at California State University, Fullerton, invites applications for a tenure‐track assistant professor position in foundations of literacy (PK-12), as well as literacy leadership, with appointment to begin Fall 2024.
California State University, Fullerton (CSUF) is a minority-serving institution and an affirmative action and equal opportunity employer. CSUF is firmly committed to increasing the diversity of the campus community and the curriculum, and to fostering the Guiding Principles of Social Justice as well as an inclusive environment within which students, staff, administrators and faculty thrive. Candidates who can contribute to this goal through their teaching, research, advising, and other activities are encouraged to identify their strengths and experiences in this area. Individuals advancing the University’s strategic diversity goals and those from groups whose underrepresentation in the American professoriate has been severe and longstanding are particularly encouraged to apply.
CSUF is committed to retaining all faculty and has established affinity groups you can join to support your success.
Yes, CSUF could serve minorities, but is that the same thing as being a “minority-serving institution”? Who knows? But the ad was posted about a week before the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action on the basis of race, and, at any rate, that form of affirmative action has been outlawed in California for a long time.
And what are the “Guiding Principles of Social Justice”? Ten to one this demands adherence to a specific ideology, a form of compelled speech that is also illegal.
“Affinity groups” are sex-specific or, more often, ethnicity-specific groups for say, only Hispanics, only blacks, only Asians, and so on. (It goes without saying that there are no “white affinity groups”.) The invitation for the candidate to join one of these groups presumes that the candidate should be from a minority ethnic group. That requirement is also illegal, but this is a sneaky way to practice affirmative action when hiring.
You can read the ad for yourself, and unless I miss my guess, most readers will find it very like a parody. Just for completeness, here are the requirements for applying. I’ve put everything referring to diversity, including the detailed requirements for a diversity statement, in bold:
Application
- A complete on‐line application must be received by electronic submission to be considered. To apply, please visit http://hr.fullerton.edu/careers/Faculty.php, choose full-time faculty, search for position 529407, and provide the following required materials:
- cover letter of application in which you respond to the required and preferred qualifications
- curriculum vitae
- teaching philosophy statement
- Unofficial graduate school transcripts
- statement on commitment to just, equitable and inclusive education (see below)
- This statement provides the candidate’s unique perspective on their past and present contributions to and future aspirations for promoting diversity, inclusion, and social justice in their professional careers. The purpose of this statement is to help the department identify candidates who have professional experience, intellectual commitments, and/or willingness to engage in activities that could help CSUF contribute to its mission in these areas.Diversity is a defining feature of California’s past, present, and future. Increasing the diversity of our educators to better reflect the population of California is just one aspect of the College of Education’s dedication to just, equitable and inclusive education. Diversity refers to the variety of personal experiences, values, and worldviews that arise from differences of culture and circumstance. Such differences include race, ethnicity, gender, age, religion, language, abilities/disabilities, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, geographic region, and more.All College of Education students leave with a perspective that recognizes, honors, and respects the knowledge and strengths all learners bring from their communities and identities. This perspective is known as Just Equitable and Inclusive Education (JEIE) and is evident in all our programs. College of Education students use this perspective to make community-based assets an integral component of curricular and pedagogical development to enhance academic success. In this way, our students learn to value and draw upon students’ backgrounds not only to support them in developing skills leading to success in the broader society, but also as a mechanism to transform our schools and communities. We believe that all faculty and staff who work for the College must share these same commitments.The diversity statement should focus on your commitment to a Just, Equitable and Inclusive Education. The diversity statement will be assessed based on knowledge, experience, application, and expertise as it relates to JEIE. The strongest statement will have an emphasis on the intersectionality between JEIE and a social identity or marker (social class, race, gender, sexual orientation, language, etc.)This statement can take several different forms and should address at least one of the following
- Your contributions to advancing principles focused on JEIE.
- How you incorporate principles of JEIE into your instructional practices, your research and/or service activities.
- How you have personally experienced JEIE.
