Too many ‘dead white dudes’? Seattle U students protest program’s curriculum

Submitted by Mastodon on Fri, 2016-05-20 23:56

Article here. Excerpt:

'For seven days and counting, dozens of Seattle University students have been holding a sit-in in the lobby of a university administrative building, demanding an overhaul of one of the university’s elite programs and the resignation of a college dean.

At issue, they say, is a classical curriculum that focuses on Western ideas and history, in part through the teachings of philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle.
...
In a letter to the university community this weekend, Seattle University President Stephen Sundborg said the students have raised serious issues, and that the university will address them.

“I cannot pretend to know how deep their pain goes, the amount of harm it has caused or the extent of our own shortcomings as educators and administrators,” wrote Sundborg.

Matteo Ricci’s dean, Jodi Kelly, has said she will do a comprehensive review of the college’s curricula, hire a consultant to assess the college’s culture and climate, and train faculty and staff in racial and cultural literacy.

But students say there’s only one thing that will end the sit-in: Kelly’s resignation.'

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Comments

... is worth much on the market anyway, but scenes like this only continue to devalue it. What if Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy has been taught for centuries because, well, their ideas and thought processes were just plain outstanding as compared with the many other philosophers before or since?

Of the many hundreds of thousands of philosophers who have lived since ancient Greece, so many of them also white men, why have such ones as Plato and Aristotle always been taught above them? It isn't their white maleness. Lots of those in philosophy and those guys don't get the same distribution. So why?

It's a little word known as "quality". Dismissing quality because the quality people involved are white men is just plain stupid. But we got a lot of "stupid" in our colleges these days.

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Submitted by Matt on Sat, 2016-05-21 00:35

Causes people deep pain?

How about Homer, Sophocles, Virgil, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Cervantes, Descartes, Baudelaire, Wittgenstein, Einstein, and Nabokov?

Or Dr. Seuss?

Education is quickly being destroyed in this country.

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Submitted by el cid on Sat, 2016-05-21 12:28