Enrollment drops force major cuts to academic but not DEI programs at UNC Greensboro
What the modern college education is becoming: “But
Brawndo’s got what plants crave. It’s got electrolytes!”
Because of an approximate 10% drop in enrollment since 2017, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro has now announced major cuts to many academic programs, while leaving untouched its many racially-based programs.
Five majors are being completely eliminated, according to a recent announcement from Chancellor Franklin Gilliam: anthropology, geography, physics, physical education and religious studies. Three language minors — Chinese, Russian, and Korean — are also on the chopping block. The university is also ending 12 graduate programs and is pausing admissions in its masters drama program.
These cuts were detailed in an announcement by the university’s chancellor, Franklin D. Gilliam, Jr. Interestingly, his announced cuts left entirely untouched the small Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) office is he runs from within his office. Nor did the cuts include the university’s Office of Intercultural Engagement, which appears entirely focused on favoring the queer agenda and students who advocate it. The cuts also left intact the college’s black studies and its women’s, gender, and sexuality departments, both of which might be popular but neither contribute much to providing students a real education.
In addition, the university continues to track the racial and ethnic make-up of its students and faculty, and appears to be aggressively working to favor some races and ethnic groups (blacks, hispanics, American Indians over others (whites and Asians). Since 2014, enrollment of these favored minorities has increased from 29.4% to 35.4%, in increase of about 17%. To achieve that increase the university has targeted whites mostly, reducing the number by several thousand during this time period.
That the university chose to cut real academic programs instead of these racially-based empty programs is not only unfortunate, it suggests a concrete reason for the enrollment drop. American academia has done itself a great disservice in the last few decades by these racist programs, discrediting it in the eyes of many. High school students are increasingly choosing other paths post-graduation rather than college.
This university could have made a powerful statement that might have stopped this trend in its tracks, by cleaning itself of these unhealthy and pointless programs. It did not. Instead, it chose to reduce its academic programs, making its product even less worthwhile to potential students. Why go there if it gives real education such a low priority?
This problem is deep rooted within academia and is likely not going to be solved by academia itself, which is increasingly uninterested in providing a classic, robust education in the fundamentals of western civilization. For example, when the Texas legislature shut down all DEI related programs in its university system, including segregated graduation ceremonies only for minorities, an alumni group dubbed Texas Exes for the University of Texas at Austin decided to reinstate these ceremonies, independent of the university system.
Academia: dedicated to the new segregation!
Texas Exes spokesperson Dorothy Guerrero told The College Fix on Tuesday that they are organizing four events: Lavender Graduation for LGBTQIA+ students, GraduAsian, Latinx Graduation, and Black Graduation at the UT Austin Alumni Center. …“The Texas Exes looks forward to celebrating our 2024 graduates and welcoming them to the Alumni Center and the next chapter of their lives,” Guerrero told The Fix. “Through these celebrations, we will help new grads get plugged into our Networks, which work year-round to support students and alumni around the world.” [emphasis mine]
The highlighted sentence is critical. These segregated events, for blacks, hispanics, asians, and queers only, are important networking events to help graduates find good jobs. Whites need not apply. They must instead go to the back of the bus.
Thus, even when the state legislature takes strong action to kill such discriminatory programs, the academic community rallies to reinstate them, outside the law. Such racial-based events violate many civil rights laws, yet the college-educated in Texas don’t care. For them, its “segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!”
It appears the only real solution is for free Americans of all races to establish a new academic community, made up of new colleges being run and taught by people who think the content of a person’s charactor and what they do is more important than their skin color.
Such a solution might be necessary, but the tragedy is that to achieve will likely take decades, if not centuries. In the interim we are faced with an ugly dark age of an uneducated intellectual class that puts race first in all things.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
What the modern college education is becoming: “But
Brawndo’s got what plants crave. It’s got electrolytes!”
Because of an approximate 10% drop in enrollment since 2017, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro has now announced major cuts to many academic programs, while leaving untouched its many racially-based programs.
Five majors are being completely eliminated, according to a recent announcement from Chancellor Franklin Gilliam: anthropology, geography, physics, physical education and religious studies. Three language minors — Chinese, Russian, and Korean — are also on the chopping block. The university is also ending 12 graduate programs and is pausing admissions in its masters drama program.
