Get a degree in diversity
mainBentley University, a business-oriented liberal arts school in Waltham, Massachussetts, is offering a Bachelor of Arts and a Bachelor of Sciences degree in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).
It is apparently the first of its kind.
Graduates are practically guaranteed a job in arts funding.
Read more here.
Not a real major. It fits right in with Womens and Gender studies. What a waste of tuition.
What on Earth does this have to do with Classical Music?
Diversity wrath has become one of the Riders of the Acopalypse of classical music, so of course it merits to keep an eye on their driving license.
Blacks can’t get driver’s licenses, lawyers or control their emotions. Anything to the contrary is now a Democrat dog whistle.
Biden and Harris have espoused this narrative to excuse poor black intellectual performance. However blacks can get plenty of guns and shoot each other. Joe and Kamala are happy with that!
Please watch cnn, msnbc and the White House press briefings a la Psaki to get educated like a good liberal unless of course you’re a Republican John.
I was talking about diversity, nothing else. One single diversity that consists of more than blacks in the USA.
Absolutely correct, but in the US (a card-carrying member since 1954), for most habitants, diversity means black. Sadly, the US remains extremely racist.
It’s a degree on how to tastefully appoint a diverse cast in an opera so one doesn’t get accused of being a racist, sexist, homophobe et al. All to do with classical music!!!!
Unfortunately, THIS has everything to do with everything, classical music included!! Graduates with these, so called, degrees will be in decision-making positions in classical music too!!! You should look and see a little further than your nose!!
I share what I infer to be your apprehension about this academic systemisation of what one would like to think is a runaway trend, but I have some doubts about the objectivity of the source to which you link. It pretty clearly represents a right wing agenda, judging by some of its favourite contributors.
Seems to me that this business school (doesn’t seem to take much to get the appellation “university” in the US) is simply cashing in on something they see as providing employment for their graduates in years to come. But like all diversity officers and programmes it seems to have to tart it up, here into a “major.”
I last worked in offices on a more or less fulltime basis on lengthy contracts in the 80s, at a major Canadian corporation. My own Vice President was a woman, as were several directors in my own division. There were some minorities around and, this being an issue in Canada, there were a lot of French-Canadians. It was a very friendly office, and nobody, I feel sure, felt any difference in the way they were treated than any other person. As a consultant, I worked with a number of high-level committees, including one of several male VPs, and was always treated with courtesy and respect.
We had no diversity officers. The corporation president was in thrall to the Peters/Waterman book In Search of Excellence, and from him down, managers and directors simply sought to place the best people they could find in positions. I changed my serious travel plans at their urgent bequest when I accepted a third contract from them because I was told (having initially declined it) that they had combed the country looking for someone with my particular qualifications for the role in question and I had still come out at the top of their lists. Based upon those I met when I took up the role, I was inclined to believe them.
We don’t need all this waffle. There has to be, certainly, an openness to people from all backgrounds and “protected classes,” and a commitment in companies that there will be no crap about whether people are black or gay or disabled or whatever. I have rarely worked, even briefly, in offices that are not a mixture of men and women, several races and usually one or two disabled people. I have joined in complaints on coffee breaks about managers female and black, and once both, for one reason or another — never because of what they were but over something they had done, or we had perceived they had done.
All companies need to do is tell staff that they ARE a company, and to be decent to one another, and to take their complaints, if any, up the line (skipping, if necessary, anyone in the line who is the cause of the complaint). I took my secretary’s complaint to a VP once — she felt she had been badly treated when lent to his office for a few days and came back very upset. Her complaint struck me as having some validity, and I told him he needed to address it. She got a call within the hour, and an apology. All friends again. She was not a part of victim culture, he had been curt and careless of feeling while busy, not deliberately insulting, and it was sorted.