- Your experiences and/or qualifications that enhance your ability to work with diverse students, faculty, parents, and community stakeholders
- a list of three references with relevant contact information
Of the 533 words in the list of candidate qualifications, 396, or 74%, refer to what they call the required “statement on commitment to just, equitable and inclusive education”. This is just a fancy and duplicitous way of saying “diversity statement” without using those hot-button words. But then at the end they slip up and say this:
The diversity statement should focus on your commitment to a Just, Equitable and Inclusive Education. The diversity statement will be assessed based on knowledge, experience, application, and expertise as it relates to JEIE.
So it is a diversity statement after all! Note too that one of the job qualifications is this:
Demonstrated experience in anti-racist teaching and in the preparation of professionals who model and advocate for just, equitable, and inclusive education.
Tell me that this is not asking the candidate to conform to a specific form of ideological “antiracism”. (Hint: it’s closer to Kendi than King.)
Similarly, note that they’re clever in how they define diversity:
Diversity refers to the variety of personal experiences, values, and worldviews that arise from differences of culture and circumstance. Such differences include race, ethnicity, gender, age, religion, language, abilities/disabilities, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, geographic region, and more.
So you might think they’re simply looking for viewpoint diversity, which is fine. But I don’t believe them. They are looking for ethnic diversity, pure and simple, but can’t get away with saying it straight out, because it’s illegal. Note that they could simply say “ideological and viewpoint diversity” above without going into detail, but then they couldn’t mention ableism, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and all the things that make CSUF look virtuous.
Finally, I got this ad from Luana Maroja, and after I wrote the above I asked her for her take, which she gave me and allowed me to publish with her permission. Note that there is some overlap, but not too much, between her comments and mine.
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Luana’s comments:
Here are my impressions (words in italics are copied directly from the ad):
“CSUF is firmly committed to increasing the diversity of the campus community and the curriculum, and to fostering the Guiding Principles of Social Justice”
What are the guiding principles of Social Justice? This can mean many things – from “ungrading” courses to allowing people to express their opinions freely.
“Individuals advancing the University’s strategic diversity goals and those from groups whose underrepresentation in the American professoriate has been severe and longstanding are particularly encouraged to apply.”
Here they make clear that they are not really a “equal opportunity employer” as they state earlier.
In the qualifications section they implement more ideological biases, which don’t seem to be crucial to success in this current job (they appear instead to be ideological litmus tests):
“Demonstrated advocacy for, or experience working with intersecting social groups and communities historically underserved and marginalized by educational policies and practices”
“Demonstrated experience in anti-racist teaching and in the preparation of professionals who model and advocate for just, equitable, and inclusive education”
They initially dump the term “diversity statement” and replace it with “statement on commitment to just, equitable and inclusive education (see below)” I guess this is possibly to distract people who are concerned with “diversity statements”. . . But then they forget to remove diversity statement further down (see below).
Notice that here they do not mention “diversity of political views“, which is one aspect which really enhances diversity which I am sure the college lacks:
“Diversity is a defining feature of California’s past, present, and future. Increasing the diversity of our educators to better reflect the population of California is just one aspect of the College of Education’s dedication to just, equitable and inclusive education. Diversity refers to the variety of personal experiences, values, and worldviews that arise from differences of culture and circumstance. Such differences include race, ethnicity, gender, age, religion, language, abilities/disabilities, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, geographic region, and more.”
Once again the emphasis is on identity politics:
“All College of Education students leave with a perspective that recognizes, honors, and respects the knowledge and strengths all learners bring from their communities and identities. This perspective is known as Just Equitable and Inclusive Education (JEIE) and is evident in all our programs.”
Finally, here they forget they should not be using the term “diversity statement” and don’t use the euphemistic term from earlier in the ad:
“The diversity statement should focus on your commitment to a Just, Equitable and Inclusive Education. The diversity statement will be assessed based on knowledge, experience, application, and expertise as it relates to JEIE. The strongest statement will have an emphasis on the intersectionality between JEIE and a social identity or marker (social class, race, gender, sexual orientation, language, etc.)”