These cuts were detailed in an announcement by the university’s chancellor, Franklin D. Gilliam, Jr. Interestingly, his announced cuts left entirely untouched the small Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) office is he runs from within his office. Nor did the cuts include the university’s Office of Intercultural Engagement, which appears entirely focused on favoring the queer agenda and students who advocate it. The cuts also left intact the college’s black studies and its women’s, gender, and sexuality departments, both of which might be popular but neither contribute much to providing students a real education.
In addition, the university continues to track the racial and ethnic make-up of its students and faculty, and appears to be aggressively working to favor some races and ethnic groups (blacks, hispanics, American Indians over others (whites and Asians). Since 2014, enrollment of these favored minorities has increased from 29.4% to 35.4%, in increase of about 17%. To achieve that increase the university has targeted whites mostly, reducing the number by several thousand during this time period.
That the university chose to cut real academic programs instead of these racially-based empty programs is not only unfortunate, it suggests a concrete reason for the enrollment drop. American academia has done itself a great disservice in the last few decades by these racist programs, discrediting it in the eyes of many. High school students are increasingly choosing other paths post-graduation rather than college.
This university could have made a powerful statement that might have stopped this trend in its tracks, by cleaning itself of these unhealthy and pointless programs. It did not. Instead, it chose to reduce its academic programs, making its product even less worthwhile to potential students. Why go there if it gives real education such a low priority?
This problem is deep rooted within academia and is likely not going to be solved by academia itself, which is increasingly uninterested in providing a classic, robust education in the fundamentals of western civilization. For example, when the Texas legislature shut down all DEI related programs in its university system, including segregated graduation ceremonies only for minorities, an alumni group dubbed Texas Exes for the University of Texas at Austin decided to reinstate these ceremonies, independent of the university system.
Academia: dedicated to the new segregation!
Texas Exes spokesperson Dorothy Guerrero told The College Fix on Tuesday that they are organizing four events: Lavender Graduation for LGBTQIA+ students, GraduAsian, Latinx Graduation, and Black Graduation at the UT Austin Alumni Center. …“The Texas Exes looks forward to celebrating our 2024 graduates and welcoming them to the Alumni Center and the next chapter of their lives,” Guerrero told The Fix. “Through these celebrations, we will help new grads get plugged into our Networks, which work year-round to support students and alumni around the world.” [emphasis mine]
The highlighted sentence is critical. These segregated events, for blacks, hispanics, asians, and queers only, are important networking events to help graduates find good jobs. Whites need not apply. They must instead go to the back of the bus.
Thus, even when the state legislature takes strong action to kill such discriminatory programs, the academic community rallies to reinstate them, outside the law. Such racial-based events violate many civil rights laws, yet the college-educated in Texas don’t care. For them, its “segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!”
It appears the only real solution is for free Americans of all races to establish a new academic community, made up of new colleges being run and taught by people who think the content of a person’s charactor and what they do is more important than their skin color.
Such a solution might be necessary, but the tragedy is that to achieve will likely take decades, if not centuries. In the interim we are faced with an ugly dark age of an uneducated intellectual class that puts race first in all things.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
“The cuts also left intact … which might be popular but neither contribute much to providing students a real education.”
Nor do they contribute to making a better society, I’ll wager.
What kind of rationality makes a bad move, sees the negative consequences, and rather than back off proceeds to double down?
A place that abolishes its Physics and Anthropology Departments is not a serious institute of education. To quote “The Big U”, ,UNC is is the lowest form of higher education.
Col Beausabre-
yeah…. what the heck? Who cancels Physics? I wonder what the Chemistry department looks like.
(full disclosure– a have a minor in Anthropology)
“Nor do they contribute to making a better society, I’ll wager.”
In fact, they make it *worse*. Much worse.
If, as Robert suggests, “… the only real solution is for free Americans of all races to establish a new academic community, made up of new colleges being run and taught by people who think the content of a person’s character and what they do is more important than their skin color,” then we would be in effect creating parallel institutions to facilitate a very different — and separate — kind of society. Pretty clearly, the people behind the DEI movement — as Robert also points out — are not going to abandon their ideology, indeed they are doubling down on it*. The problem is, the Jacobin left KNOWS that it is in a no holds barred cultural civil war, and they mean to win it at whatever cost. While many of the rest of us discern that we are in some kind of a struggle with “something” that is inimical to our traditional beliefs and way of life, we don’t want to admit that we really ARE in a war, and, moreover, that many of our leaders have themselves gone over to the opposition. Thus the open borders, Covid lockdowns, and DEI mandates that we see.