Interesting, it shows how such human ripples can be dealt with in a normal way. It reminds me of a job I had in my very early dog days as a male typist in a hall filled to the brim with female typists, giving me the feeling of ultimate minority, within the perplexed stares of the group. But there was never any problem, and my letters were much better than theirs, and even that did not create problems. Current diversity problems may often be the result of first creating a concept and then looking for the fit. Stuff for cultural anthropologists.
But those jobs won’t pay much at all!!!
I hope you are right, but I am sure that you are wrong!
Here’s all you should need to do to earn this degree: Keep a straight face while watching this video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWHZxXuJFzw.
Is that Pretty Yende with Peter Gelb and Yannick?
Yessssss!
As a BTL commenter asked, who choreographed this garbage, Stevie Wonder? Working with a superannuated Village Person?
Hahahaha! Awesome!
Another easy degree for academically challenged and intellectually lazy students. But they’ll find work in Democrat administrations…
Stupid as your comment is, I’ll attempt to make a small correction.
I know you’re trying to slip in a slur, but Democratic is the word you’re looking for. Otherwise, we’re going to start referring to you as Republikkkan. Or would you prefer RepubliQan?
Democrats formed the KKK while Lincoln freed the slaves (see Juneteenth) who was to the RIGHT as his party ultimately became the Republicans.
Besides, Democrats are the racists keeping up the antifa/BLM violence and promulgating hate while it is THEY who chose a white male as their leader. Most libs are too slow to realize they enable their own problems from one generation to the next.
Yes, Terrance, very true. D-RATS were always racists and remain such!
This is seriously uninformed. While this WAS true around the time of the Civil War, what happened following that is more complicated. Suffice it to say that by the time that President Johnson, a Texas Democrat, passed two pieces of landmark civil rights legislation, there was a major switch in the south. The racists who had been supporting Jim Crow laws and the subjugation of Blacks switched parties and all became Republicans and a big change occurred in Southern Democrats. It was this change that presidential candidates such as Nixon and Reagan famously played into when campaigning in the south in order to garner votes from racists, who by then, were the Republicans. It was a very shameful aspect of US politics at the time.
“If we pass the Great Society legislation, we’ll have Blacks voting Democrat for the next 200 years.” Lyndon Johnson to a group of southern Democrat Governors on Air Force One. BTW, he didn’t use the word Blacks.
Look at the wonderful effects of this legislation…
HR, your D-RAT stupidity shines brightly in your comment!! Bravo!
Please don’t dehumanize your political opponents by calling them “rats” or anything similar. It’s proven a terrible slippery slope from there, as any number of historical examples will show. Leave the rats out of it.
Democrat admins- you mean academia, right?
When the Left proudly trots out their version of education they have not yet realized what they are celebrating. Academic standards have been DILUTED to accommodate children of lesser intellect in order to enhance the figures along with their habit of non-reporting the glaring negative results of diversity. They’re fooling themselves into believing their own myth through smugness.
Proof you demand!
Here’s definitive, public proof from the Democrat core of Silicon Valley. It’s called the truth.
https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/diversity.google/en//annual-report/static/pdfs/google_2021_diversity_annual_report.pdf?cachebust=2e13d07
Absolutely, 100%
These articles beg inquiry as to how diverse the Slipped Disc staff has become to align with both paying and general readership??
To begin with, I am very diverse and sustainable, so that is already the best safety valve.
As a white male, you need to get sacked!
And what do we do with you Linus?
You continue to beg those like Linus for money to create a more “exclusive” environment (using that GARISH message Norm pimps at every turn). That’s what his WHITE staff will do.
‘Exclusive’ is always the same as ‘white’? It depends on context. How ‘exclusive’ is the BLM movement?
I’m not diverse. I am the same sex I was born as, and am the Scottish offspring of two Scottish parents, both descended from potato famine Irish. Because I am white and heterosexual I have to assume I am not sustainable.
The only privilege I have ever had is to get a good education, and encouragement to read, learn music and to appreciate the arts from birth. As well as being raised with some dusty old bromides like do unto others…(and the others were not specified).
