With recent appointments from Governor Kristi Noem, the South Dakota Board of Regents appears to be taking proactive steps for our state’s colleges to more closely remember what their purpose is as incubators of debate and free thinking, as well as for them to pay more attention to American exceptionalism.
Today the board passed on an 8-0-1 vote (with one abstaining) a measure to “provide clear direction on the Board’s position and approach to addressing and managing various areas garnering recent attention on the national stage, ensuring our institutions remain places of learning, study and exploration, built upon free speech, scientific discovery and academic freedom.”
And you can read it below:
7_A_BOR0821 by Pat Powers on Scribd
Best part? as you’ll read in the document..
South Dakota’s state universities are public, taxpayer-funded institutions. It is inherent in the missions of our universities to proudly support the United States of America. Our students will learn about America’s history, our system of individual liberty in a democratic republic, and our system of free enterprise. Part of that instruction is to acknowledge and discuss America’s flaws and mistakes, so that we can learn from them and improve. We celebrate, though, America’s role in recent world history, as the nation most responsible for expanding liberty, prosperity, and equality across the globe.
Heck yeah!
This seems to counter the talking point that “college makes you a lib”, but to be honest, that has nothing to do with what is being taught. A college course in science, for example, teaches (and forces) one to comply with a practical methodology, that is logical, and pragmatic. You are encouraged to ask questions, and to discredit your hypothesis in order to define causality. When one understands and accepts this process, it is applied to all scenarios in life, and therefore contradictions to party philosophy are seen. If you really want to reduce “the libs”, consider changing policy.
1. If guns don’t kill people, and should not be regulated, then why are drugs regulated? Does the timeline of drug law, incarceration, and prison population coinciding with emancipation of slavery have anything to do with that?
2. If the unborn life is so important, why aren’t the born lives important? Is it just because the unborn are a great group to advocate for? They don’t ask for anything, they are morally uncomplicated, they don’t resent your condescension or complain about you not being PC, unlike the born they don’t need money, education or healthcare, they aren’t illegal immigrants, they allow you to feel good about yourself without really any work, and once born, you can forget about them?
3. Freedom from that overreaching government hand is a fundamental GOP line. However, why does government in states like SD continue to expand each legislative session with more restrictive laws? Who is the party of big government again?
4. Blue lives matter, but only when they are fighting people not like me. Assaulting a police officer is the same whether it is in Los Angeles or Washington D.C. Speak up!
5. Tax cuts to the wealthy are more important than those to the middle class, it is called trickle down economics. Except, this theory has never resulted in actual evidence other than the rich getting richer, which is why we have more wealth concentrated at the top bracket of income than we have ever had before in our nations existence.
College is not the problem, the policy is the problem, the talking points are not working on people the same way they worked on the past generations. We have more college graduates than ever before, and it is slowly becoming the norm. The autocratic style of government is not going to work as well as it has in the past.
You’ve got to be kidding me. Go visit a contemporary university. Look at how controversial political and social issues are handled. Expansive discussions in which a broad range of hypotheses are put forth and tested rigorously? I think not. Just look at the pseudo-scientific, largely vacuous discourses on disparities and how they are all due to “systemic racism” or “lack of access” to this or that, the let’s-just-make-stuff-up storytelling supposedly based on “implicit bias” research, the holding up of various progressive cause celebres like “the school to prison pipeline” as obvious facts, and so on. Much of the discussion is neatly constrained and set up so as to arrive at, and confirm, what progressives believe. This includes in many academic journals. Wake up.
This is all unsubstantiated talking point jargon with no evidence, exactly what I am referring to in the first comment. I have been to “contemporary universities” which I assume we have in South Dakota according to your opinion, hence this direction from the BoR. Do you know what systemic racism is, implicit bias, did you see my first point in the previous comment? I don’t know what you think progressives are believing and trying to confirm through education, but perhaps there is enough evidence to define causality, despite your desire for there not to be? if you have a specific example, I would be curious to hear it, but I’m not sure Dan Bongino or Tucker Carlson have done that episode yet.
