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CONLEY COMMENTARY (WSAU) – Many years ago, I was a part-time instructor at Yale University. It’s an impressive little line on my resume.
My job was to teach aural writing to student-volunteers at the campus radio station. Aural writing is writing that’s supposed to be heard, not read visually. Movie scripts and poetry… and news writing… are examples of aural writing.
I would have no chance at landing such a job at Yale today. Once students got a look at these commentaries, I’d be deemed unacceptable. I’m an unapologetic conservative. Many of the super-liberal ivy-leaguers would immediately protest my presence on their campus. I’d be doxxed or gas-lit before I even arrived.
There’s another reason I’d never be hired. Most universities require all new professors to write a DEI – a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion statement – as part of the job application. You need to demonstrate that you are down for the DEI struggle. Mine would be simple: “I am willing to teach anyone of any ethnicity, race or religion to the best of my abilities.” I’m certain that mine would be inadequate.
One major university, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is dropping DEI statements for new hires. They’re a fine place to start. MIT is the premiere science and tech college in the world. If you are working on a new spaceship for NASA, or a stronger, studier bridge, or groundbreaking micro-biology, the laws of nature and physics and mathematics don’t care about your race or ethnicity. Either you get the science right, and your rocket blasts off to outer space; or you don’t, and your bridge collapses. How woke your professor is becomes irrelevant.
I think the same holds true in most other academic fields. If you can’t write or speak standard English, you’ll be less effective at conveying your ideas to others, for instance, through a news story. Instead, those students will learn aural writing from someone else – or, perhaps, not at all. And I’m a very good teacher.
Chris Conley
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