Can "Intellectual Diversity" Be Legislated--Should It?

Loyalty Day, 2007
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/04/20070430-3.html

Note from the friend who emailed this link:

"Jhee, signing the declaration of independence was an act of sedition dude! Gosh, if we had a 'loyalty day' back then we might still have a king ... George was his name wasn't it? Funny."

While it's true that people should be able to police our own behavior, it's also true that we don't in fact do so. And people get railroaded for having unpopular opinions, whether right or wrong, all the time.

Based on some of the bill's language, it is in part supposed to allow whatever opinion a person has to exist, free of persecution. Whether it will actually have that effect is another matter, as some of the bits I didn't sample here are more authoritarian.

My bet is that, besides allowing grounds for lawsuits, this definition will basically just result in another layer of bureaucracy to give lip service to.

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(d) Establish clear campus policies that ensure that hecklers or threats of violence do not prevent speakers from speaking;

(g) Develop hiring, tenure, and promotion policies that protect individuals against viewpoint discrimination and track any reported grievances in that regard;

(i) Establish clear campus policies to prohibit viewpoint discrimination in the distribution of student fee funds;

(k) Eliminate any speech codes that restrict the freedom of speech;
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Summaries of the two related bills, the second of which, salary incentives (HB214) has already been passed. Jane C. is the legislator:

HB 213 Cunningham, Jane
Establishes the Emily Brooker Intellectual Diversity Act, which defines intellectual diversity for reporting purposes at public higher education institutions (LR# 462L.03P)

HB 214 Cunningham, Jane
Creates the Teacher Choice Compensation Package which will make salary stipends available to teachers who qualify based on measurable superior performance (LR# 713L.01I)
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rel="nofollow">The full text of HB213. is only a page long. One can also follow the progress of HB213.

k) Eliminate any speech codes that restrict the freedom of speech;

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Like this one? You'd think by college, a person would recognize irony when it bit them on the butt!

Nance

I've been in a number of circumstances (in college, where plenty of things bit me on the ass but irony wasn't one of them) where I was criticized and even had my grades knocked down for reporting a perspective that didn't happen to fit the victim mentality that the purveyors of the course espoused.

Under such an illogical seeming provision, I would have had some recourse, presuming that being graded on something written is considered analogous to being held to a codified standard.

Could have at least asserted my right to hold my own opinion that was at odds with the supposedly feminist viewpoint of the women's studies teacher's aide. More like victim's studies, it was.

what your complaint really is but if I were running a women's studies class and you called it victims' studies, I might not think you had learned what I was teaching and I might not give you the gold star you were after.

I might think you had understood everything but simply chose to be contrary or came into the class with an agenda to be disruptive. I might think any number of things.

What I wouldn't think is that women's studies looks like the career for you.

Nance

"It makes the assumption that students who are attending colleges and universities
need to be coddled. . . that they’re not able to determine right from wrong.”

I've been thinking about that, as we went through Spank Out Day and Loyalty Day and then Prayer Day, all this week. How WOULD they know right from wrong, seriously? Who would they have learned it from?

There are two possibilities, neither good:
1) Teacher union political operatives who slash tires and commit mafia-type financial crimes and don't give a rat's ass about actual students, and call moms terrible names (yes, like "whore" except without the Don Imus accountability at the end, heck the MSM barely reports it!) simply because the parents want a better education for their own children than institutionalized government standards delivered through a massive bureaucracy can possibly provide? (WHICH EVERYONE KNOWS BUT CAN'T TALK ABOUT, APPARENTLY - it isn't PC!)

2) Religious wacko families (who pretend the Earth is only 6,000 years old) and the insulated communities that spring up around them, who together have created a whole alternate world in which to rear and "teach" children, so divorced from contemporary reality that they wouldn't know citicial thought or knowledge (much less "right from wrong") even if God personally told them he was going to beat it into them the way they whack their kids until he's gotten their attention and broken their rebellious nature. (So much for submission!)

"Corporal punishment is not something you do to the child, it's something you do for the child," said Bethel Pastor David Sutton, who wrote the pamphlet. "Your goal as a parent is to correct the child or get him back on the right path."They believe this so strongly that they have decided to make it god's will and have even written a pamphlet advising parents how best to hit their children. According to the pamphlet, parents who do not practice corporal punishment are depriving their children of the only method God says produces wisdom, and risk directly opposing God's will. . . Adjunct professor Susan Holloway of the UC Berkeley School of Education said she was particularly alarmed by the pamphlet's recommendation that parents swat their children repeatedly until their will is broken.

"That is not any kind of comment a psychologist would endorse," Holloway said. "Getting along in this world requires children to assert their own will, and it's not good to stifle a child's. This is way over the top."

So where exactly is it, that this fine rational, civil-rights-protecting Democratic rep believes the next generation could possibly have learned to tell right from wrong well enough to stand up for it against university authority figures holding their future hostage? They never have done, or they wouldn't BE there, would've been drummed out one way or another already . . .

***I stipulate there are exceptions. My daughter is definitely one, but only one. I am talking about the masses governed by all this "public" education debate . . .you know, all the kids who become eligible to vote in most cases before they even get to the college campus.