Subversion Impersonating Gibberish

You can't make this up. Well, a normal person can't make it up.

A very smart law professor friend of mine found this floating around campus and passed it along on his Facebook page:

The Diversity Leadership Summit positions the campus community to come together in various ways to learn, collaborate, and teach about social justice issues that impact our campus, our local communities and beyond. This summit will help to build capacity to have critical dialogue, expand consciousness of self and others, and create liberating and equitable practices, all of which increases student leadership development. The Diversity Leadership Summit will be a place where we will engage in narrative change work by uplifting and centering various sites of knowledge, voices, and experiences, including the ways knowledge is embodied. We empower our students, faculty, and staff to leverage not only their research but also their lived experiences, ideas, and insights to tell more inclusive and complex stories of the past, present, and future of our campus and communities.

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Attendees will:

Explore their identities and culture and deconstruct its impact on how they make meaning and behave…

Identify the ways our collective socialization processes inform our identities and recognize that within all of our dominant, marginalized and subordinated excellence, we share a rich, diverse history of our thoughts, voices, contributions, and lived experiences that strengthen our community and the world…

Build emotional intelligence and capacity to engage in cross-cultural with empathy and vulnerability, around various social justice issues that impact our campus, local communities, and beyond…

Describe at least one specific action they can take to promote positive social change at the individual, relationship, community or societal level…

Challenge the boundaries of your comfortability when interacting within and across communities and generate steps to develop meaningful and authentic relationships.

I don’t think there’s such a word as “comfortability,” but golly, why sweat the small stuff when, after reading this blurb, anything that might be left of your brain is at significant risk?

One might be tempted to dismiss this as just some Woke sophomore stringing together every airhead phrase he’s ever heard, but I think it’s slightly more meaningful, and more ominous, than that. In a nutshell, I think it’s subversion in sheep’s clothing, albeit a sheep that’s been smoking some really good pot.

Note, for example, the phrase, “lived experiences, ideas, and insights to tell more inclusive and complex stories of the past, present, and future…” What does that mean? You can’t really tell (which is a big part of the idea), but the buzzwords about “lived experience,” “inclusive,” and “complex” versions of the past are a tip-off that this workshop is going to fill you in on, for example, the “fact” that everything in American history is only a footnote to slavery, and that the main deal with that dead white male George Washington is that he was an “enslaver.”

Or take, “Explore their identities and culture and deconstruct its impact on how they make meaning and behave…” What does that mean? I have no clue, but the one thing I can tell is that it focuses on the student and his/her/their/its “identity” and making of his/her/their/its “meaning.” When I was in college, the idea of education was to find out about the world, that is, things outside yourself, things that had their own history and nature that didn’t particularly care about your version of their “meaning.” If this language had any degree of sophistication or even just intelligible content to it, I’d say is was poor man’s solipsism. As things stand, the juvenile, self-absorbed and navel-gazing quality of this Wokeness flier is impossible to overstate.

Or take, “Identify the ways our collective socialization processes inform our identities and recognize that within all of our dominant, marginalized and subordinated excellence, we share a rich, diverse history of our thoughts, voices, contributions, and lived experience…” Translation: We’re so wonderful! Our excellence! Our richness! Our lived experience! (which I guess I’ll concede is more illuminating than dead experience).

I could go on, but there’s a limit on how much I can ask readers to tolerate. If your kid is in college, just be aware that this is the sort of stuff you’re paying $60,000 a year for him to hear.