traditional coursework today across the world.
But with sides being taken, divisiveness and rhetoric increases – even in fields ike mathematics. Anecdotes of provosts stating publicly they ‘hope their students never have to
read another dead white male’ and of mass
faculty resignations happening in protest over the adoption and/or embrace of critical race theory, push forward the creation of organizations to push forward respective agendas.
For example, on the traditional side of things, you have Jonathan Haidt creating the Heterodox Academy, which is a “nonpartisan collaborative of 5,000+ professors, educators, administrators, staff, and students who are committed to enhancing the quality of research and education by promoting open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement in institutions of higher learning,” but which is also generally understood to be a defender of the traditional western canon. You also have the creation of the National Association of Scholars (NAS), which was established to 1987 to support teaching the traditional western canon but which today specifically tracks incidents where higher
education faculty had been ‘cancelled’ in hope that its effort "will shed light on the widespread malfeasance of academic administrators in our colleges and universities for the sake of tangible accountability.” (The organization claims 249 cancellations as of October 2022.).12
By contrast, on the more liberal side of things, challengers and challenges to the western canon have been supported by several organizations. For example, you have the Partnership for the Future of Learning, which is a national coalition of left-leaning think tanks, unions, foundations, and advocacy groups that “hopes to combat conservative outcry over
'critical race theory' by promoting the idea of
'teaching honesty' in education as a strategy to support teachers, school administrators, and school board members who find themselves under new attack for equity and anti-racism work.” There is the Zinn Education Project’s “Pledge to Teach the Truth,” which has developed a #TeachTruthSyllabus “to shine a light on the kind[s] of lessons that the GOP is trying to ban.” And there is The African American Policy Forum, which is also leading a related #TruthBeTold campaign.13
There is also the Centre for Race, Education,
at Leeds Beckett University, which seeks "to inform education policy change, to decolonise and transform curricula to reflect the contributions and experiences of people of colour, nationally and internationally - in order
to prepare all to live, learn and work in a racially and ethnically diverse world.”14 There is the Ash Center at Harvard Kennedy School which has created The Institutional Antiracism and Accountability (IARA) Project, a project that works “at the intersection of community, academia, and policy to address intellectual and practical questions as they relate to antiracism policy, practice, and institutional change.”15 There is the Anti-Racist Curriculum Project, which is a new collaborative research project funded by Scottish Funding Council (SFC) and in collaboration with Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) Scotland that aims to
understand and support the development of an
Naturally, media coverage of events happening on campuses around the world suggest to politicians that the culture wars are real and that they can exploit respective positions for personal gain.
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