The screeching throng on the right would have you believe that colleges and universities haven't changed since the days of the movie "PCU" more than 25 years ago, and that higher education for anyone my age and younger was an uphill battle against the "horrors of political correctness". The current yowling by the right about critical race theory is a new name for a battle that's been going on for all my adult life.
That's not to say that some instructors and professors aren't terrible people, as this week's Sunday Long Read details in the San Francisco Chronicle, the story of avowed racist teaching his students that Black and Hispanic students should be in college, and that they're all taking the place of more qualified Asian and white kids.
With one painful exception that she still thinks about today, Marisol Schowengerdt enjoyed her classes at Cal State East Bay.
She enrolled in 2014 at age 41, older than most students, but no one gave her a hard time. The university’s Hayward campus was an inviting, diverse place, as East Bay’s marketing stresses: 86% of undergraduates are non-white, and many are the first in their families to attend college. Even at the business school, where a stock ticker flashed market prices as students arrived to class, officials emphasized social justice.
“The ‘American Dream’ is the ideal that everyone living in the U.S. should have an equal opportunity to achieve success and prosperity,” reads a recent mission statement by East Bay’s College of Business and Economics. “We make the Dream possible for an exceptionally diverse student population.”
Schowengerdt is the daughter of an immigrant cherry farmer, a man born in Mexico who came to the U.S. in the mid-’60s and raised seven children. She had spent her 20s and 30s building a successful career in California real estate and finance. But she lacked a college degree and aimed to change that.
After two years at a junior college, she transferred to East Bay — part of Cal State, the largest four-year public university system in the country — and majored in economics. She liked almost all of her professors, she said, and they seemed to believe the stuff about the dream.
Then there was Gregory Christainsen.
A white man with salt-and-pepper hair, Christainsen was 60 at the time and had taught economics at East Bay since the 1980s. Schowengerdt enrolled in his public sector economics course, a requirement for her to graduate. The syllabus promised lessons in government finance and health insurance markets.
But to Schowengerdt’s surprise, she said, Christainsen spent hours of class time talking about which racial groups were smarter than others.
In one of the first lectures, Christainsen said Black and Hispanic people get involved in politics at lower rates than whites, Schowengerdt recalled. Then he showed a photo of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign staff in Chicago. Most staffers were white or Asian American. The photo, she said Christainsen told the class, demonstrated that even a Black man needs white people to get elected.
As the semester continued, she said, the professor lectured repeatedly about race and intelligence, insisting they are linked. He taught students that white people and those of Chinese heritage are smarter on average than Black and Hispanic groups; he said this was proved by gaps in average IQ scores between races.
Although scientists overwhelmingly attribute these gaps to societal factors like racism, poverty and cultural biases in the tests, Christainsen said the IQ disparities are inherent, rooted in genetics. He spoke with pride about his own family’s heritage: Telling students that his wife was Chinese, he called himself a “white tiger.”
For Schowengerdt, these lessons felt like bigotry, not teaching, and it was all the more upsetting, she said, whenever she swiveled her head in class: Most of the 25 or so students were non-white, and many were Black. She vented sometimes with a classmate in her study group, Alex Bly, one of the few white students in the course.
Originally from Texas, Bly, now 35, said she found the experience “surreal.” One day, she said, Christainsen gave students an article about how Jews run Hollywood. It struck her as a classic anti-Semitic trope, which “blew my mind,” she recalled. But it also seemed irrelevant: What did Jews in Hollywood have to do with public sector economics?
About halfway through the semester, around March 2014, Bly drafted a complaint about the class. She addressed it to Jed DeVaro, chair of the economics department. To protect herself from possible retaliation, Bly created an anonymous email account.
She hit send, then waited for the university to do something.
What followed of course was the controversy last year over Christainsen and his courses, and the somehow still-ongoing "debate" that Black and brown folk are genetically inferior to Asian and white folk. If anything, Cal State East Bay did nothing about this racist asshole for years, because dealing with him would have made the school a target of billionaire-funded right-wing garbage fires like Campus Reform, Turning Point USA, and the Young America's Foundation.
The funny thing about "political correctness" is that college campuses today are absolutely terrified of being correct about anything, especially in red states where higher education funding has been brutalized over the last 15 years. This story shows that even in blue states, I wouldn't count on college administrators to give a damn until they are forced to do so.
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