So, overall this is such an over-the-top litmus test that one does not even need to read the whole ad to know that. It will discourage any non-woke or even white person to from applying. It also reduces the pool of candidates, which is never a good idea as this might overlook talent. And talent is really needed given how poorly minorities are doing in CA.
“A perspective that recognizes, honors, and respects the knowledge and strengths all learners bring from their communities and identities. This perspective is known as Just Equitable and Inclusive Education (JEIE) and is evident in all our programs.” Need I mention that it is unconstitutional for a university to try to contr what perspectives students leave with?
I had to look up the position, because I wasn’t sure what a Professor of Literacy does. This is part of the job description:
I find “social justice,” like “revolutionary justice,” to be one of those cases where the qualifier diminishes the object, rather than enhancing it.
“I find ‘social justice,’ like ‘revolutionary justice,’ to be one of those cases where the qualifier diminishes the object, rather than enhancing it.”
Unless they’ve already become established phrases with known underlying meanings, which is something to which “social justice” certainly applies.
I’m a reading specialist and I weep for all the children who will be deprived of skilled, knowledgeable reading teachers thanks to practices like this. The irony is that the children most harmed will be black, brown and low income. Shameful.
You took the words right out of my keyboard. I spent a little over 20 years teaching middle school English, and it took me way too long to realize that almost every one of my students who said they hated to read felt that way because they’d never reached the level of automaticity in decoding.
I read the whole ad looking for wording that indicated the candidate should understand how human beings actually learn how to read, but I didn’t see anything like it.
And you’re right, JaneP, it’s black. brown, and low income students who will suffer most.
When parody of extremist ideology becomes reality — especially parody that was being produced only a year or two prior — it ceases to be funny and becomes frightening.
Also, think of all the brilliant black, Latino, and other minority professors who will never get a job at any school with requirements like this because they’re too far to the right of being fully committed to an extremely far-Left ideology. Lack of tolerance for viewpoint diversity and/or fealty statements to a specific ideology discriminates against everyone.
Wokeness is indeed growing and (alas!) spreading quickly through American institutions. Reading this unfortunately accurate assessment of the current situation, one cannot help recalling the famous phrase from Rudi Dutschke on the “long march” (“der lange Marsch durch die Institutionen”). This Maoist strategy has proved all too successful, while many exiles from China resident in this country have warned Americans of the horrors of their homeland’s “Cultural Revolution”.
Sorry for the long reply, but this is something I’ve been thinking about quite a bit for the last month.
I know that the word “totalitarianism” is almost always defined as an ideology enforced by the state, but a thought has been percolating in my head recently that, at least in ideology, it is a matter of degrees. If the ideology is successful in rising sufficiently, it can eventually become fully totalizing. Mao’s long march through the institutions is an excellent example, but I find wokeness more interesting because of some unique facets.
First and perhaps most interestingly, it is being forced by society’s social elites upon the masses. Rather than a bottom-up movement, it is one devised, spread, and enforced top-down by those who wield more power than the people beneath them.
Second, much like state-mandated totalitarianism, its most ardent adherents do everything in their power to punish those who refuse to conform. They will form Tw***er mobs to get people punished or fired for what they perceive as a transgression. They will protest and lobby administrators in any institution or company to suppress wrongthink and punish those they perceive to be responsible for it. They will resort to violence. They have methodically placed those who will follow these guidelines into positions of administrative power over many years, especially in positions of teaching, hiring, and human resources. They are now trying to restrict jobs to only those who pledge fealty to their ideology.
Third, they seek laws, backed by the state monopoly on violence, to punish wrongthink.
Fourth, they get control over as many mainstream journalists and media outlets as possible to push their ideology on the public. They do the same with academics, even infecting scientific journals to steer research toward their goals. They are constanly attempting to wrest control from all others over the “production of knowledge.”
Finally, not only is dissent forbidden, but now demonstrating constant and active support is required. They even have reeducation camps.
