We agree! Hypocrisy is the worst . . .

An insightful faculty meeting

I’d like to say thank you. Why? Because I actually had an insightful faculty meeting today. It started with a discussion about Native American land acknowledgments. One of the Native American professors in the room made the point that I’ve made in previous posts. He said that words don’t matter. What matters is actions. That’s exactly right. If someone really believes their house is on stolen land, then they should give that house back. Any one of these professors pushing land acknowledgments on the rest of us is free to do just that. But what happens instead is they will read a statement, and then (at most) they might give a tiny amount of their time or money to charity. If their sincere belief is that they live on stolen land, then that’s just not enough.

I’ve asked if we can rotate which cause we talk about instead of only talking about the same cause every time at the beginning of our meetings. I was told “no.” The Native American land acknowledgment is the only cause we will talk about at the beginning of our meetings. It seems to me that either we don’t privilege any specific cause or we allow multiple different causes and perspectives the same amount of time. But this is what happens when people take power. They complain about other people misusing their power, but when they get power, they impose their beliefs on everyone else.

So I’ll ask again here on the Substack. If we need to spend the beginning of every faculty meeting talking about a political cause, then let’s rotate which political causes we talk about. Perhaps each professor gets to talk about a political cause that is important to them at the beginning of the meeting. Or, let’s focus on the school business and not our political opinions.