Strewth it's Meghan again

Sitting here on a Sunday evening in front of the fire I happened to peruse an interesting piece by Doug Stokes on decolonizing the curriculum and what seems to be the unstoppable decline of the West through self-flagellating stupidity. Fair enough but blow me - the Duchess of Cliché manages another appearance. Oh well - it's worth reading in spite of that  - 

The campaign by left-wing student protestors and some faculty to force Western universities to “decolonize the curriculum” has been surprisingly successful. A movement that started at the University of Cape Town in 2015, with the demand that the city’s university remove its statue of Cecil Rhodes—“Rhodes Must Fall”—quickly made its way to the U.K., with student activists calling for his statue at Oriel College, Oxford to be taken down. At its heart, the movement seeks to challenge what it characterizes as the dominance of the Western canon in the humanities and social sciences, as well as the under-representation of women and minorities in academia. It also, like many movements inspired by critical theory, maintains that a person’s beliefs and worldview are largely determined by their skin color, sexual orientation and gender.

To those of us on the outside, academia has begun to resemble a vast asylum where middle class loons seek to outdo each other in rhetorical absurdities far, far removed from real life. Far enough for Meghan to endorse it at any rate.

In a bizarre turn of events, this movement now enjoys the endorsement of the British Royal Family. In February 2019, on a visit to a London University, the Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle, lent her weight to the movement, having had her eyes opened by a presentation about the relatively small number of Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) staff within the U.K. higher education sector...

When presented with evidence about the lack of black and female professors in British universities she reportedly exclaimed, “Oh my God!” One of the organizers, Meera Sabaratnam, said it was “wonderful to see the Duchess standing up for female equality” as many “of the issues around racial equality are similar and it is great to see her embrace this. Change is long overdue.”

Yes - "Oh my God" is exactly what she would say. Forget the quality, forget reality, just emote over the academic tractor stats. The trouble is, the emoting really is based on tractor stats as Mr Stokes demonstrates.

 At Professorial level (the data that shocked the Duchess the most), the report says that among “U.K. academics, the difference in proportions between white professors (11.2%) and BME professors (9.7 percent) was small at 1.5 percentage points.” What the data does show is, in fact, the incredible diversity and richness of faculty throughout U.K. academic institutions, one of the reasons they remain so attractive to some of the world’s best and brightest. This is something to be celebrated and is evidence of the meritocratic hiring practices of our higher education institutions, one of the reasons the U.K. boasts four of the world’s top 10 universities.

  

It's depressing but the whole piece is well worth reading. What one should make of it I'm not sure. In one sense it's just another tale of political correctness dragging us into the mire. On the other hand? On the other hand the meek won't inherit the earth.