Being lucky with being born in a good milieu and getting a good education is not a privilege, it is being lucky. Such things should be accessible to everyone. ‘Privilege’ always suggests unfairness. But life is not a machine, well-ordered, safe, 100% under control by the state.
They could also offer a course on monetizing social consciousness movements.
Journalism in white face.
Like a “degree” in Hambugerology from McDonalds.
Where will it end?
(If only it would.)
Quite so Terence, but the avoidance of doubt, did you mean Hambuggerolory, Humbugerology or Hamburgerology? Different routes to the same nonsense!
another hobby degree which brings you nothing, since when have universities become deliverers of degrees which are just air balloons?
Almost every degree outside the STEM disciplines (Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) is an ‘air balloon’. Of course, I’m generalizing a little bit, there are surely exceptions, and in the individual cases you have to pull the plug to check which kind of gas it contains…
??? Literature, English, history, the arts, etc. etc.?
Those are very important disciplines, I for example have a large extra-academic interest in selected aspects of these fields (that is, for my leisure and improvement of my soul). However, it is precisely there, in the ‘Humaniora’, that s–t is happening just now. It is unwise to study for a degree in those fields today.
May I enter an exhibit?
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-antiquity/article/remains-of-the-fray-nascent-colonialism-and-heterogeneous-hybridity/01142FD7A4D22DCC8E4C7C5E0D793F31
A fascinating report from the journal American Antiquity on objects found in Mississippi on the lands of the Chickasaw Nation, taken and re-used, with substantial modification, from the invading force of Hernando de Soto, in 1540-41. The report is quite accessible, informative, and a nice illustration of how objects change status, assignation, and function as they change hands and cultures.
But: to pass muster, the paper had to carry the sub-title “Nascent Colonialism and Heterogeneous Hybridity”.
Très woke.
A mere “The Remains of the Fray”, which describes quite vividly what happened (and with a nice nod to Kazuo Ishiguro) would not do.
By the way, the Conquistadors didn’t conquer that time, they got soundly thrashed and managed a prudent retreat. But the documented account of an indigenous success story, which earned the Chickasaw a century and a half of independence and relative peace, is not enough. Liturgical lip service has to be paid to the current orthodoxy.
Would you trust a score that is not properly edited by someone with a degree in musicology?
What next. A degree in country music.
A degree in female composer history and repertoire, and a BSc in arts decolonization.
What would really be useful is a university department that studies hysterial mass projections in society, with the aim to advise governments to somehow reduce the danger they signify.
like “entrepreneurship”
Where do i sign up? Sounds like a degree close to my heart!!!!!
Nearly as good as media studies or how to feed your cat!!!
Well, as anyone who owns a cat will tell you, that can be a complicated process. What they like one day, they don’t like the next. Take my moggie, Schoenberg, his preference is for wondering between twelve saucers of carefully selected morsels and taking his pick as the mood takes him – sometimes with no apparent connection between what he chooses from one to the next. It could be: kibble, salmon, beef, duck, tuna, lamb, duck, kibble, duck, pilchard, pilchard – (pause to clean whiskers) – kibble, tuna…. (coda: sleep) then… salmon… etc.
Does your cat Schoenberg ever return to the same dish before having at least sampled all others?
He has more choices than most of us at a single meal.
There are now a huge number of jobs for completely useless people who peddle this completely useless nonsense so why not get on the bandwagon?
But if you first create a public with diversity awareness, you need professionals to serve them. The ideal is to create a world without art from the past, because the past was bad. A future where nothing needs to be decolonialized any longer, is preferable to the situation of being surrounded by artifacts from times of mental darkness, when all artists served evil regimes.
After we have got rid of the cultural artifacts, we begin with the industrial products, invented and designed under suppressing governments, like the vacuum cleaner, the washing machine, the light bulb, the dentist drill, etc. etc. – there is much work to do for the specialists.
