Many colleges and universities have diversity requirements. Students have to take at least one class that directly engages with topics like race, ethnicity, gender. Well, one school, Hamilton College, a liberal arts college in New York state, is looking to go one step further. Joining us by Skype to tell us more is Karen Brewer, a chemistry professor at Hamilton College. She is chairing a subcommittee that will review potential courses before the school's new diversity requirement takes effect next year. Professor Brewer, thanks for joining us.
KAREN BREWER: Well, thank you for having me.
SIEGEL: Other colleges require diversity courses. What's going to make Hamilton's different?
BREWER: What's different about Hamilton's requirement is that each department will design the requirement for their majors. And in that way, they can make it relevant and meaningful to those students for their future goals in the department and their majors as well as in their careers.
SIEGEL: But if a student is majoring, say, in computer science or physics, is it germane to their major to take a course about race or ethnicity? Aren't - isn't the stuff they're studying essentially race neutral?
BREWER: Well, science depends upon a diversity of perspectives in order to kind of decide what questions to ask and what approaches to use to answer those very complex questions.
SIEGEL: Is it really important that your chemistry degree come along with some understanding of race and gender in chemistry?
BREWER: It's germane to what I said before, that science is dependent upon having a variety of perspectives. But also, it's conducted in laboratory groups in industry, government that are becoming more and more and already are very multicultural and multinational. So students thinking about this in the context of sciences is really beneficial to their careers. They'll hopefully be able to work more efficiently and better in teams, show leadership in those teams and hopefully to spot innovation when it's coming from a different perspective..
Remember ethnicity influences what happens when you combine sodium hypochlorite with nitric acid.
It's not so much the hard sciences that they are going to kill, but the schools themselves. The future of schools in the US should be interesting. I suspect that hard science courses will end up in specialty schools, with none of the humanities type classes available. What those race/equality idiots don't realize is that when this happens, the resulting students will have very little humanizing elements in their background. Well-rounded students will be a thing of the past. History seems to indicate this is a bad thing. Typical results from the SJW contingent, to destroy what they are trying to elevate/create.
ReplyDeleteThe one useful possibility in this is that culture (and gender) may influence how people collaborate in a laboratory. I have the suspicion that a chem lab in China operates differently from one in India. Things like how discussions proceed, how the team leader interacts with juniors, etc.
ReplyDeleteKaBOOM!
ReplyDeleteI don't believe is dependent on how you think.
The problem with the belief that 'feelings' affect reality is, in a scientific milieu, bizarre.
When higher education puts more emphasis on 'feelings' than 'thinking', it ignores some of the most pertinent precepts of scientific analysis of the world around us.
And when institutions of higher learning emphasize 'feelings' above 'thinking', it loses the basic predictions of 'learning.
(Which is a very polite way of saying that these dorks are fucking the very minds which they are tasked to expand. But that's just me.)
Rich: There probably are cultural differences, but I suspect American scientists trying to evaluate this would be like fishes studying water.
ReplyDeleteRich,
ReplyDeleteIn China, females are always second class citizens when it comes to important things. This comes from their family dynamics, where the males are important, and his sisters must pander to his every need. This system will allow a woman to take engineering courses, and work in labs, but the attitudes still control everything.