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Malkin and Singleton: Right/Left Tag Team for "Maoist" Style Thought Reform?

As I noted earlier, Michelle Malkin and other outraged conservatives successfully pressured Bellevue Community College in Seattle, Washington to upbraid an idiotic instructor who had asked the following math question: "Condoleezza holds a watermelon just over the edge of the roof of the 300-foot Federal Building, and tosses it up with a velocity of 20 feet per second."

Their victory proved hollow, however, because administrators cleverly seized on the incident to expand their turf through a PC agenda. One of the lessons I took from this badly misfired crusade is the need for conservatives to avoid the easy temptation of gotcha games.

Well, it may be worse than I thought. In response to Malkin’s campaign, Bellevue College not only has given the diversity police more monitoring authority over the curriculum and personnel evaluations, but will hire the notorious Glenn Singleton to conduct ideologically one-sided training for faculty and staff. Apparently, it will be mandatory. For more on Singleton, see here and here.

A self-described “diversity expert,” Singleton is an accomplished race baiter who is often able to persuade colleges and schools to pay him hefty fees for his services. Critics on both the left and right have condemned his “Maoist” style "training" methods.

For example, Harry Brighouse, a philosophy professor at the University of Wisconsin and blogger at Crooked Timber, had the following to say after a school district in Madison implemented Singleton’s Courageous Conversations training program:

…every employee (except the many who took sick days) had to participate…. It’s a kind of involuntary therapy session—the kind of thing that my friends who used to be in obscure Maoist organizations report having gone through regularly. The pretext is a concern with minority underachievement, which the District regards as being caused by institutional racism, on which the day’s conversation focused. You might expect that a focus on institutional racism would look at the racism in the criminal justice system and the labor market, which deeply affect the prospects of minority males and, presumably, therefore indirectly effect their aspirations and marriageability (with predictable consequences for family structure). But: no mention of these things. It is all about the racism inherent in the schools, and particularly in the attitudes of teachers.

Then again, it is possible that I’m being too hard on Malkin. We all make mistakes. I’ll gladly eat crow if she now tries just as vigorously to undue some of the damage by fighting the decision to hire Singleton. While she's at it, she could join us in the ultimately more rewarding cause of academic freedom. How about it, Michelle?

Posted on Friday, April 21, 2006 at 12:26 AM | Comments (16) | Return

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