Last year the University of Chicago established a new department, The Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity (RDI). The vote for this department by the Council of the University Senate was overwhelmingly positive.
This is the mission statement on its homepage:
Now the first thing you notice is that this statement is laden with the jargon of Critical Social Justice ideology. The second thing you notice is how poorly written it is—perhaps a reflection of postmodern obscurantism. While I initially hoped that the department would allow a free discussion of the issues for which it was named, if you go through the website you (or at least I) get the impression that the department is devoted not to free and open discussion about race, disasporas and indigeneity, but to purveying the current progressive version of Social Justice. That is, it may possibly propagandize its students and squelch those whose views are inimical to the “mission” of the department. That shouldn’t happen at the free-speechy University of Chicago, but a number of our faculty worry that this is a Department with a Mission. Yes, other departments are full of woke people who want to fill their students with their own take on political and ideological issues, but this is an entire department that may be dedicated to that business. I have made a few comments in bold on the statement, which I reproduce below.
The Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity (RDI) is dedicated to investigating, interrupting, and challenging the historical and social processes [HOW DOES ONE INTERRUPT AND CHALLENGE A PROCESS? FURTHER, INTERRUPTING ALREADY GIVES THE DEPARTMENT A SPECIFIC MISSION.], the cultural and political practices, and the formations of identity and community that are integral to these three concepts. Our project is committed to knowledge-making founded in the dynamism of social life and resistance to bondage, exploitation, and dispossession. [HERE WE HAVE THE MISSION STATED EXPLICITLY: TO FIGHT AGAINST THE DEPARTMENT’S IDEA OF OPPRESSION.] The ambition of the department is to foster a breadth of vision, new aesthetic imaginaries, conceptual rigor, innovative pedagogical approaches, and deep engagement within and beyond the university that will enable communities to tackle some of the most challenging issues of the current historical moment in ways that defy intellectual, disciplinary, and geographic orders. [AGAIN, ONE GETS A HINT HERE THAT THE DEPARTMENT WAS CREATED NOT TO MAKE PEOPLE THINK, THOUGH THEY DO SAY THAT, BUT TO ENGAGE IN SOCIAL ENGINEERING.]
I invite readers to try to further decipher this mission statement, which is a dreadful piece of prose that could have been written much more clearly. But perhaps the lack of clarity is meant to obscure what its mission really is.
I worry now that this department was created to foist a specific ideology on its students, and thereby send those students into the world to fulfill social goals. I may be wrong (this is, after all, my cynical take on the department), but only time will tell. But no matter what happens, this department is here to stay, and it makes the University of Chicago, regarded as a beacon of free and open thought, seem just like every other school, responding to transitory political currents by changing its curriculum.
That is also implied on the Department’s History page—it uses cookies, something no other department I know of does—a page that makes the obligatory mention of George Floyd:
Decades before the February, 2022 vote in the Council of the Faculty Senate that brought the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity into existence, students and faculty at the University of Chicago, like others across the country, had called for the creation of a department, with appointive powers, focused on race and its allied concepts. While such calls met with success at most colleges and universities across the United States, that was not the case at the University of Chicago. For the last 25 years, the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture (CSRPC) has been the only formal unit on campus exclusively devoted to research and pedagogy related to race.
The mobilization and uprisings across the country following the murder of George Floyd gave new energy to pursue that goal. During the summer of 2020 a group of colleagues affiliated with the CSRPC launched the #MoreThanDiversity campaign, which sought, among other things, to expand conversations about, and increase institutional support for, diversity, equity, and inclusion at the University of Chicago. Some of the faculty involved in that campaign formed a committee to explore possible models for an academic unit dedicated to the study and teaching of race and related topics. In the fall of 2020, that group invited some undergraduate and graduate students with expertise in this subject area to join in the work of determining what form the unit should take and where in the University it should reside.
In other words, we must have a department centered on race because all the other schools do, too. This is not diversity, but conformity. And it was apparently the murder of George Floyd, as averred above, that eventually gave birth to the RDI Department. The second paragraph, with its implication that the new department will help “increase institutional support for diversity, equity, and inclusion at the University of Chicago,” again shows that it was born with an ideological mission. This is more evident with the contentious calls for “equity”, i.e., representation of all groups in proportion to their presence in the general population, disregarding group differences in culture or preference as causes of inequities.
