Variety, inclusion are important, but may include empty discourse: professor
As long as they are combined with free speech and significance, “diversity and addition” are crucial components of higher learning, according to a progressive California doctor.
However, Santi Tafarella, a professor at Antelope Valley College, claimed that the socialist and Socialist beliefs that have grown so closely entangled with DEI are bothering him. And his worries just led him to speak out more about the matter, first on his own campus, then in the eyes of society as a whole.
The La culture’s collateral item is the source of the issue. It’s kind of a hook and change, from equality of opportunity to equality of results. That’s where you get communist, Communist ideas”, he told The Fix in a new telephone interview.
A professor of English, Tafarella ( pictured ) described himself as politically center- left, with some libertarian leanings. He has been teaching at a neighborhood school for 24 years, and he said to The Fix that he thinks community colleges may encourage diversity and inclusion.
Some of his students come from first- technology, low- income, and Hispanic or American British backgrounds, he said.
They may not have the history understanding that some academics assume, he said, because many of them are older and pale and raised in higher-income individuals with families who also attended school.
It’s a matter of being” sympathetic to your audience”, he said. For instance, he advised faculty to consider authors like Chilean Nobel Prize winner Pablo Neruda and American Robert Frost in their American groups.
He described a Spanish scholar who approached him after class one day and expressed interest in reading to The Fix. The young gentleman was the first in his home to go to school, he said.
” I fed him ebooks for a month or two”, and then, seeing the child’s possible, encouraged him to set his sights higher and use to the best universities in the country, Tafarella said.
The younger man was accepted at many, graduated from the University of California Berkeley, and presently has a powerful, high- paying career in New York City, he said.
That is why “diversity and inclusion”, as properly understood, are important, Tafarella said.
” This is not political correctness. Being human with other people and attempting to bring them along is what he said.
Parts of DEI” not consistent with academic freedom.”
He does, however, have some of the ideas being promoted as part of DEI.
Tafarella said he only recently started speaking out about his concerns with socialist ideas trickling into community colleges because he was more interested in” building bridges” than in causing division.
A” Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility Glossary of Terms” was the catalyst in the fall when Antelope Valley College President Jennifer Zellet requested support from the Academic Senate.
Tafarella, who serves on the senate, told The Fix the glossary was” clearly a manifesto” and” not consistent with academic freedom”.
Its goal was to “instruct campus administrators and leadership in policy formation, hiring, faculty evaluations, and even course outlines of record,” he wrote in a letter to the Wall Street Journal in February.
” It commits them to a radical, racially charged ideology.’ Merit,’ for instance, is defined as ‘ a concept that… is embedded in the ideology of Whiteness and upholds race- based structural inequality,'” he wrote.
Although worried about “blowback”, Tafarella said he also knew adopting the glossary would alienate anyone who is not far- left politically, including “liberals and moderates and conservatives”.
Initially, he and a colleague did speak up about their concerns, and were met with hostility by their dean and some of the faculty in their related departments, he said.
Tafarella claimed that as word spread throughout the campus, more academic staff members began to raise the same questions.
Since then, he said administrators decided to delay voting on the glossary, worried it would not pass.
Tafarella told The Fix that he does not want to “demonize ideologues,” but that he believes administrators and academics who support DEI should be open about the socialist principles at play.
Often instead, he said language is couched in Orwellian ways, “instead of speaking openly about what” they are trying to do.
The job of educators is to teach students “how to think rather than what to think,” he said. He claimed that administrators and professors should also provide students with “measured neutrality and critical thinking.”
To create a successful educational environment, Tafarella told The Fix he believes colleges should promote diversity and inclusion, be committed to free speech and viewpoint diversity, and adopt neutrality policies.
” If any of those things are not there, if you have passionate politics instead of neutrality, you’re undermining the purpose of a college”, he said.
MORE: A lawsuit targets DEI faculty requirements at community colleges in California
IMAGES: Santi Tafarella
Follow The College Fix on Twitter and Like us on Facebook.
