U. Michigan Activists Forcing Engineering Students Into Race Studies
One of the saving graces of the usually challenging science and engineering programs at many universities is that they are light on progressive agenda items.
However, a group of University of Michigan activists is trying to change that.
To become a good engineer of business major, a student must first study the all-important subjects of race and ethnicity — at least according to student government leaders at the University of Michigan, who are working to extend the liberal arts college’s race requirements to all colleges of the university.
A proposal, drafted by members of the Central Student Government, aims to reform the requirement that all students in the College of Literature, Science and the Arts study race and ethnicity before graduation. Moving forward, all students–even those in the Colleges of Engineering and Business — would be forced to take a class with a racial component, if the proposal were approved by faculty.
Sagar Lathia, president of the LSA Student Government, which is separate from CSG, supports the change. He told The Michigan Daily that students studying business and economics had just as much reason to take R&E classes as their peers in LSA.
It would be helpful for economics students to study “poverty, inequality and labor through the scope of race,” he suggested.
Carly Manes, LSA representative to CSG and current CSG presidential candidate, said that intersectionality, “is the core component of the educational model.”
Manes hoped that the proposal would establish identity-based themes — such as gender, sexuality, immigration status, religion and race — as the core focus of the curriculum at each of the university’s colleges.
The proposal is support by the Black Student Union, a race-based activist group at UM that recently made news for presenting a list of demands to the university. Administrators immediately caved to group’s most costly demand: a $300,000 renovation of the campus’s multicultural center.
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Comments
Speaking as a U Mich Engineering grad from a few decades ago, I could support engineering students taking such required classes if students in the other colleges took integral calculus. As a professor in a calculus class said when I was a student, “When you integrate, everything gets better.”
Yes. If science and engineering have students need to take more “liberal” arts, then all the gender studies, ethnic studies, art history majors, et. al. need to take a year of calculus and a year of physics of chemistry.
physics OR chemistry
Physics AND Chemistry, if you please.
The word ‘take’ and its various tenses has a whole raft of meanings.
To the mathematical logical brain it means ‘studied a cleanly set out and logical subject and passed a rigorous exam’.
I assure you, that to these “University of Michigan activists” it has no such meaning. If they agreed to ‘take’ calculus it would mean discussing the gender consciousness of Newton and Leibnitz and why they were both homosexual, and why that was good. There would be no ‘limits’ to their bullshit.