As I told a colleague who also criticized this department, and especially its opaque mission statement above, “This may be the only department on campus that violates the Kalven report.” (The Kalven Report, of course, is our “foundational principle” that commits the University to institutional neutrality on issues of ideology, politics, and morality.)
While individual faculty are encouraged to express their personal opinions, they don’t have completely free speech in class (a biology course, for example, cannot teach creationism), but, more important, an entire department—a unit of the university—cannot purvey an ideological viewpoint that doesn’t permit and welcome, dissent. Will the new department, for example, teach that “race is a social construct without any biological foundations”? As I’ve argued in a paper with Luana Maroja, that is simply untrue. Can a student agree with us without being penalized or shouted down? Again, we shall see. And would this department, for example, hire heterodox black scholars like John McWhorter or Coleman Hughes? Have they hired such people already? I have no idea.
Well at least it doesn’t have anything to do with Marxism, ‘cuz that’d be, … just, .. you know…
Not a good track record.
“knowledge-making” gives the game away too, I think. Knowledge is achieved through discovery. If you’re making it up, there’s no requirement that your story is factual.
“New aesthetic imaginaries.”
Lol.
Lol, indeed. Easier and more exciting than ‘conceptual rigor’, I guess.
The mission statement is clearly ideological and activist in intent.
Seriously. How could this load of malarkey ever get past serious academic consideration?
The square root of -1 in green and blue.
The University of Chicago has leaped ahead of the curve here, with this new department. It’s mission embraces “historical and social processes”; the arts (“aesthetic imaginaries”); and the sciences (the words “conceptual rigor” and “investigating”, although “interrogating” would be the preferred term in Wokespeak). Finally, like the faculties of Engineering and Medicine, it proceeds to practical work (“interrupts” and “deep engagement within and beyond the university”). We can expect many other institutions to follow U. Chicago’s lead by forming similar new departments. They will be called “Critical DEI Studies”. In time, all of the Schools of Ed will establish related programs in “Critical DEI Studies Education”.
What are the liberal and heterodox voices saying about this? Can they resist such nonsense? Will they? I had the impression that the president and at least some of the administration would be against this. Has anyone, other than Jerry, raised an eyebrow? Very worrying.
As I said, the faculty senate supported it overwhelmingly. But I would guess that those faculty opposed to this department would self-censor—simply keeping their mouths shut. It was pretty much a done deal, so why get yourself ostracized for criticizing it?
Because being silent is how the revolutionaries win.
Sure, no one can counter this individually, but supposedly the majority of faculty oppose it. Is there really no way for them to rise up together against it? If not, then the war is already lost.
Looks like when Pope Sixtus IV issued the papal bull Exigit sinceras devotionis affectus (”Sincere Devotion Is Required”). Next is the Alhambra Decree.
Even the best schools are not immune from the social pressure to put such departments—grievance studies departments, I call them—in place.
As with all grievance studies departments, the mission is ideological.
Sorry to be late to the comment party today but was reading the 82-page full proposal ( https://bpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/voices.uchicago.edu/dist/9/3462/files/2022/11/RDI-Proposal-Web-PDF.pdf ). My first comment is simply to ask why these researches and studies are not simply housed in the Anthropology Department, which also is in the Social Sciences Division?
My second comment is that the founding proposal, in spite of its wide range and volume of words, seems to favor some very contemporary critical theory and Social Justice western and African studies ideas. My sense from reading this material is that time begins with modern exploration and history (predominately Western at that) and that Eastern and ancient behaviors are given short shrift. So again why not in anthropology writ large?
And finally, this effort really needs some real scientists to keep definitions of race and populations honest.
I think all is made clear by recognizing the Dialectical Epistemic Inversion in these projects:
Application of Hegel’s dialectic to anything such that word or idea meanings are inverted, by virtue of the epistemology being rooted in gnosis – self-knowledge – in direct subversion of Enlightenment values of (e.g.) independent empiricism.
