ASU continues DEI Humanities

Looking over my email today, I saw one from ASU’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences promoting a new website for ASU Humanities. “That will be wonderful!” I thought. A whole website dedicated to the pursuit of wisdom and leading a virtuous life.

I was immediately corrected. The description begins with a dean talking about how wonderful the humanities are and why they are needed. Agreed. But then the dean tells us how the humanities can be applied to our world today. And how is that?

DEI and racial identity politics.

The two programs highlighted were RaceB4Race. This is a program that says, “If you limit talking about DEI to the last three hundred years, you need to go back even further. Shakespeare? DEI. Renaissance? DEI. Middle Ages? DEI.” It’s all race, all the time at ASU Humanities.

Next up, their Latinx Humanities program. More focus on racial identity. We know that this is a selective focus. The idea is that we don’t need to study “the whiteness”—it doesn’t matter or has been studied ad nauseam. We must instead study the other political identity groups. And more specifically, we need to study how they were marginalized and oppressed.

ASU Humanities still holds out hope that these will translate into the job market. It promises its potential majors that businesses are climbing over each other to hire a graduate who can explain DEI in Shakespeare. I have my doubts.

But apart from the job market, there is the opportunity cost. By inserting DEI curriculum into everything, ASU Humanities is taking away the opportunity for these students to learn about wisdom and virtue. By insisting on Rousseau’s “anything I do wrong is because of my environment and private property” philosophy, they not only teach the student a false philosophy but prevent them from learning the truth.

They believe what is false and approve of those who do the same.