https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/amherst-colleges-glossary-of-wokeness/
Campus politics are increasingly deranged, and college administrators have a lot to answer for.
When Samuel Abrams, a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and professor at Sarah Lawrence College, surveyed national data on the political views of college administrators, he revealed that liberal staff members outnumber their conservative counterparts at a ratio of twelve-to-one, and suggested (oh so gently) in a New York Times op-ed that this kind of imbalance might be a problem for “the free and open exchange of ideas.”
As detailed here by yours truly and here by National Review’s David French, Abrams was then treated appallingly by Sarah Lawrence College’s students and staff.
Abrams’s basic point – that students arrive on campus fairly liberal and are taught by very liberal professors and socialized by extremely liberal administrators – should concern anyone who cares about the integrity of higher education.
Last month a document produced by the Office of Diversity and Inclusion’s Resource Center Team at Amherst College in Massachusetts, titled “Common Language Guide,” surfaced. The document was described by its authors as a “list of carefully researched and thoughtfully discussed definitions for key diversity and inclusion terms.”
And what did they come up with? A slew of rather obscure definitions of oppressive behaviors and structures such as “eurocentrism,” “heterosexism,” “ethnosexism,” “cissexism,” as well as more heard-of terms such as “ageism,” “classism,” and “racism.”
“Microaggressions,” the document explained, are “rooted in institutional oppression” and involve “verbal and nonverbal indignities and denigrating messages targeting people of historically and presently marginalized backgrounds.” This translates as insults, both accidental and deliberate. (Insults and slights are unpleasant, but are they really so ideologically loaded? Might this be encouraging people to be overly sensitive?)
