Higher education has gone off the deep end in the United States with woke culture affecting every aspect of the lives of both students and faculty.
Boston University continued that trend recently when it gave mandatory Title IX training to its staff that include multiple choice questions, The Washington Examiner reported.
Some of the questions asked staff to affirm that it is appropriate to “intervene” if someone were to compliment a woman’s family or encourage her to have children.
The training included multiple-choice questions that had to be answered correctly in order to complete it. Some questions were empirical—”How often do you think people make false allegations?”—while others asked about the appropriate course of conduct in a given scenario. Faculty who did not complete the training would “not be eligible for merit-based salary increases,” the school said in a campus-wide email, with further penalties possible for “continued non-compliance.” Students who did not complete it would “be blocked from registering next semester,” according to the university’s website.
Several scenarios involved “bystander intervention,” the idea that onlookers should prevent harassment by inserting themselves into potentially inappropriate encounters. In one vignette, an Asian woman is told that her white husband is “good-looking” and that “half-Asian babies are the cutest.” Asked “what should you do,” students and faculty were forced to select “Intervene” to advance through the training. Even though the woman “smiled” at the compliment, the training explains, she still “might have felt uncomfortable” about comments relating to “her race, her husband’s appearance, or the prospect of having children” itself.
In another question students and faculty had to agree that false allegations are uncommon.
“You might be surprised to learn that false reports aren’t common, and frivolous claims are almost nonexistent,” the question said.
The answer “sometimes” was not acceptable in this scenario because, apparently, these people never heard of Jussie Smollett.
One study even discovered that as many as two-thirds of hate crime accusations are false, The Wall Street Journal reported.
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education said that the training violates the university’s own policies on free speech.
“BU makes clear commitments to free expression and academic freedom, and that includes the right to be free from compelled speech,” Aaron Terr, a program officer for FIRE, said.
The only way to complete the training is for students and faculty to “select the university’s preferred answers as their own,” he said.
“This is compelled speech and has no place at a university that promises its faculty expressive freedom,” he said.
The Free Beacon argued that such training “demonstrates how the antidiscrimination law can become a Trojan Horse for compelled speech. Universities frame such compulsion as a way of complying with Title IX and other civil rights statutes, even when it goes far beyond what the law requires.”
Boston University has become a haven for wokeness in recent times. The theater and playwrighting programs both include a requirement that, before performances, there must be a “land acknowledgment” whereas it must be stated that the performances are taking place on “the traditional unceded territory of the Massachusett Tribal Nation.”
In the training, several more scenarios are presented where the “correct” response is for someone to intervene even if no one has said they are offended or uncomfortable.
Under the guise of complying with the law Boston University, and other universities, are setting a standard for preferred behavior and coaching students and faculty to behave and act a certain way even if it is not what they want to do.
