Oregon, My Oregon!

Oregon State University students required to pay for own 'social justice' training

The Oregon State University (OSU) diversity center is hiring two college students to promote “social justice” and “cultural engagement” on campus.

In a recent job posting, OSU highlights that the two students will fill the newly created positions of Social Change Leadership Liaisons, working up to 20 hours a week with the school’s Diversity and Cultural Engagement office (DCE).

The DCE offers numerous annual social justice programs to students, including a longstanding Examining White Identity retreat, a Womxn of Color support group, an annual Examining Masculinities conference, and many others.

The new hires will assist with the DCE’s programming, and are expected to enroll in a two-credit course on “Foundations of Social Justice Leadership” as a condition of their employment. While the course is not yet listed on the school’s course catalogue, the job posting indicates that it is “forthcoming.”

According to the 2017-2018 OSU tuition schedule, the class would cost in-state students $490, while out-of-state students would need to pay $1,523. As the position pays $11.25 an hour, this means that in-state students would need to work 43.55 hours to pay for the required class, while out-of-state students would need to work 135.37 hours.

Successful applicants are also expected to have leadership experience, demonstrated sensitivity to various racial and ethnic groups, and the ability to articulate and share their knowledge on “issues of social justice” including “racism, sexism, cis-sexism, homophobia, classism,” and “ablism [sic].

With their skills in articulating social justice issues, the Social Justice Leadership Liaisons will be tasked with facilitating “dialogue on difference, power, and identity and then co-facilitate such dialogue in ways that strengthen community and encourage deep learning.”

Hey, those SJWs teaching the course need money for vegan food and lattes like everybody else!

What started as a cause, became a business, and then a scam.

Fortunately, there's little evidence that such campus proselytizing does any good, and if anything is counter productive:

A survey in the current edition of the Harvard Business Review based on over three decades’ worth of data from more than 800 U.S. businesses shows that most diversity programs aren’t actually increasing diversity. In fact, the data suggest that diversity programs like the ones seen all over America’s campuses are having exactly the opposite effect.

“Laboratory studies show that this kind of force-feeding can activate bias rather than stamp it out.”

The study’s authors, sociology professors Frank Dobbin of Harvard and Alexandra Kalev of Tel Aviv University, tracked the effect of diversity trainings on the actual growth of minority populations in businesses over a five-year period, but found that “after instituting required training for managers, companies saw no improvement in the proportion of white women, black men, and Hispanics in management, and the share of black women actually decreased by 9 percent, on average, while the ranks of Asian-American men and women shrank by 4 percent to 5 percent.”

The reason, the Review argues, is that managers, business executives, and employees in general are less likely to agree with a position if it is presented to them under mandatory circumstances. Indeed, the Review is not alone in its thinking, citing three other studies supporting the claim that compulsory diversity trainings are met with “resistance and anger” and that “many participants actually report more animosity toward other groups afterwards.”'

“Laboratory studies show that this kind of force-feeding can activate bias rather than stamp it out,” the study explains. “As social scientists have found, people often rebel against rules to assert their autonomy. Try to coerce me to do X, Y, or Z, and I’ll do the opposite just to prove that I’m my own person.”

Teens and young adults resist being force fed ideas? Who could have foreseen that?