Here's another plum from UC Irvine's professor, social justice warrior, Palestinian-supporter, Al Jazeera op-ed contributor, Campus Watch icon, and international rock legend, Mark LeVine. (I read somewhere that he once jammed with Mick Jagger.)
At any rate, LeVine has another op-ed running on Qatar's news outlet, Al Jazeera. It's about the latest goings-on at UC Irvine and how they have built a field hospital to deal with Covid and the challenges facing both students and teachers in the wake of this pandemic.
I have no issue with most of this article, and I wish UCI (where I taught part-time for 16 years and made the acquaintance of Professor LeVine), nothing but the best in these hard times. As usual, however, LeVine's writings drift off into social justice commentary.
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/1/5/covid-19-the-university-and-reimagining-the-common-good
Here is where it gets really "good".
“To do our job in this environment,” as my colleague Doug Haynes, Vice Chancellor for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion at UCI told me, “the university increasingly, by necessity, has to become an instrument of social welfare and justice.”
At the risk of arguing that Mr. Haynes' job at UCI is not really necessary, I would argue that being an instrument of "social welfare and justice" is largely what has gotten academia into so much trouble. The role of the university is to educate, not to indoctrinate. The terms "social welfare" and "social justice" sound innocent and noble enough. The problem is that the universities have come up with their own definitions of these terms and used them to indoctrinate our young people into believing that America is inherently flawed, unjust, and must be radically changed. Yes, we have a troubled history, and, as I have often written, when I was a child growing up in the 1950s, this was a racist country-particularly in the South where racism carried the force of local laws. But we have dramatically changed, mostly due to the Civil Rights Movement, which today's social justice warriors seem to have forgotten, maybe because many of them weren't even born yet.
"So, the stress currently being felt at universities is as much a result of the state’s failure to provide adequate funds to enable its students to get the education they need and deserve as it is a consequence of the pandemic."
Adequate funds? Today's universities are all about money. They are billion-dollar enterprises, not only receiving state funding (in the case of public universities) but donations from alumni, foundation grants, exorbitant tuitions, and let's not forget all those millions pouring into universities from places like China and Saudi Arabia. It is the latter that has pumped billions of oil money into American universities to set up Middle East Studies departments that teach nothing but pan-Arab, anti-West, anti-Israel garbage.
And think how many millions could be saved if universities would scrap all those useless and divisive ethnic, gender, and gay studies departments. Think of the 6-figure salaried positions that could be eliminated in the form of chairs, vice-chairs, deans, etc.
"Racial inequality in the education system is another fault line the pandemic exposed."
"......universities like UC Irvine, which is a federally designated minority-serving university, and has a disproportionately large number of students from historically underrepresented, economically marginalised and immigrant backgrounds.
Hmmm. True, I have not taught at UCI since 2016, but in my experience, I would have estimated that slightly over 50% of the students were Asian-American. There are many students from Middle Eastern backgrounds, immigrants, and foreign students as well. Economically marginalized? I don't think so. Of course, I don't know know how many were attending on economic-need scholarships, and I would have guessed that there were many more students from Asian backgrounds at UCI than black or Hispanic. In this vein, it should also be noted that UCI has a relatively small humanities department as opposed to UC Berkeley or UCLA. There is a strong emphasis on engineering, pre-med, biology, and hard sciences. I have always argued for that reason, you see less insanity at UCI than most other schools-the notable exception being the anti-Israel agitation that comes every May for a week-an issue that has increased campus anti-Semitism on the part of a small percentage of students.
And then we get to Critical Race Theory, which is encroaching on education at a rapid rate-especially in California. What this theory preaches is that America is still a racist country and that white people, no matter how fair and well-intentioned, are privileged and inherently racist. It also includes discussion on-believe it or not- the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, much to the detriment of the pro-Israel narrative. Resultant anti-Semitism is swept under the rug since, after all, Jews are all white and especially privileged, don't you know? In sum, CRT is crap. But LeVine does not agree.
"Conservatives can rail all they want against “critical race theory” as the latest root of all university evil, but it comes down to mathematics. If you hollow out communities through decades (in fact, centuries) of discrimination, segregation, impoverishment, state violence and incarceration, you make it exceedingly difficult for families from these communities, never mind individual students, to afford higher education.
When minorities are highly over-represented in prison populations and underrepresented in university populations (and the former costs at least twice as much per year as the latter), it’s impossible not to feel that the State of California, and the country as a whole, has for too long been more interested in arresting, trying, convicting and incarcerating minorities than enrolling and helping them complete their educations at the UC – whether there is a pandemic or not."
Let's examine that sentence in more detail. Are minorities over-represented in prison populations and under-represented in university populations? If you are talking about blacks and Hispanics, the answer, sadly, is still yes though progress has been made over the past decades. Is that true of Asian-Americans or Arab-Americans? I would say no since both groups tend, on the average, to be doing OK financially. It must also be noted that there is more crime in black neighborhoods as well as Mexican neighborhoods, which accounts for the over-representation in prison. There are, indeed, social and historic reasons for that since there is more poverty in those neighborhoods, and there has been historic discrimination. Where I specifically take issue is this part of the above quote:
"..... it’s impossible not to feel that the State of California, and the country as a whole, has for too long been more interested in arresting, trying, convicting and incarcerating minorities than enrolling and helping them complete their educations at the UC – whether there is a pandemic or not."
Let me be clear: The state of California and the country as a whole have no interest in arresting, trying, convicting and incarcerating minorities rather than enrolling them in college and helping them complete their education. I say that based on nearly 30 years in law enforcement, 9 of which were spent working in Los Angeles.
As a retired DEA agent, I know first-hand that drug addicts and drug traffickers come in all colors. Of all the people I arrested, a good share were white. What we do have interest in is arresting and incarcerating criminals-no matter their color or background. As such, I have no apology for anyone that I ever helped put in prison. Similarly, it is in the best interest of the state and the nation-not to mention all the citizens- for minorities to succeed like everyone else.
And then there is this attack on the sheriff of Orange County:
"And when the very forces of order who have long been the spearpoint of racist and coercive state policies, such as Orange County Sheriff Don Barnes, declare repeatedly that “compliance with health orders is a matter of personal responsibility and not a matter of law enforcement” as the infection rate surges, while the largely white and wealthy residents of towns like Newport, Laguna and Huntington Beaches walk around, shop and dine as if there’s no pandemic, it can only serve to reinforce just who, in Barnes’ words, gets to “enjoy our most cherished freedoms”.
I don't know what LeVine's point is here other than possibly engaging in some sort of "intersectionality", as if the Covid plague and the recent surge were all the fault of rich white people who live in certain communities. I guess this is based on Sheriff Barnes' policy of not forcing restaurants to remain closed as his force deals with crime instead. Fortunately for us, we are not run by crazy leftists, as is the case in San Francisco and Los Angeles.
I suspect that what is going on here, not just in California, but the whole nation, is that the left wants to take this Covid tragedy and turn it into a racial issue, which it should not be. Is this the narrative now- that black and brown people are dying of Covid while rich white people in Orange County are ignoring the crisis and dining on lobster thermador in fine restaurants? Is this what the readers of Al Jazeera, whoever and wherever they are, are supposed to believe about America?
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