There was a recent eXtwitter debate about counter-Enlightenment figures, if anyone wants to look into that. Good things to know about.
I know I overcommented before when this topic came up before, so I’ll try to cool it. Thing is I just seem to recognize all the connections below the superficial veneer of post-whateverism “theory” in the description, as a way to hide the ball, so to speak.
The Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity in unpropitiously named. What is going to happen when the Diaspora collides with the Indigenous people in the countries they have diasporized to and they start a Race war over decolonization and ethnic cleansing? As Douglas Murray says, “Welcome to Hell.”
I am disappointed to see the University of Chicago going this route. This is what Canadian universities do. Shame.
(On the topic of Canada, “diaspora” is code here for black people whose ancestors were brought to North America as slaves and have found themselves in Canada, a country they were never slaves in, although there were a few slaves in New France and British colonial North America before abolition. Nonetheless we shoulder the white man’s modern burden of blame for racism all the same. What the diaspora absolutely does not mean is Jews. I’m not clear if the diaspora includes people who have emigrated to North America from modern-day African countries in order to be oppressed more stringently here than they were back home. The wording is delicate. We are allowed to talk about the African diaspora in indulgent terms but we are not allowed to talk about unassimilated trouble-making diasporas from other countries that foment sectarian unrest in their mother countries from safe havens here in Canada. I would like to see UC’s new Diaspora Dept. tackle that question, which has serious real-word geopolitical implications, not just critical-theory navel gazing.)
The primary theme of PCC(E)’s critique of the Department of Race, Diaspora and Indigineity is not, in fact, deappropriation, but neodeappropriation. In a sense, an abundance of theories concerning the defining characteristic, and hence the failure, of semioticist class exist. Derrida uses the term ‘the posttextual paradigm of context’ to denote the role of the writer as participant.
If one examines dialectic precultural theory, one is faced with a choice: either accept prestructural desublimation or conclude that consciousness may be used to exploit the Other, given that the premise of the posttextual paradigm of context is invalid. However, we have to choose between dialectic precultural theory and postsemanticist objectivism. The characteristic theme of the works of Coyne is the difference between society and cats.*
*assisted by the post-modern generator!
Yes! I could tell!
Well played!
“[W]e have reviewed evidence for the radicalization of the (mostly but not exclusively) American academy and some of its downstream consequences. Surveys of faculty show overrepresentation of the Left in the American academy, including massive overrepresentation of people holding Far Left views. A recent national survey has found that these developments appear to be seeping into the American consciousness—although most Americans underestimate the political skew of academia, the greater the perceived skew, the less credibility they ascribe to its scholarship. Downstream consequences include:
1. the regular expression of bizarre and inflammatory statements, unhinged from anything recognizable as scientific evidence, by academics in both formal presentations and the peer reviewed literature if those statements are framed as advancing social justice;
2. a rise in authoritarian behavior manifesting as regular attacks seeking to punish academics who express views that violate values and beliefs held sacred on the political Left;
3. explicit endorsement and implementation of censorship of ideas critical of or which challenge social justice values and policies; and
4. the regular appearance in the peer reviewed literature of unjustified claims about the power and pervasiveness of various phenomena that provided useful rhetorical ammunition for advancing claims about social justice.
There are many things that could be done to address these problems. Universities could implement stronger protections of free speech and academic freedom. The government could make funding contingent on universities providing such protections. Universities could proactively seek greater political diversity among newly hired faculty. Within existing academia, faculty committed to pluralism, neutrality, and objectivity (no matter how difficult those may be to achieve) can form new organizations that eschew political litmus tests and censorship. However, we are not optimistic about any of these potential solutions being widely adopted anytime soon. If little or nothing is done, the American academy is on a course to become the intellectual wing of Far Left political movements, providing some indeterminate mix of actual advances to knowledge and propaganda masquerading as scholarship.”
(Jussim, Lee, Nathan Honeycutt, Pamela Paresky, et al. “The Radicalization of the American Academy.” In /The Palgrave Handbook of Left-Wing Extremism, Vol. 2/, edited by José Pedro Zúquete, 343-366. Cham, CH: Palgrave Macmillan/Springer, 2023. pp. 360-1)