It’s very difficult to respond your ranting and raving, which is not very clear. For example, what do you mean by “evidence to define causality”? The cause of what? “Do you know what systemic racism is, implicit bias, did you see my first point in the previous comment?” What does that mean? It’s grammatically incorrect to the point of having no clear meaning.
I obviously can’t write a paper on “implicit bias,” etc., in a comment on a blog (but nor did you provide any actual evidence in your post to support your arguments). But you are free to go consult the research and reviews on the topic, and there you will find that “implicit bias” is a laboratory phenomenon with very weak links to biased behavior in real life. Yet it is widely touted as proof of how racist everyone is, and why everyone in corporations and schools needs to be subjected to training and regulation by progressives.
I don’t have time to explain the fallacies surrounding “systemic racism” to you in detail. Jim Crow would be a case of actual systemic racism. But “systemic racism” as widely used today boils down to “the omnipresent thing that causes racial disparities.” That is vacuous concept. It’s like saying: “Demons are the things that cause car crashes. They’re everywhere!” You can say that. But it’s a word game, not a scientific explanation of car crashes.
Meanwhile, many of your original arguments are faulty. You basically argue, for example, that we have high concentrations of wealth because the government “let” the wealthy earn too much and didn’t tax them enough. What sort of argument is that?
Alright, good luck to you, but I’ll have to move on to other things now.
First, let me note that I am not the anon you have been replying to. Their arguments are a bit confusing, so I will try and prevent ones I think are a bit more reasonable. You acknowledge that racial disparities exist in the US, but then quickly move on without even attempting to explore why they do. Have any theories? You acknowledge Jim Crow, which systematically discriminated against people of color with the support of the government. Before that, there was slavery. From the time of America’s founding until well into the 1900’s, the US and state governments did this. I’ll just ask: do you think that the simple ending of Jim Crow and slavery put everyone on equal footing? I don’t. It’s a bit like arguing that a person with a head start in a race doesn’t have an advantage so long as the race starts at the same time for everyone. It just doesn’t work that way and it is bizarre to me that people can argue it does.
Yes, it is reasonable to say that Jim Crow, redlining, etc., can have continuing effects down the generations. I’m sure that is the case. It is reasonable to ask to what extent this problem exists and what can be done about it. Few people are against that, I’d guess.
But any such process should be done in accordance with normal scientific and political norms. What we have now is a public discourse dominated by leftist arguments that just attribute disparities to “racism” wantonly.
Bad things have happened to all groups of people at some point in time. Why is it that we draw an essentially direct and total line from historical injustices to present difficulties for some groups (Black and Native Americans) but not others (Jews, Japanese and Irish Americans etc.)? What justifies this? Yes, yes — the magnitudes of the injustices may be different. But that is separate from the question of why different modes of explanation are used for different groups. What are the mechanisms by which slavery and Jim Crow produce disparities? Ask many on the left and you will hear crickets followed by speedy recourse to the familiar hand-waiving arguments involving “systemtic racism.” But what if, for example, slavery and Jim Crow produced differences in values or culture that yield different outcomes. At what point do you own those differences? Do Black Americans have agency or are they billiard balls shuttlecocked around by forces outside of their control? This has nothing to do with “blame” or “blaming the victim.” A value or priority that fails to translate into higher earnings or some other prized outcome may be perfectly legitimate in its own right. Is it then the job of the state to make people holding such a value whole (i.e., have the same outcomes as others)? I would think not. The point here is not that we should assume this particular thesis about disparities. It is that there is a huge array of possible explanations for disparities apart from “systemic racism” and its equivalents. (Why, after all, do Asians often have better outcomes than Whites? Why do Black Americans of different heritages have different outcomes? Can all of these disparities be attributed to systemic racism? No, because disparities have complex causes.) All possible explanations should be on the table.
Ah but the “progressive” left would prefer such hypotheses not be considered lest their cartoon version of history be exposed for what it is. Hence the need to shut down debate through cancellations, twitter mobs, and politically discriminatory universities. Hence the need for the BOR policies.