Jerry Coyne: Williams College Indoctrinates Its Students

CHICAGO, IL - Over at Jerry Coyne's website, Why Evolution is True, we can read an erudite evaluation of the degree to which Williams College has ceased functioning as a liberal arts college and instead become something of a brainwashing facility. In this instance, Coyne tears into the school's absurdly biased insistence that students fulfill a requirement by taking at least one course concentrating on “Difference, Power, and Equity.” There is a pdf of the DPE courses here.

Coyne remarks: "Granted, this is only one requirement, and to fulfill it students need take only a single course. But those courses are almost all about oppression narratives, and all would appeal to the Authoritarian Left. To my mind, they’re intended, as is the requirement, not to convey knowledge or to get students to question things critically—I haven’t found a single course that takes a conservative point of view—but to inculcate students with an Authoritarian Leftist attitude in order to get the students to become agents of change. That means agents who will enact the social changes that their professors and administrators want. In other words, puppets of social change."

The irony is that Coyne is a liberal. He thinking that he is probably in agreement with what Williams College administrator want to see for the future. Nevertheless, he asks: "...should a college curriculum be designed to make the students behave in ways the administration wants them to behave?"

Previously, Coyne criticized efforts by the student activists in CARE Now who sought to prevent the adoption of the Chicago Principles at Williams College.