[kylecazar]

Sounds like they did her a favor.

The claims about 'White Supremacy Culture' alone are asinine (sense of urgency?).

Why anybody would want to participate in academia as an administrator is beyond me. It just seems so toxic and petty.

[recursivedoubts]

“The reason that university politics is so vicious is because stakes are so small”

[tptacek]

They are asinine. They've become a shibboleth for detecting DEI-types who are unengaged with theory and have hopped on the fad --- the Robin DiAngelists, if you will. You don't have to like, appreciate, or respect DEI in any way to acknowledge that unironically showing slides suggesting that literacy is a white virtue is disqualifying, and that most social justice thinkers, including Okun herself, agree with that.

Okun's website attempts to clarify all of this; for instance, the page expanding on "worship of the written word" explains that it's a reaction to the idea that anything not written down according to formal standards is worthless. That's not a crazy DEI idea, so much so that it's part of the plot of the Terry Gilliam movie Brazil.

But people just want fortune cookies to memorize and repeat, and it is somewhat on people like Okun for providing those fortunes and only 20 years later clarifying them. And, of course, De Anza wasn't at all engaged with Okun's actual thoughts; it was using them to prevent managers from setting agendas for meetings.

Again: everybody involved in this story is a crank.

[owlglass]

Money. Where else are likely to make hundreds of thousands of dollars with a PhD in comparative literature?