The cost of a college education has skyrocketed. The price has increased 400% relative to inflation. Much of this money is spent to purchase useless degrees1, and the recipients have found themselves locked into sometimes six-figure student loan debt that they have no way of paying using the skills they were (not) taught at the college.
Exhibit 1 of this sort of useless academic pursuit is a course offered by Rebecca Journey called “The Problem of Whiteness2”. According to Fox News (I could not find the actual course description to link to) this is the course description.
"Critical race theorists have shown that whiteness has long functioned as an ‘unmarked’ racial category, saturating a default surround against which non-white or ‘not quite’ others appear as aberrant," the description said. "This saturation has had wide-ranging effects, coloring everything from the consolidation of wealth, power and property to the distribution of environmental health hazard. Yet in recent years, whiteness has resurfaced as a conspicuous problem within liberal political discourse."
Daniel Schmidt, a sophomore at the University of Chicago, shined a light on this particular course with the following tweet:
And the cockroaches went scurrying. Rebecca Journey wrote an opinion piece in the University of Chicago Paper named “The Chicago Maroon”. The only thing I could think of when I heard that name was this:
Her editorial is entitled: “The Problem of White Grievance: A Defense of Critical Inquiry”. “Defense of critical inquiry”! LOL! The title starts off with the implication that the problem with white people is that they are too sensitive. I’m going to have some fun and address the major points in the editorial one by one.
I would be remiss if I didn’t start off with the ridiculous “trigger warning” before the article begins:
Content Warning: This op-ed discusses or references racism, white supremacy, antisemitism, and threats of violence and sexual assault. It also contains screenshots of emails that reference these themes.
The editorial begins with:
On the morning of November 2, an automated email from the Office of Equal Opportunity Programs appeared in my UChicago inbox, nudging me to complete a training module on harassment prevention.
How much does it cost the university to have an “Office of Equal Opportunity Programs”, and how much does it prepare actual students to succeed in life?
As it happened, this email arrived sandwiched between 23 others urging me among other things to come to Jesus, go into hiding, and “delete myself.” I could appreciate the irony, but as the day unfolded the invective got uglier. A quick search revealed its origin: A UChicago undergraduate, whom I’ve never met, had apparently attacked my seminar on whiteness on Twitter the afternoon prior. In a lengthy thread, the student accused my course, which had just opened for registration in winter quarter, of exemplifying “anti-white hatred.” One tweet dissected a screenshot of my course description, as if it served as evidence of my bigotry, that he had “exposed.” Another offered over 30k followers a screenshot of my faculty page, including my university email and headshot. This is the face, the student implied, of institutionalized “anti-white” racism:
This undergraduate, Daniel Schmidt, had exposed the silliness that passes for academic study nowadays. Those he had exposed it to, had contacted this “teacher” and asked for more information about this enlightening course offering… wait… I’m kidding. They contacted her to roundly mock the course and the “teacher” with the temerity to teach it.
Full disclosure: I’m a member of the only minority group left in America that can be discriminated against and abused. A white, heterosexual, Christian male.
Contrary to the student’s proclaimed “victory,” my class was not in fact cancelled. I made the call to move it to spring quarter precisely because of his cyber harassment campaign, which placed a target on my body and therefore on my classroom.
Before the next “course offering” another push needs to be made to mock this course, which takes students’ hard earned money and provides them nothing of value in return.
In this discussion I want to pull focus on where it belongs: on the torrent of abuse this harassment campaign has incited. I won’t spend time here characterizing the 146 and counting taunts and threats to my body, safety, and psyche that have flooded my inbox since November 2. Read some of them for yourself in select screenshots published here. I want to ask instead how an institution avowedly committed to free expression has come to condone its weaponization. So let me begin with a thought experiment.
Free expression does not include conning impressionable students into taking a course which will offer them nothing to help them in life, and may actually hinder them. Now take a look at the “thought experiment”, and let me know if you got the same impression that I did.
Had the student reached out to me with concerns about my course, The Problem of Whiteness, I would have happily scheduled office hours to discuss them. During that meeting, I would have listened to his concerns and addressed them by elaborating far beyond the five sentences published in the course catalog. I would have clarified that the class is not about “anti-white hatred” or my personal “problem with white people.” Both of those statements are value judgments; judgements which get in the way of critical inquiry. I would have explained that critical inquiry involves the rigorous study of social problems—problems which exert a shaping force on history and society. Grappling with such problems and the questions that flow from them—even and especially sticky ones, like race—is essential to the pedagogical enterprise. (ed. Link to definition added)
I’ll take “Things that Would Never Have Happened” for $800, Alex!
This would not have happened because this woman would never have listened to Daniel’s concerns because she’s smarter. She has a PhD in Cultural Anthropology and she is right, and he is wrong. She might have appeared to listen while she was thinking of her next condescending retort, but there would have been no dialog there. There are a couple more paragraphs of the same which I cut out for brevity.
But this conversation never happened, because this student never reached out. He didn’t ask questions about my course description or request a copy of the syllabus. There was no thoughtful exchange of ideas during office hours. Clearly, this student is not interested in learning. As evidenced by his expertly packaged Twitter feed, he is interested in generating content for his MAGA media persona. In his bio, he positions himself as an amateur investigative reporter “exposing insanity” at the University of Chicago. White grievance—the notion that the true victims of institutionalized racism in the U.S. are white people—seems to be his main beat.
Of course Daniel didn’t reach out. He most likely figured (as I did) that it would not accomplish much. His subsequent response was much more effective. There are some ideas that should not be discussed because by doing so you grant them the legitimacy they don’t deserve. They need to be soundly mocked.
He looked at the title: “The Problem of Whiteness” and figured that since he was a white guy, and probably had whiteness (since he probably doesn’t embrace blackness) then he was a problem. I was curious about what “whiteness” was so I looked at what the Smithsonian Institute had to say about it:
Seems like behaviors that lead to success to me, but what do I know, I’m just a white guy without a PhD in some form of sociology.
All of this leads me to conclude that this student has not been acting in good faith; that is, as a pupil expressing sincere concerns about a course offering. Rather, he has acted as a cynical opportunist chasing likes and shares. For this reason, I will refer to him as such in the remainder of this essay.
No, honey, I would guess his main concern is to get your course shut down and if at all possible get you fired.
Because teaching fellows are junior scholars, we are institutionally precarious. To what extent this young opportunist understood this and saw me as an easy mark is for the reader to assess. What is knowable are the consequences of his actions (thus far).
You set yourself out there, sweetie. You used your free speech, he used his, and now you both will reap the consequences of your actions. You were taught in college that actions have consequences, right?
When the opportunist found my course description in the winter term schedule, he seized a chance to go viral on social media by stoking racial resentment. In the “EXCLUSIVE” Twitter thread in which he deputized an indignant mob to attack me via email, he crafted just enough plausible deniability to dodge a lawsuit. Yet his followers clearly understood what they were being invited to do (harass a professor). As their emails and comments below show, they also understood the subtext of racial grievance in play:
No, he pointed to what a clown-show the University of Chicago was operating, and pointed to your particular ring of the three-ring circus as evidence.
My definition of “useless” is a degree which cannot lead you to a career which will allow you to both live from day to day and pay off your student loan in a reasonable amount of time.
As an “academic” exercise, try putting any other race into the title, such as “The Problem of Blackness” or “The Problem of Jewishness” or “The Problem of Indigenousness”.