It isn't just us normal working or retired folks who view America's colleges and universities as problematic. The French do, too. And reported in the NYTimes of all places.
Read the rest at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/woke-american-ideas-are-a-threat-french-leaders-say/ar-BB1dwN0q?li=BBnb7KzQuote:
PARIS The threat is said to be existential. It fuels secessionism. Gnaws at national unity. Abets Islamism. Attacks France's intellectual and cultural heritage.
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The threat? "Certain social science theories entirely imported from the United States,'' said President Emmanuel Macron.
French politicians, high-profile intellectuals and journalists are warning that progressive American ideas specifically on race, gender, post-colonialism are undermining their society. "There's a battle to wage against an intellectual matrix from American universities,'' warned Mr. Macron's education minister.
Emboldened by these comments, prominent intellectuals have banded together against what they regard as contamination by the out-of-control woke leftism of American campuses and its attendant cancel culture.
Pitted against them is a younger, more diverse guard that considers these theories as tools to understanding the willful blind spots of an increasingly diverse nation that still recoils at the mention of race, has yet to come to terms with its colonial past and often waves away the concerns of minorities as identity politics.
Disputes that would have otherwise attracted little attention are now blown up in the news and social media. The new director of the Paris Opera, who said on Monday he wants to diversify its staff and ban blackface, has been attacked by the far-right leader, Marine Le Pen, but also in Le Monde because, though German, he had worked in Toronto and had "soaked up American culture for 10 years."
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The publication this month of a book critical of racial studies by two veteran social scientists, Stphane Beaud and Grard Noiriel, fueled criticism from younger scholars and has received extensive news coverage. Mr. Noiriel has said that race had become a "bulldozer'' crushing other subjects, adding, in an email, that its academic research in France was questionable because race is not recognized by the government and merely "subjective data.''
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Some center-right lawmakers pressed for a parliamentary investigation into "ideological excesses'' at universities and singled out "guilty'' scholars on Twitter.
Mr. Macron who had shown little interest in these matters in the past but has been courting the right ahead of elections next year jumped in last June, when he blamed universities for encouraging the "ethnicization of the social question'' amounting to "breaking the republic in two.''
"I was pleasantly astonished,'' said Nathalie Heinich, a sociologist who last month helped create an organization against "decolonialism and identity politics.'' Made up of established figures, many retired, the group has issued warnings about American-inspired social theories in major publications like Le Point and Le Figaro....
“If you’re going to have crime it should at least be organized crime”
-Havelock Vetinari
-Havelock Vetinari
