and equality, students indicated over all they were not heavily involved in those issues this year, but they are noticing a changing campus climate. In fact, while nearly half recall getting an email from their institution, and about three
in 10 remember a statement expressing
support for Black Lives Matter (BLM), it seems as ‘colleges were much less likely to have taken bold steps, such as developing a comprehensive racial justice action plan.’ However, this does not imply things weren’t being done and impressions weren’t being changed:
Twenty percent of students participated in a protest (16 percent off campus), but COVID-19 doesn’t appear to have been a big deterrent; 22 percent say they would have participated in a protest if they were on campus, but 32 percent say they would not have done so.
Thirty-six percent agree at least somewhat that the BLM movement has resulted in a curriculum that’s more inclusive of diverse voices, and 39 percent report having been more intentional this year about race-related discussion.
Fifty-seven percent agree at least somewhat that race is now discussed more frequently across campus, and even more students, 60 percent, say it comes up more in discussion with peers.31
This raises, of course, the additional question: what purpose are such conversations serving? Throughout these conversations, it seems as though many of the conversations are dedicated more to ideological arguments than what skills will be required of graduates and/or how they are to obtain those skills.
For example, it seems Sir Ken Robinson was
onto something when he suggested during a TED talk that higher education as presently configured was killing “creativity.” Presenting an argument that higher education was one of the least productive and most disorganized institutions, Sir Robinson pointed out that the entire structure of higher education – effectively, what has become known as the secular church – was designed to graduate (or make) people like their professors, people who had been trained as researchers and scholars and not practitioners or laborers in any general sense of the term.32
For many, this highly elite and profiled system simply does not conform to today’s society wherein people can acquire education and skills independently. Granting at least consideration of the proposition, a person must necessarily ask if this is not the case? Think about it: a great many professors, pushing ideological agendas, would wish their students to become ‘like them': enlightened, focused on moral and ethical concerns, who, as ‘social advocates,” as “teachers,” push forward the next generation, never asking if that is what the students, themselves, desire.
Other data suggests colleges and universities around the world are not adequately preparing students for the future. A recent study by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and
These arguments, events, and facts serve to remind a person of what occurred during the multicultural debates taking place in America during the 1980s and 1990s, which built on actions that took place during the 1960s.
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