In all of these ways, wokeness is truly a “totalizing” ideology. Even if I agreed with it, I would still resist it on these grounds alone. I often bring up the concept of Havel’s greengrocer (from Václav Havel’s critical dissident work The Power of the Powerless). Rather than formulate my own surely much poorer definition, I’ll just quote part of the Wikipedia description: “Havel uses the example of a greengrocer who displays in his shop the sign Workers of the world, unite! Since failure to display the sign could be seen as disloyalty, he displays it and the sign becomes not a symbol of his enthusiasm for the regime, but a symbol of both his submission to it and humiliation by it. Havel returns repeatedly to this motif to show the contradictions between the ‘intentions of life’ and the ‘intentions of systems’, i.e. between the individual and the state, in a totalitarian society. An individual living within such a system must live a lie, to hide that which he truly believes and desires, and to do that which he must do to be left in peace and to survive. Individuals at each level within the bureaucracy must display their own equivalent of the grocer’s Workers of the world, unite! sign, oppressing those below them and in turn oppressed by those above.”
Many people now live in the world of Havel’s greengrocer, from employees in regular jobs, students, academics, and the unlucky person who is caught on camera or social media doing or saying something deemed counter to the ideology.
The college of education has become a college of indoctrination.
“Pick up the mission statement of almost any college or university, and you will find claims and ambitions that will lead you to think that it is the job of an institution of higher learning to cure every ill the world has ever known: not only illiteracy and cultural ignorance, which are at least in the ball-park, but poverty, war, racism, gender bias, bad character, discrimination, intolerance, environmental pollution, rampant capitalism, American imperialism, and the hegemony of Wal-Mart; and of course the list could be much longer.”
“Once you start preaching or urging a political agenda or engaging your students in discussions designed to produce action in the world, you are surely doing something, but it is not academic, even if you give it that name.
You know you are being academic (rather than therapeutic or political or hortatory) when the questions raised in your classroom have the goal of achieving a more accurate description or of testing a thesis; you know that you are being (or trying to be) something else when the descriptions you put forward are really stepping stones to an ideological conclusion (even one so apparently innocuous as “we should respect the voices of others”). The academic enterprise excludes no topic from its purview, but it regards any and every topic as a basis for analysis rather than as a stimulus to some moral, political, or existential commitment. Not to practice politics, but to study it; not to proselytize for or against religious doctrines, but to describe them; not to affirm or reject affirmative action, but to explore its history and lay out the arguments that have been made for and against it.”
(Fish, Stanley. /Save the World on Your Own Time./ New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. pp. 10+169)
Wow. Why would a University need a professor of literacy? Shouldn’t students admitted to a University already be literate? WTF is high school for if not to at the very least get students to literacy?
A Professor of literacy in a college of education teaches how reading should be taught. The students of such a Professor are not people who are not yet literate, but people studying and teaching how non-literate people can be taught how to read and write.
My guess is that this program is preparing people who will go on to fill positions like “Assistant Superintendent for Reading Instruction” for public school divisions. So they’ll be spreading this social justice approach to reading instruction to teachers who teach reading/language arts in K-12 schools.
I think a Professor of Lunacy is a great idea – let a thousand flowers bloom!
Whoops – a hundred.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Flowers_Campaign
“The name of the movement originated in a poem:
百花齊放，百家爭鳴
(Bǎihuā qífàng, bǎijiā zhēngmíng)
Let a hundred flowers bloom;
let a hundred schools of thought contend.”
太好了!
谢谢
… I’m just havin’ fun with a translation app – and quoting Wikipedia!
It’s pretty cool the characters show up here correctly.
Not necessarily. Well, obviously, they should all be relied on to be able to read the language of choice at the university and string basic sentences together, but they can’t necessarily be relied on to write coherently, especially if they are studying STEM subjects.
When I was at college, all the computer science students except me had to do a course in writing English (I escaped because my degree was Maths and Comp Sci). This was because, in their careers, they would likely have to write a lot of technical documentation.
The new question I ask about these things is how this relates to the UN Sustainable Development Goals 2030.
