University event aims to combat ‘Christian Privilege’

George Washington University diversity workshop to be held four days after Easter

Just four days after Easter, George Washington University will host a training session for students and faculty that teaches that Christians — especially white ones — “receive unmerited perks from institutions and systems all across our country.”

The April 5 diversity workshop is titled “Christian Privilege: But Our Founding Fathers Were All Christian, Right?!”

Hosted by the university’s Multicultural Student Services Center, the event will teach that Christians enjoy a privileged, easier life than their non-Christian counterparts, and that Christians possess “built-in advantages” today, according to its online description.

The workshop will also discuss how Christians receive “unmerited perks from institutions and systems all across our country.”

The “Christian Privilege” workshop is one of 15 “free training opportunities” offered through the center to “equip students and staff with the necessary skills to promote diversity and inclusion in the different environments,” according to its website.

Other workshops offered through the center focus on “heteroesexual privilege,” “cisgender privilege,” “abled-bodied privilege,” “socio-economic privilege,” “unconscious bias,” and more.

Efforts by The College Fix to reach a campus spokesperson, the multicultural center and the host of the Christian privilege workshop were to no avail Monday afternoon.

The Christian privilege event aims to make people aware of the privileges that Christians have and “what is meant by privilege overall and white privilege specifically,” the event description states. Furthermore, the event will try to educate those of the “role of denial when it comes to white privilege” and the difference between “equality and equity.”

By the end of the training, the organizers want participants to be able to name “at least three examples of Christian privilege” and “at least three ways to be an ally with a non-Christian person,” the website states.

Organizers also want the participants to be able to describe words like: “privilege, Christian privilege, denial, quality, equity, Christianity, bias, unconscious bias, micro-aggression, ally,” the website states.

The workshop will last 90 minutes and will feature a PowerPoint presentation and Q&A.

It will be hosted by Timothy Kane, the interim associate director for inclusion initiatives at George Washington University, according to his biography page. As interim associate director, Kane works to expand the diversity and inclusion efforts at GWU, specifically the LGBT community. He did not respond Monday to a request for comment.

Kane, who has a master’s degree in divinity and theology, is “dedicated to ensuring that all types of diversity at GW are celebrated and meant to feel included in campus culture and student life.” Being a “proud gay member of the LGBT community” at the university, he hopes to “promote this kind of solidarity amongst the LGBT community, and work towards celebrating the richness of diversity here at GW,” his online bio states.

Kane also hosts the “heterosexual privilege,” “cisgender privilege,” “abled-body privilege,” and “socioeconomic privilege” workshops. White privilege is a specific focus in each of these training sessions, according to the multicultural center’s website.

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No men allowed: UVM hosts women-only debate championship

The first rule of a North American debate tournament to be held in Vermont this weekend: No men allowed.

Some 150 debaters from 18 schools across the U.S. and Canada will compete in the special tournament, which is designed to be a safe space for women who complain of bias when they debate against men.

Although some men will be allowed to serve as judges, organizers say the tournament at the University of Vermont offers women a chance to hone their speaking and arguing skills and gain confidence and friends without being subject to sexism.

"There is also a lot of sexual predation that happens in the debate community," said UVM debate director Helen Morgan-Parmett. "The tournament, I think, provides a safe space where people feel they are debating other women, and their bodies aren't necessarily on display."

College debating is one of the few intercollegiate competitive activities in which women and men compete directly against one another. While some women do win, the debaters say they have to be that much better than men to overcome bias on the part of many judges. And they point to statistics that show they are less likely to reach the top echelons of the activity.

"Like with a lot of collegiate activities, debate has a tendency to be male-dominated," said UVM sophomore debater Miranda Zigler, of Boston.

The UVM event will be run using the British Parliamentary debating style, in which participants learn the topic they will be debating only 15 minutes before the competition begins. More traditional college debate, known as policy debate, uses a set topic for the entire season and the debaters must be ready to argue for or against. Both formats are judged by a panel.

Collegiate debate began to grow after World War II, and for the first decade or so men and women debated separately. That began to change in the late 1950s and early 1960s but still few women signed up, said Dallas Perkins, the former debate coach at Harvard University and now the spokesman for the National Debate Tournament, held earlier this month in Wichita, Kansas.

Women have broken through to the top ranks: Two of the final four debaters at the national tournament this month were women.

Georgetown debate director Mikaela Malsin whose team lost in the finals this year and coached one of the women said she hadn't heard of the women's debate tournament. She said college debate is prone to the same sexism and misogyny that pervades American culture, and that far more men than women compete.

"We want it to be more inclusive and more accessible on its own terms rather than retreating or creating a separate space," Malsin said. "I certainly think there is value to that kind of thing, but, like I said, I don't think it would catch on quite as much in the policy world for the reason that I think women and people of color primarily want to keep pushing back and continue to elevate or improve the activity from within."

What has evolved into the North American Women's and Gender Minorities Debate Championship being held in Burlington this weekend began in Canada in the 1990s. It disappeared for several years but was revived in 2009, said Sarah Sahagian, the program director for the nonprofit group Speech and Debate Canada.

"I think even when I was a participant there were women who did well, there were women who won things, but on average, the average female debater did not do as well. Disproportionately, male debaters did better," she said.

The first women's debate championship in the United States was held at UVM in 2015. The last two years it was back in Canada. Organizers now hope it can remain an annual event, alternating between the two countries.

The women at UVM recognize the women-only tournament can make them targets of people who feel they are asking for special treatment, but say it's good to raise awareness of the issue.

"I think there is just no bad publicity," said UVM debate coach Stela Braje, "especially if you're trying to make a point."

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Australia: Universities need charters of intellectual freedom

The latest politically correct madness at the University of Sydney — gender, race, sexuality, and class background quotas at the nation’s oldest debating club — is another demonstration of the extent to which ‘Unlearn U’ has mainlined postmodern identity politics.

It isn’t just the violation of core liberal principles of merit, equality of opportunity, and respect for the individual that is of concern — despite later day converts to the diversity agenda dismissing the importance of such ‘philosophical beliefs’.

What is also at stake are the foundational freedoms of speech and thought which universities ought to uphold as bastions of civil debate, rational discussion, and intellectual freedom.

Underpinning identity politics is an ideological agenda that seeks to shape, set and enforce the boundaries of acceptable, as opposed to so-called offensive ‘racist, patriarchial or homophobic or transphobic’ thought and speech.

This is creating a hostile and intolerant intellectual environment for students with the ‘wrong identity’: witness the Student Union-led a counter protest that took violent direct action to ‘unlearn’ conservative students who supported traditional marriage at Sydney University during last year’s marriage equality plebiscite campaign.

Australian universities are highly likely to follow the US path towards a full-blown campus free-speech crisis unless intellectual freedom is properly protected.

This should be the responsibility of university governors. But greater external accountability may be required, given the propensity of modern administrators to indulge in identity politics and view their mission as making universities less “old, white, male”.

Perhaps it is time to investigate requiring universites to sign up and comply with —  as a condition of taxpayer funding — a  charter of intellectual freedom, which could be based on the University of Chicago’s Stone Committee Report of 2015 on freedom of thought and expression at the university

Because the University is committed to free and open inquiry in all matters, it guarantees all members of the University community the broadest possible latitude to speak, write, listen, challenge, and learn.

These words would serve as worthy credo for all Australian universities — if they are to remain worthy of that name.

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