Harvard’s Freshmen May Be Forced into ‘Check Your Privilege’ Training
I wonder if Catholic students will be forced to attend?
Starting this fall, incoming students at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government may be mandated to check their privilege at freshmen orientation, a student group has announced.
“The administration has officially expressed its desire to collaborate with us on designing a privilege training component for orientation week for every HKS degree program,” the student group that lobbied for the effort, Harvard Kennedy School Speaks Out, states on its Tumblr page.
The “power and privilege training” is expected to cover “components of race, gender, socioeconomic class, sexual orientation, ability, religion, international status, and power differentials for every incoming HKS student starting August 2014,” the group states on its website.
The new training comes about as the result of the Harvard Kennedy School Speaks Out’s lobbying effort, which launched this school year and was prompted by what some students described as negative classroom experiences.
Their main gripe was that classes didn’t address race when considering policy issues, the Crimson campus newspaper reports.
With that, the group’s members “decided that students and faculty needed to have a better understanding of ‘race, gender, socioeconomic class, sexual orientation, ability, religion, international status, and power differentials,’ prior to entering classroom discussions, according to the movement’s open letter to the Kennedy School community,” the Crimson reports.
The group’s Tumblr page notes that the exact curriculum has yet to be decided, nor has funding officially been approved.
“We will be putting together a committee of students who will liaise with the administration over the summer to design the training,” the website states.
In addition to holding “moments of solidarity” and “check your privilege” workshops recently as part of the campaign that led up to this recent decision, the HKS Speaks Out group had also penned an open letter to administrators which stated that “shortly after arriving, we noticed holes within the HKS core curriculum that stymied our education.”
Harvard University Freshmen To Be Forced To Undergo ‘Check Your Privilege’ Training (The College Fix)
Comments
Will they have an honest discussion, or will this be another one of those guided sessions that use brainwashing techniques?
Time to tell those “privilege” to stuff it. My “privilege” was achieved through consistent hard work. If there is any privilege to check it would be affirmative action. What isn’t earned is given. What is given isn’t appreciated and isn’t ever enough. Campuses have become hostile environments and at some point there will be riots.
Okay folks, let’s get academic here.
According to the Harvard website, there are only 1,659 matriculates in the class of 2017. (see here)
Forty-six per cent of the 2017 class qualifies as people of color. Forty-nine percent of the 2017 class qualifies as male.
All things being equal, that means that there are 374 members of the class that are “White Privileged” males. While males would then account for 22% of the school population.
Remember, Harvard used to be a white male dominated institution. No women allowed.
This makes white males now a minority, not a majority.
But, that is not the worst of it.
If affirmative action rules were in place and included whites too, the fact is that Harvard would be forced to make 36% of admissions “White Privileged” males based on current census data.
In conclusion, under affirmative action rules, the 2017 student body which has 22% “white males” as it is constituted right now has lost 200 “white male students” or let 12% of the applicants be unfairly rejected because of the color of their skin and their race.
“Check your privilege”ought to be answered with “Lost my privilege big time, don’t gloat!”