Rutgers is Apparently Taking Action for Solidarity with Black Lives Matter
In the left’s never-ending quest for racial justice, they’ve now deemed proper grammar and English to be racist. According to the College Fix, “The English Department at Rutgers University recently announced a list of “anti-racist†directives and initiatives for the upcoming fall and spring semesters, including an effort to deemphasize traditional grammar rules.”
Rebecca Walkowitz, the English Department chair at Rutgers University, sent an internal email on Juneteenth titled “Department actions in solidarity with Black Lives Matter”.
In her email Walkowitz says,
“In a meeting earlier this week, members of CBAP agreed that the committee needs to move from a role emphasizing “awareness and prevention†towards a role emphasizing “culture change.†Several initiatives came out of that meeting:
- Launching a web page to provide access to contacts, events, affiliated groups, and resources (mentioned above).
- Organizing two teach-ins focused on Black Lives Matter, anti-racism, police brutality, and prison reform that will be offered remotely to the entire department in August. These will be all-hands-on-deck events. I urge everyone to attend, especially faculty, staff, and students who do not live the experience of anti-black racism every day.
- A recommendation – now endorsed by the Chair and leaders of all instructional units – requiring all Fall 2020 instructors in English to attend at least one workshop (remote) on “how to have an anti-racist classroom.†The instructional units of the department will be collaborating to develop a module that can be adjusted to fit the different courses we teach. We will be in touch about these workshops over the course of the next few weeks. They will be mandatory for all tenure-track, tenured, non-tenure-track, part-time, and graduate instructors – everyone.
The Writing Program
Subsequent to the appointment of the Writing Program’s first Associate Director for Diversity and Equity in the Fall of 2019, a six-member Diversity and Equity Steering Committee was formed in January 2020.
The committee is sponsoring a three-part summer session workshop on responsive teaching beginning June 29. The workshop will cultivate critical conversations for Writing Program instructors around the disproportionate impacts of covid-19; state power; racism; violence; white supremacy; protest and resistance; and justice. The goal of this 3-part workshop (June, July, August) is to come together as teachers now, so that we can invite students into these conversations in the fall.
By the end of the workshop, instructors should have class plans almost completely designed with a toolkit of activities, questions, and prompts for the upcoming semester. We will also be addressing the opportunities and challenges of responsive teaching in a remote learning environment. This workshop series is intended to be collaborative and low-barrier so that we can maximize involvement and learn from each other.
In development this summer for an August launch, the group will launch a Racism in Education Reading Group, which begin with seminal texts about the ways in which educational institutions reproduce the racism and inequality of American society, and will then break into smaller interest groups around themes such as history of education, critical and culturally relevant pedagogy, radical writing center praxis, and so on, depending on participant interest. The reading group will meet online once per month.
The Diversity and Equity Committee values initiatives to address racism in our classrooms, but also feels strongly that we must equally address workplace racism and inequity. We have begun informally working within our networks to initiate conversations about the climate of the Writing Program, but we are mindful not to ask colleagues of color to bear the burden of describing how these issues affect them professionally and personally unless they feel called to do so.
Ideas we have for workplace initiatives include implementing periodic climate surveys and/or listening sessions in tandem with the creation of new structures to bridge the gap between listening and institutional action; developing an underrepresented faculty mentoring program; and creating campus meet-and-greets and affinity groups to build community.
Ongoing initiatives within the Writing Program include the ongoing assessment and updating of the reader that is used in English 101, “Expository Writing,†the University’s only universal graduation requirement.“
You can read the full email HERE.
Universities like Rutgers have been a breading ground for socialists and Marxists over the years. The professors seem to be unhinged leftists loonies for the most part.
I just recently completed college and a good deal of my professors were very left-leaning, going so far as to deduct points from my discussions should I say anything pro-American or pro-Trump. We are allowing our children to be brainwashed by pompous windbags.
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