OLD CONTENT
We have a degree program!
home.dominican.edu/news/2019/07/social-justice/
In response to a growing number of students interested in careers focused on social justice and civic engagement, Dominican University of California is adding a new degree program social justice this fall.
The Social Justice major will examine the links between well-being, social justice, and diverse worldviews and teach students to analyze social injustices and work toward positive social change. The major will integrate coursework, faculty expertise, and practical experience and exposure gained through engagement with community partners.
I would like to see some course content.
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Some good news:
www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-49435041Glasgow University has agreed to raise and spend £20m in reparations after discovering it benefited by millions of pounds from the slave trade.
It is believed to be the first institution in the UK to implement such a "programme of restorative justice".
The money will be raised and spent over the next 20 years on setting up and running the Glasgow-Caribbean Centre for Development Research.
It will be managed in partnership with the University of the West Indies.
The centre, to be co-located in Glasgow and the Caribbean, will sponsor research work and raise awareness of the history of slavery and its impact around the world.
Prof Sir Hilary Beckles, vice-chancellor of the University of the West Indies, said the university's decision was a "bold, moral, historic step" in recognising the slavery aspect of its past.
The move comes almost a year after a study by the university looked at thousands of donations it received in the 18th and 19th Centuries.
It found many were from people whose wealth came from slavery.
University bosses said that although it never owned enslaved people or traded in the goods they produced, it was clear it had received significant financial support.
In total, the money it received is estimated as having a present day value of between £16.7m and £198m.Dr Mullen said the research was the first report of its type in British history and Glasgow was the first university to acknowledge financial income from slavery on such a scale.
Consider that if colonial-era slavery had never existed, none of these donations to universities would have been made, the rate of empirical knowledge expansion would have been slower due to less funding, and surely we would be living in a less complex world today. In reality, however, although slavery has since been abolished, we are still stuck with all that empirical knowledge which should never have been discovered. Even giving back the money now (while a nice gesture) won't erase the knowledge already discovered. Only the total death of Western civilization can perhaps achieve this.
However, Glasgow's decision to begin a programme of reparations has not been universally welcomed.
Author and academic Joanna Williams said: "For me, the number one problem with this is that it suggests people who are alive today bear some historical responsibility for what their ancestors did in the past.
"[These were] truly barbaric and criminal acts, but to suggest that people alive today are responsible for the sins of their ancestors is a step too far."
She added: "It also suggests that other people who are alive today are victims of what happened to their ancestors. There comes a point we all need to move on from that and say that the past is the past."
Yes. That point will come when:
1) all descendants of colonialists have either voluntarily refrained or been prohibited from reproducing (currently not yet the case)
2) all identitarian concepts (e.g. "whiteness") from the colonial era have been discarded (currently not yet the case)
3) all symbols associated with colonialism (e.g. British Empire flag) have been discarded (currently not yet the case)
Until that occurs, the past evidently continues into the present, and to claim that "the past is the past" is intellectually dishonest.
No individual alive today bears responsibility for what their ancestors did in the past. On the other hand, every individual alive today has a duty to not transmit any further forward the bloodlines of those ancestors, and therein that very blood which caused those ancestors to behave as they historically did. To reproduce despite knowing your ancestors were colonialists is to increase the chances of colonialism happening again.
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yaledailynews.com/blog/2020/01/24/art-history-department-to-scrap-survey-course/
Yale will stop teaching a storied introductory survey course in art history, citing the impossibility of adequately covering the entire field — and its varied cultural backgrounds — in one course.
Decades old and once taught by famous Yale professors like Vincent Scully, “Introduction to Art History: Renaissance to the Present” was once touted to be one of Yale College’s quintessential classes. But this change is the latest response to student uneasiness over an idealized Western “canon” — a product of an overwhelmingly white, straight, European and male cadre of artists.
This spring, the final rendition of the course will seek to question the idea of Western art itself — a marked difference from the course’s focus at its inception. Art history department chair and the course’s instructor Tim Barringer told the News that he plans to demonstrate that a class about the history of art does not just mean Western art. Rather, when there are so many other regions, genres and traditions — all “equally deserving of study” — putting European art on a pedestal is “problematic,” he said.
Absolutely. An American university, in particular, should primarily focus on New World art history. And when secondarily covering Old World art history, it should certainly cover all of the Old World rather than ignore the parts which did not colonize the New World!
I do encourage studying Western art, but
through non-Western eyes able to perceive its ugliness:
https://trueleft.createaforum.com/true-left-vs-right/western-civilization-is-ugly-48/This is infinitely more helpful than studying art around the world through Western eyes (which will consider Western art superior).
The decision to get rid of this survey art history course resembles the English Department’s move to “decolonize” its degree requirements in 2017. At the time, the department made a sequence titled “Major English Poets” optional for majors.
For years, the Directed Studies program — a six-credit sequence for first-year students focusing on philosophy, literature and political philosophy — has also fielded criticisms about its exclusive focus on the Western canon.
We have plenty of work awaiting.....
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It used to be commonplace during counterculture times to mock Ivy League Universities as being elitist havens for Westerners.....
We would even make fun of their antiquated renaissance era architecture, which they insisted on not changing due to "heritage"!
Yet look at what has happened now, Gentiles, most of whom are younger, fashionably proclaiming that monuments to Western icons explicitly be preserved due to precisely that reason: "heritage".
Oh how times have changed.
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Ignorance and Indoctrination of Westerners Kills Millions
Our Planet Earth is heading straight towards the most dangerous collision in its history. It is not a collision with some foreign body, with an asteroid or a comet, but with the most brutal and selfish chunk of its own inhabitants: with people who proudly call themselves “members of the Western civilization.”
Again and again it is clearly demonstrated that Western culture, which the paramount psychologist Carl Jung used to call “pathology”, couldn’t be trusted.
www.globalresearch.ca/ignorance-and-indoctrination-of-westerners-kills-millions/5489648