Making progressive ideas mandatory.

The College Fix reports.

Swarthmore College ponders strategy for new ‘social justice’ requirement

Approximately thirty faculty, staff, and members of the Intercultural Center (IC) at Swarthmore College met last week to discuss new course requirements dedicated to, get this — gender, race, class, and sexuality.

That’s right — requirements. Who would have guessed, eh?

“Swarthmore students need to be well-informed when they graduate and enter the professional world,” noted Andrés Cordero, one of the meeting organizers. “Regardless of political orientation, the requirement would get students ‘to also have a social justice alignment and theoretical basis.’”

Cordero argued that a mandated social justice class isn’t different from any other course requirement, pointing out he had to take a college calculus.

“Even if it was against my will, it ended up being in my best interest to have a holistic education. It’s the same conception when it comes to social issues,” he said.

Except, of course, it’s kind of difficult to inject radical progressive dogma into a calculus course.

In the same vein, a professor made the case that a social justice mandate could “offset contemporary pressures for students to pursue more STEM majors and careers” — it would be “a counterbalance to the ‘neoliberal impact on the liberal arts.’”

Right — we certainly don’t want students seeking productive careers in science and technology now, do we?

It should come as little surprise that this (visiting) prof, Sa’ed Atshan, is a member of the college’s Peace & Conflict Studies Department.

Then there was the Educational Studies Department’s Edwin Mayorga, who typifies academic progressivism perfectly:

“We fall into the trap of creating the opportunity to have the conversation, but then we only have the conversation and then it was a nice conversation, a civil conversation, but there was no change.”