Hey! Teacher! Leave those kids alone!
Wayne State University in Detroit has a long and proud history — it’s been in existence since 1868, hosts almost thirty thousand students every year, and may or may not be bankrolled by Batman through his Wayne Foundation. In a move nearly as creepy, disconcerting, overflowing with the social and moral philosophy of the 1970s and generally stupid as a Pink Floyd song, Wayne State University has announced that it will no longer require all students to study mathematics, but will now require them to take "diversity" classes instead. If you’re interested in the sort of word soup that can pour forth from the word extruders of the university’s General Education Reform Committee, which proposed this wonderful "reform," here’s a choice sample:
Year 1 focuses around a paired set of "Year 1 Core" courses designed to generate excitement, build key academic and practical skills, and build a sense of community… These core courses are intended to help excite students about the promise of a university education, build key skills essential for student success, and to increase a student’s feelings of "belongingness" to the university community…
[W]e feel that the Student Communities and the Capstone courses will increase a student’s meaningful interaction with their peers and the community, thus leveraging the incredible diversity of our university. Finally, we are proposing the creation of specific "Diversity" courses, with students required to take one course in this designation. These courses will provide opportunities for students to explore diversity at the domestic level and consider the ways in which it intersects with real world challenges at the local, national and/or global level.
That’s right, proud parents: you can sleep easy, knowing that your $22,000 per year ($33,000 for non-residents) will not be wasted teaching your child any actual knowledge or skills. You will instead be paying for four years of feel-good idiocy, taught by people who are somehow unashamed of publishing official documents containing language like "belongingness" and "leveraging the incredible diversity of our university." This seems like a bargain to me!
What’s that you say, Ashley Thorne, executive director of the National Association of Scholars?
Mathematical ability is an objective and practical skill that will serve students the rest of their lives, which is why it has traditionally been a core part of college curricula. ‘Diversity’ is not an academic subject. It is a concept invented to classify people by their social identities. Focusing on individuals’ race, ethnicity, sex, and sexuality in this way has been demonstrated to lead to racial animus, segregation, stigmas, discrimination, and poor academic performance. It also politicizes education.
Nice attempt to hide behind a lady-sounding name, "Ashley," but you’re clearly a patriarch!
Here’s the air support
In its quest to open up diplomatic relations with Cuba (one of the few good things the Obama administration has done), John Kerry’s state department has hit on a comedy winner: sending Shaquille O’Neal to the island as a "basketball envoy."
O’Neal will host basketball clinics for Cuban children to "demonstrate how sports can serve as a means of developing academic, leadership, and teamwork skills," State said in a press release.
The agency said O’Neal’s trip will build "on the momentum of President Obama’s historic March trip to Cuba."
"During his time in the country, O’Neal will visit historically significant cultural sites in Havana to encourage positive ties between the U.S. and Cuban people," the press release added.
As of press time, Last Week in Weird has not received confirmation as to whether or not dunking on Fidel Castro is a capital offense in the workers’ paradise.
That said, it’s fairly hilarious that the United States government is sufficiently ignorant of Cuban society as to believe that the Cubans need to be educated about sports. They know about sports! Perhaps, if Shaq’s visit is a success, they could send Jack Nicholson to educate the Cubans about cigars next. Perhaps Desi Arnaz Jr. could go teach them to go chick chick-a boom chick chick-a boom.
Last Week in Artificial Hate Crimes
Admit it: you think this is going to be about some college kids somewhere pretending they were attacked by horrible, evil white males, but getting caught making the whole thing up. You know, like the story that broke last week that those three black girls who famously got attacked by a bunch of whiteys on a bus this January actually faked the whole incident. Well, in a stunning reversal, that’s not at all what I’m here to write about; instead, I’m writing about the Paper of Record breaking the important true story that all computers everywhere are racist and sexist.
ACCORDING to some prominent voices in the tech world, artificial intelligence presents a looming existential threat to humanity: Warnings by luminaries like Elon Musk and Nick Bostrom about "the singularity" — when machines become smarter than humans — have attracted millions of dollars and spawned a multitude of conferences.
But this hand-wringing is a distraction from the very real problems with artificial intelligence today, which may already be exacerbating inequality in the workplace, at home and in our legal and judicial systems. Sexism, racism and other forms of discrimination are being built into the machine-learning algorithms that underlie the technology behind many "intelligent" systems that shape how we are categorized and advertised to.
Your humble narrator is at a loss to explain what the world would do without The New York Times bringing us this kind of hard-hitting intelligent true thinking. The author of this piece jumps from the assertion that Nikon’s cameras sometimes mistakenly think that Asians are blinking when they aren’t (an odd form of racism for Japanese camera manufacturer Nikon to build into its cameras) to the assumption that all the black people will be put in jail because racist computers will tell the police to do so. Never mind that I’m not 100% sure it’s really an example of pervasive racism if police spend more time surveiling poor black neighborhoods than upscale white neighborhoods — I am fairly certain there’s more crime in the "hood" than in the Hamptons, after all — and just consider for a moment why on Earth this would actually happen. Literally every problem the author identifies — Amazon’s same-day shipping not supporting some ZIP codes that are majority-black (along with mine, of course, which is almost entirely white), for example — has either already been fixed or is in the process of being fixed. Even if we assume (stupidly) that the only cause of these problems is horrible racism rather than, in Nikon’s case, the fact that people don’t all have the same eye shape, why would we assume they’re getting worse when all the evidence is to the contrary?
I’m starting to think these people don’t really put much thought into their bonebrained accusations of racism, guys.
Deutschland, Deutschland, über alles
In conclusion, here’s the official response given in the Brandenburg parliament by Germany’s "Alternative für Deutschland" party to a proposal by the Green party to create a "Campaign for Acceptance of Gender and Sexual diversity, Self-Determination and against Homo and Trans*-phobia in Brandenburg."