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What do you do when your passion and career trajectory have been infected with amorality? This is the question I was forced to ask myself after over a decade of working toward what I thought was to be my goal: ensconcing myself in academia as a prolific researcher and respected professor.
It was no secret that education in America was in a downward spiral for much of the 1990s and early 2000s—data from the National Assessment of Education Progress shows only about 30% of students in the U.S. were and are proficient in basic educational fundamentals.
Educators have placed the blame on many factors including the implementing of No Child Left Behind—what some in the business unaffectionately called No Child Gets Ahead. The wildly unpopular George W. Bush program has been criticized for focusing on the students with lower proficiencies and ignoring the needs of higher performing students allowing them to slip through the cracks in true collectivist fashion.
To me, someone who was privileged enough to receive stellar Catholic private education all my life, these battles were fightable and winnable. As part of the system, I could aim to affect change from within, and with my zeal, passion, and ambition I was poised to do so. Alas, a wave of postmodern thought had other plans—the type of thought in which there is no such thing as objective truth and anything majoritarian is evil.
I was well aware that the conservative values and ideals that I held were already frowned upon in academia. Upon entering graduate school, I was warned by a then-professor of English never to divulge my political or religious proclivities as I might be shunned or black-listed. I heeded this advice, but then I started to notice that the extremism that was infecting the institutions was beginning to take out even liberal thinkers.
In 2015, Professor Bret Weinstein of Evergreen College in Washington spoke out about questionable and racist activities being done in the name of “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.” The university’s administration allowed a mob of students subsequently to take the campus hostage and threaten Professor Weinstein’s life without real repercussions.
This isolated incident was a warning bell I chose to ignore. However, I began to notice things in my own field, the field of Linguistics. In 2020, the name and abstract of a conference presentation found its way into my inbox. The presentation was entitled, “Corpus linguistics in solidarity with struggles for justice: A methodological reflection on using corpora to examine and critique ideology.” In a morbid curiosity of what this word-salad meant, I read the abstract.
It discussed ways that linguistic research can serve social justice ends. One method of doing so stated, “[C]orpus linguistics should challenge and reject dominant epistemologies that assert, among other things, that research should be neutral, objective, or apolitical.” In other words, the author is suggesting we challenge and reject the notion that science should be objective, neutral, and apolitical. Such a suggestion would mean the death of science and objective fact, and the fact that a self-professed scientist is proposing this should be indicative of what academia has become.
But perhaps the most personally illustrative example and final straw for me came when a professor whom I respected and viewed as having integrity and morals made it clear that she too had been compromised by the new extremist thought. In the wake of a department-internal scandal involving a minority student being awarded a doctoral degree under “questionable” circumstances, this particular professor, when questioned about why she did not speak up about the clearly dishonest tactics said, “As a white woman, I did not feel it was my place to question her.”
Seeing the one person I admired and respected and hoped to emulate, debase herself and her integrity out of fear of being labeled as “racist” was the defining blow of my career hopes. I decided at that moment I would not allow myself to be put in a similar position or associate with people who thought awarding a degree based solely on race was acceptable.
This kind of extremism has been spreading through academia with the advent of what some call “Grievance Studies”—things like Critical Race Theory (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/20/the-man-behind-critical-race-theory) which began in law schools in the 1960s. It has gone somewhat undetected by the general population until recently. With the pandemic forcing parents finally to see what their children were being taught, many of them rightfully sounded the alarm.
Perhaps the most contemporary issue plaguing our country’s universities shows just how deep this amorality goes. The campus protests, riots, and encampments supporting terrorism and the genocide of the Jewish people have blown the door off of any attempt to hide the absolute cesspool that academia has become. As Americans look on the war zones that campuses like UCLA have become, they may be shocked by the evil rhetoric and stilted worldview of these students. Unfortunately, I watch unfazed and unsurprised.
Faculty and administrations have created this monster. They preach about how political activism and the dismantling of institutions is a moral obligation. They purposefully seek out students who have participated in social unrest. They teach Marxist and anti-American sentiments. Then they are surprised when riots and hatred for the western world are the outcome.
Furthermore, the recent testimony of the three Ivy-league demagogues about antisemitism on college campuses revealed the true nature of these administrators. Claudine Gay, and others of her ilk, snickered at the thought of denouncing genocide because to them challenging any extremist narrative is absurd. Their reality is so different from the rest of the world’s, and it has been for a long time.
I must say that part of me thanks those women and the pro-terrorist protestors for showing the disgusting truth. Now I no longer have to field questions like, “Why did you give up on your dream?” and “Why did you work so hard just to leave academia?” To anyone with a soul, that answer should now be obvious.
I return to my original question: What do you do when your passion and career trajectory have been infected with amorality? As I see it, there are only two options, as the trite saying goes. You either beat them or join them. I am choosing the former, and with my integrity and soul in the balance, I will continue to attempt to beat them or die trying.
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Author: J. Mitchell Sances
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