* https://www.zerohedge.com/political/life-long-charity-volunteer-fired-not-understanding-pronouns
Have we given up, then, on having a common country and culture with shared civic infrastructure, or is the creation of parallel institutions — where they may be successfully instituted — the only option that we have left? Here in Florida, the state legislature has also tried to scale back the influence of DEI ideology in its university system**, but it is hard to tell how successful it has been in terms of (1) creating a shared consensus that this is the right thing to do, or (2) merely hardening attitudes on both sides.
** https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jan/29/ron-desantis-florida-university-new-college-woke-war
One irony of this approach — cf, the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow segregation as outlined in Conscious Choice — is that traditionalists of all races, religions, and ethnic origins are now faced with the choice of following in the footsteps of post Civil War / Reconstruction black Americans who, of necessity, had to create a kind of parallel society with institutions and social spaces in order to insure their own collective survival, including today’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities. The Civil Rights Movement and subsequent court decisions / legislation were supposed to have obviated the need for such parallel social arrangements, but — again the irony — we are talking about creating exactly the same kinds of culture-preserving institutions in 2024. Only this time it is traditional Americans who are spending “time on the cross,” and they are wondering if their accustomed country / culture / civilization will survive.
Physics and Asian languages are in the “hard” category of mastery. If you admit students not competent in science or their own language, they are unlikely to seek to major in something that requires real work taught by teachers who recognize effort and expect precision and accomplishment in assignments, leading to knowledge and mastery of the subject. These institutions are not engaged in education -they credential young people and launder money.
Here is “systemic racism” in action. The 28% of UNC Greensboro’s students who are black will be denied the tools they need to succeed in life through a STEM job. Not only will they be denied education in the subjects that form the basis of the STEM economy but exactly the languages they need to know for collaboration with others in the areas of space exploration and drug discovery. Russia, China and Korea all have vibrant science programs, launch rockets and are in the top 10 countries for patents. The African-American community must demand restoration of these programs so they can join the rest of the world in STEM.
Related:
“The “Good Soldiers” are doing what good soldiers do, they are taking care of their assigned business. But at what cost?”
Read this and share with your friends who are unable to see what they need to see……………..
https://www.sigma3ioc.com/post/hate-trump-got-country-not-for-long
The rot goes deep — all levels of education are under attack, with most black students’ experiences especially so. You can’t make up 18 years of shortfalls by shooting for a STEM degree. The foundation isn’t there, and they will be told any failure to succeed is due to racism.
The left has been at this a long time, and things are moving very quickly now. They have readymade vocabulary for all their hot-button issues and blame prepared when the results go sideways. Overcoming it will take dedicated resources, networks and strategy far more robust than we currently have. Normals are waking up but not fast enough, yet.
Blasey, are you related to that “Blasey” ?
Physics… Chinese… Russian…. Those are pretty important in these times.
I went to the University of North Carolina at Greensboro’s website to see what degrees they’re still offering and you’ll be happy to know “African American and African Diaspora Studies, B.A.” has not been cut. That will be a good degree for someone who wants to work at Fish and Wildlife and decide whether or not SpaceX can launch.
Meanwhile in Seattle:
“Seattle English students told it’s ‘white supremacy’ to love reading, writing”
https://mynorthwest.com/3950467/jason-rantz-seattle-english-high-school-students-white-supremacy-reading-writing/
Get your kids out of public schools.
Directly related:
“So, it is either what I have just described or these individuals who are facilitating these crimes against civilization have gone as a group insane. Choose one.”
Read the rest and give yourself a checkup from your political perspective neck up…………….
https://www.sigma3ioc.com/post/the-seeds-have-been-planted-america-going-forward
John S wrote: “Here is ‘systemic racism’ in action. The 28% of UNC Greensboro’s students who are black will be denied the tools they need to succeed in life through a STEM job. Not only will they be denied education in the subjects that form the basis of the STEM economy but exactly the languages they need to know for collaboration with others in the areas of space exploration and drug discovery.”
Denying certain students the education that they need for success may be the point of this DIE exercise. They already have destroyed women’s sports and Title IX, and some women’s rights groups are beginning to realize that decades of progress have been destroyed by these “progressives.” DIE kills everything in its path, like army ants or arsenic.
