[red_admiral]

The thing is, if you accept the basic "liberal arts" idea of education that it's about creating a common culture, then a lot of the ideas coming from the social justice side of things actually make some sense. From the "liberal" point of view, one of the purposes of English lit class and education in general is to create a common background that people in professional settings can use in conversation - I can use my favourite Shakespearean metaphor to argue a point and I know that you, as an educated colleague, will understand what I mean. I could talk about CRT/I and say "something wicked this way comes" if I wanted to, and you could hopefully decode that. Otherwise I'd have the Herculean task of having to keep a database of which of my colleagues understand which kinds of analogies, or reduce all my communication to the lowest common denominator. For example, I'm assuming here that the expressions "Herculean" and "lowest common denominator" (as a figure of speech) mean something to readers on HN.

If you accept this point of view - and lots of educators past and present have done so, including white male ones - then the student slogan "Why is my curriculum white?" makes sense. Would a stock of common background knowledge (for want of a better word) be that much less effective if it included slightly less Hemingway and Twain and slightly more contributions from more diverse authors? So the argument goes, if (to simplofy a lot) white kids learn about white culture at home and black kids learn about black culture, but the test to get a good job includes the "culture fit" part of can we hold a conversation based on the kinds of analogies and forms of speech you learn at college, then it's (1) unfair if the thing you learn at college just happens to be "white culture" and (2) even more so if a more diverse college education would serve _exactly the same purpose_.

The million dollar question is whether (2) is true. I personally think it mostly is for "arts", mainly because there are different cultures with different languages even within "the west" and several of them seem to work about equally well.

But here's the rub: science doesn't work like that.

There's a philosophical argument that Twain _created_ Huck Finn, but Newton only _discovered_ the laws of motion - if Twain hadn't lived then we might have equally good literature, but it would not be the same. But if Newton hadn't lived, someone else would have discovered F=ma and the like by now, and the formula would be exactly the same.

My main worry is that if the US tries to turn science/tech into liberal arts and China doesn't, then we're creating a new kind of inequality: in a generation or two they will wipe the floor with us. But I'm happy to listen to any argument from the SJ/CRT/I side that doesn't imply us handing over our place in the world to a power who very much believes that all races are not equal.

[DeathArrow]

SJ/CRT movement is devouring itself. The more and more it will affect sciences, technology and other critical economic areas, the more US economy will suffer. That will mean US will be less capable on exporting those ideologies into other countries.

Meanwhile, countries which no such handicap will rise economically and be able to export more of their own ideologies.

[nickik]

That assumes that universities matter for the economy. And that is not really all that clear.

Soviet Union had great schools, doesn't mean their economy was doing well.

The US is still doing well even when its school system and even university system have not really been that great overall.

[iateanapple]

> Would a stock of common background knowledge (for want of a better word) be that much less effective if it included slightly less Hemingway and Twain and slightly more contributions from more diverse authors?

In practice it hasn’t worked out that way.

Instead it has:

1) Created a cultural barrier between the average Joe and the “liberal elite”.

It turns out that Twain etc are approachable to the average high school diploma American in a way the replacements texts are not.

2) Created a clear divide between minorities who study at elite US universities and the rest of us.

For example there is a level of alienation between Chinese tech workers who went to college in the US vs other Chinese tech workers here.

3) Created a group of “liberal elite” who think they can speak on behalf of, and even lead, other cultural groups when what they have learned isn’t representative of those cultures at all.