Because the words and language mean different things to different readers. In Herbert Marcuse’s words (referring to art): “alchemy of the word”. (From Counter-revolution and Revolt.)
“Minority-serving institution”
And designated as such by the US government. More specifically, they are a “Hispanic-Serving Institution,” having an undergraduate enrollment of at least 25% Hispanic students.
As far as serving those students, they appear to be dishing up the same pablum as every other college of education–those places where dumb ideas get dumbed down further. Add an extra dash of “we CARE about OUR students” and you get a taste of the indoctrination diet we are happily feeding to many in the K-12 system.
“Affinity groups” are sex-specific or, more often, ethnicity-specific groups for say, only Hispanics, only blacks, only Asians, and so on.
How come that does remind me of Apartheid ideology? Was Hendrik F. Verwoerd right with his ‘separate development’ after all? These DEI or JEIE supporters appear to think so. Extreme right and extreme left are sometimes difficult to distinguish. After all, “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others”.
In fact, it’s spread so widely that it almost seems like a parody of itself, so much so that it’s often hard to tell wokeness from satires on wokeness.
Hence so many, including Private Eye magazine in the UK, failed to realise that Titania McGrath was a parody of a Social Justice Warrior.
A revealing diagnostic is hidden in plain sight: “tenure‐track assistant professor position in foundations of literacy (PK-12), as well as literacy leadership” (bold added). The magic word “leadership” and related terms keeps turning up in four places. (1) Schools of Ed, where they often list courses, programs in educational “leadership”; (2) Business schools, where they also prattle on and on about training for “executive leadership”; (3) the corporate world, where of course the CEO is the big boss, and the various vice-presidents are, at least in theory, little bosses; (4) the authoritarian Left, where there is a mania for Masters like Lenin, Stalin, Castro, whichever member of the Kim dynasty is the current Dear Leader in the DPRK, and so on;
Word salad like the present example combines (1) with the usual woke pretensions. It all fits together, doesn’t it. Maybe the “authoritarian personality” really is a thing.
I just realized
“literacy” almost certainly means political literacy as formulated by Paulo Freire in Pedagogy of the Oppressed and The Politics of Education.
Genuine literacy is literally an afterthought in Freire’s formula.
Ye Gods! Right after I sent off comment #13 above about the “leadership” obsession, an uninvited Email appeared in my inbox reading as follows:
“This Week in Leadership
Stay on top of the latest leadership news with This Week in Leadership—delivered weekly and straight into your inbox.”
Enough to make one paranoid—I mean even more paranoid.
I do wish someone would take CSUF up on the “diversity of viewpoints” part.
“I am a white cis-het person, born in a trailer park in West Virginia to an unemployed ex-coal miner father and a mother who used to stock the shelves at Wal-Mart until she was dismissed for using drugs. All my family are ardent Trump supporters. I myself stopped supporting Trump after Jan 6, but I continue to love my family despite our differing political views. I am also a devout Evangelical Christian and I believe that life begins at conception and premarital sex is a sin. However, if you hire me I promise not to try to impose my views on my fellow faculty/students. I am 100% anti-racist and anti-sexist, because I believe that Jesus commands me to love all my fellow humans, regardless of their skin color and gender. Hiring me would bring much-needed socioeconomic, religious, geographic, and viewpoint diversity to your university. Thank you for your consideration.”
How far do you think this application would get?
The term Diversity, Equ(al)ity, Inclusion is clearly not what’s going on in any of these recent examples. What we have instead is Conformity, Heirarchy and Exclusion, or CHE for short (quite appropriately, one might think).
Conformity and Exclusion go together: if you don’t toe the line in every aspect of what the High Priests ordain, you will be excluded from the community, which will do its best to destroy your reputation and your livelihood.
At the top of the Heirarchy is…well, whatever intersectional combination carries the most brownie points. At the bottom are old, white, heterosexual, educated men like me. Even more so if they’re Jewish, because automatic anti-Semitism is part of the makeup of these people.
Sorry to be so cynical.