It’s very Year Zero. And on the whole we didn’t approve of that, did we?
Or do these protesters and decolonisers know what it is?
When the current diversity/equality/decolonization is over, what will these persons do? Open an equality-repair shop?
It will hardly be over in the foreseeable future! Sad, but true.
See my comment above: there is much more.
Time to return to the ancient curriculum: trivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric), quadrivium (arithmetic, music, astronomy, geometry). Covers everything, really.
Actually, these type of programs may be over sooner than you might think. Lawsuits are being filed against public schools and colleges. Chicago-area lawsuit blows up media defenses of critical race theory. https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/chicago-area-lawsuit-blows-up-media-defenses-of-critical-race-theory
Very interesting:
“…… this claptrap isn’t designed to combat racism at all, at least not as that idea is traditionally understood. Instead, it is intended to indoctrinate teachers and students in service of an internal revolution against the entire edifice of Western society.”
Let nobody think Western society as it has developed is morally spotless, since no society is, given the human condition. But there is a difference between improvement and destruction. In its laudible attempt to make people more aware of internalized racism – prejudice that goes under the radar of consciousness – it may turn against itself and become entirely destructive if applied in combination with ignorance.
The fear and hatred among so many commenters is palpable.
First, one needs to know that Heather MacDonald is hardly an objective source. She has been a right-wing mouthpiece and making her case for the entirety of her career.
Second, many complaints here maintain the ugly – and not very disguised – assumption that Blacks and other minorities are intellectually inferior to white people and any attempt to address the historically enforced imbalance among Americans in our cultural life is considered suspect. This was the same fear from the 1960s when such barriers begun to be knocked down in schools and colleges by law. The fear, of course, stems from the suspicion that the whites will lose their pride of place in society. And, that fear of course, isn’t coming out of nowhere. White people are becoming an ever smaller proportion of the American public. But this fear and its ugly repercussions is not knew. We have a history of trying to keep out the Chinese, Italians, and God help us, those pope-loving Irish, who at one time were not considered completely white. And, not just these groups.
This hatred and fear is now fashionable among the far-right wing of the conservative Republicans in the US and throughout elsewhere. And it’s really sad to read the hysteria among the readers here and to think we live in a world where such haters have come from under their rocks and out of their caves and celebrate their hate and ignorance. But here we are. What does anyone think is the next step to all of this?
It should not be forgotten that there is a difference between trying to correct a social injustice born from racism and the inverted racism of explaining everything in racist terms. Also there is the problem of injustice NOT motivated by racism but nevertheless landing on black people’s plate, which is the injustice that always happens everywhere, where people live together. Who is going to decide what is what in which situation? Simply grouping blacks and whites together as separate species is not going to help, and decolonizing cultural products does not help either. The only possible effective trajectory is the one of education, of everybody of any colour.
According to Joe Biden, Democrats with their moronic talking points and Jews of course with their self-segregation, blacks continue to be inferior.
As Biden (D) himself said “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black!” from his Delaware basement where he belongs.
FACT CHECK https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/22/politics/biden-charlamagne-tha-god-you-aint-black/index.html
The Left is unhinged whilst the 25th amendment is Biden’s clear fate due to his mental illness.
Dave, you need to get out of your bubble. No one is talking about the 25th amendment except you Reich-wingers. Biden is not mentally ill. Where on earth did you get such an idea? On the other hand, your dearly departed leader, The Turd Reich, is a malignant narcissist. The Left is not unhinged. If you want an example of unhinged, just look at footage from the Jan. 6 insurrection.
A major? No. A required course for business majors, physicians, or any degree for a profession that requires interaction with diverse groups of people, absolutely essential.
“graduates are practically guaranteed a job in arts funding”: this is one of these times when N.L.’s quick and incisive wit nails it with a few words. One could widen it and say “graduates are practically guaranteed a job in the arts”