Blasey wrote: “The rot goes deep — all levels of education are under attack, with most black students’ experiences especially so. You can’t make up 18 years of shortfalls by shooting for a STEM degree. The foundation isn’t there, and they will be told any failure to succeed is due to racism.”
Progressives already do blame racism for the soft bigotry of their own low educational expectations. This is why there are so many dropouts early in high school. Progressives tell our students that due to racism they cannot get ahead, and it becomes a self fulfilled prophecy. Ironically, it is the progressives who are the racists, targeting certain races for this disillusionment.
James Street wrote: “Meanwhile in Seattle:
“‘Seattle English students told it’s ‘white supremacy’ to love reading, writing’”
From James’s link:
Huh. I wonder what that says about that progressive school’s opinion of Black Lives’ abilities to read and write. If progressives think these actions make whites superior, then does that mean they think these actions make blacks inferior? Is this, as John S wrote, part of the systemic racism of denying the tools needed for success in life? If to read and write is a sign of evil superiority, then blacks aren’t going to want to take those actions, and neither is anyone else. So much for the reading and writing Rs in our education system. That leaves us with only ’rithmatic.
If they think something makes whites superior, then wouldn’t they have to also think that same something necessarily must make non-whites inferior? To have a superiority means that there is a corresponding inferiority.
“But Brawndo’s got what plants crave. It’s got electrolytes!”
UNC-G Class of 2028: “What are electro. . . electrolytes?
I admit that I had to look up the movie from whence the image was taken. Never seen it; don’t think I’ve heard of it. Heard of Mike Judge, though.
Following on from many commenters: it is non-ironic that the acronym for Diversity Education and Inclusion is DIE. An instance where the acronym is descriptive of the meta consequences (metaquences?).
Blair Ivey: Idiocracy (2006) was written as a very clever sci-fi comedy that sadly has become a very accurate prediction of the future, a future then that has become the present today. Very much worth watching.
Note too that they changed the original sequence of words from Diversity, Inclusion, and Education when they realized the acronym was DIE. Gave the game away. It suddenly and almost immediately became Diversity, Education, and Inclusion across numerous academic departments and activist groups.
For anyone who can weather a deep dive into the intellectual origins of identity politics and DEI, check out The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time by Yascha Mounk.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2023/09/27/identity-trap-yascha-mounk-review/
Written from the perspective of the academic left, Prof. Mounk’s analysis nevertheless offers a coherent and comprehensive critique of this phenomena, and — spoiler alert — he is no friend of identity politics and regards it as a dangerous “trap” for the unwary. This in itself is rather encouraging, as it demonstrates that at least some left of center academics still retain a desire to defend traditional American values and institutions. Would that more of them did and would say so in public. As “a sane discussion of serious things,” you may not agree with all of his ideas, but you will probably learn something from this book.
Like most of his colleagues, the author is alarmed by any and all manifestations of populist “authoritarians” on the right, and he would seem to suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome with the best of them. When it comes to authoritarianism on the left, however — cf, the repressive regime of Communist China or the vicious cancel culture in this country — he does not seem to believe that there is the slightest danger there*. Think of the whole sordid COVID debacle in terms of our government’s outrageous curtailment of even the most basic civil liberties. Likewise, the Trudeau government’s repressive treatment of protesters in Canada. “A man sees what he wants to see and disregards the rest.”
*Curiously enough, he cites examples of devout 20th Century Marxists who have broken with the horrific excesses of Stalin and the Soviet Union — cf, Koestler, et al.’s The God that Failed and philosophers such as Foucault — but he seems unable to envision any case in which a similar critique might apply to the Deep State and the Biden Administration in this country.
Still and all, this is a book that is well worth reading for the valuable insights that it provides, and you will come away with a much deeper understanding of where identity politics / DEI came from, what they are all about, and what might be done to thwart them. Know your enemy certainly applies here.
Here is the latest example of DEI insanity, this time from Canada:
https://tnc.news/2024/02/16/kingston-union-warns-teachers-right-wing-views/
I think it’s related because it may be close to the root…
From Tucker Carlson. It’s an hour but packed, worth the time, and mind blowing.
https://twitter.com/TPostMillennial/status/1758536019069030686