The Camel in the Tent
BYU Creates Office of Belonging
It was quite the week at Brigham Young University (BYU), the Provo, Utah school owned and operated by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The seeming cognitive dissonance alone was breathtaking.
At the school’s annual University Conference on Monday, August 23, Elder Jeffrey R. Holland of the Church’s Quorum of Twelve Apostles issued a strong, clear, and much-needed call to BYU faculty and staff to reset and ensure the school’s uniqueness and its focus on education…right after school president Kevin Worthen had announced the creation of a new Office of Belonging that, given its provenance, could quite possibly ensure that whatever is left of the school’s uniqueness and focus on traditional education will be lost to the haze of today’s beguiling woke, activist wonderland.
Later in the week, after seeing the strong reactions — both positive and negative — to Elder Holland’s remarks, President Worthen defended the Apostle and assured parents of incoming freshmen that BYU remains what it has always been — strong on the Church’s mission and delivering a sound education. And he declared that each student coming to the school is there for a reason and is loved and accepted accordingly.
Yet, the Office of Belonging announcement, and the creation of a new Vice President of Belonging position to sit on the President’s Council, leaves nagging questions for those who have followed the trend of such appointments in other institutions, be they corporations, universities, or K-12 school districts. The school’s new Statement on Belonging is laudable. But the Committee on Race, Equity and Belonging that proposed the new race-oriented VP level position clearly had something far more definitive and aggressive in mind. It could be argued — without disparaging the good president’s motives or judgment — that the camel whose nose was invited under the tent with the release of the Committee’s report in February 2021 is now being fully ushered in to roam free and confident inside the bivouac.
The crux of the concern is that people who occupy institutional positions of this nature elsewhere are never installed for mere optics or to be passive. In other organizations, they go by titles like “chief diversity officer”, or “vice president of diversity, equity, and inclusion”, etc. And, whatever the title, they almost always come with a deeply held set of beliefs that include the following:
- An abiding allegiance to Critical Race Theory (CRT) and the view that racism is everywhere and in every thing. It is their animating doctrine, foundation, and reason to exist. Yet, their belief is not centered just in scholarly ideas as some CRT apologists assert. What diversity officers always do is move their institutions “forward” with the implementation of CRT, or, in other words, the praxis of that destructive, segregationist “theory.” And there is literally no other framework out there for a vice president of belonging to latch onto (other than hewing to colorblind equality, which, whoa, has no place in the acrimonious, activist, anti-racist world that has spawned chief diversity officers). Which leads to three other critical, foundational beliefs…
- In the university setting, all white faculty, staff, and students are viewed and treated as irredeemable racists by virtue of their skin color. Further, anything they have achieved is chalked up solely to the “privilege” their skin color affords them — always at the expense of blacks and other minorities at the school — and not through anything they may have earned or worked for in their own individual lives. To the CRT enthusiast, their character no longer matters, nor does their work ethic or their capability. The only thing that matters is their skin color. And since it is white, they are viewed as racist. Which leads to the third belief…
- The institution is divided, in true Marxist fashion, into oppressors and oppressed. Everyone with a white skin is an oppressor. Everyone who is not white is the oppressed. And finally…
- All black and other minority students can only succeed if they are helped by white people. That is the nature of the oppressor/oppressed relationship…in order for a black person to gain something, a white person has to give up something. In other words, institutions that go down the CRT path adopt, by definition, the view that minority students are incapable of achievement on their own. (Which, ironically — to everyone except CRT devotees — is actually okay in the world of CRT, since achievement is a shield protecting white privilege and must be shed.) Thus, in the purported interest of eradicating racism, CRT accomplishes the implausible gymnastic contortion of being thoroughly racist toward…everybody!
Because of this set of beliefs — doctrines, really — outcomes of “vice president of belonging/chief diversity officer” initiatives often include variations of the following in real, non-theoretical life:
- Everything that is on display at the institution is seen through the lens of race. Accordingly, nothing is approved without chief diversity officers’ imprimatur because race is their domain. See how that works? Everything is done as the camel wishes, or the institution risks exclusion and derision. (In that vein, it is imaginable that BYU’s Vice President of Belonging could, in time, become stronger than even the university president and the board of trustees…and it might not even be close. The pace of change will not be important to the camel. His presence in the tent and his warm acceptance into his lead role in BYU life is all that matters.)
- A debilitating divide is created between white and non-white members of the institution’s community;
- Names of buildings are changed to avoid giving offense to favored minorities (and assorted statues, rocks, trees, and even automated soap dispensers are sometimes removed as well);
- Segregated safe spaces for minority members are created, exacerbating division;
- In a university setting, admission and graduation standards are reduced and/or bifurcated, and scholarship is diminished generally (you’ve seen the 2+2=5 argument, right; and note that, to the camel, there is no such thing as objective truth; science, grammar, math, medicine, history, and business are treated as constructs designed solely to preserve white supremacy; only personal “stories” matter, even if they contradict reality; and merit is just one more tool of white supremacy that must be abandoned);
- White faculty, staff, and students are required to complete ‘whiteness interruption’ classes to help them ‘identify their prejudices’ and ‘atone’ for their collective guilt, during which they are often segregated from non-whites, required to complete accusatory whiteness grids, confess to being white supremacists and oppressors, ‘cede their power’ to non-whites, and, literally, demonstrate self-loathing for having been born white;
- Accusations of on-campus racism are adjudicated by administrative fiat, with traditional due process rights denied the accused;
- Students are aggressively radicalized against US exceptionalism, founding constitutional principles, and capitalism, and in favor of Marxism (meaning that students entering school full of innocence, hope, and promise may well leave better prepared to march with Antifa than to serve as future captains of industry[1][2][3][4][5]). This is because CRT is nothing more than revolutionary racial Marxism, with race replacing economic class as the dividing line between the oppressors and the oppressed.
At this point you might be tempted to accuse me of being in error, or of exaggerating, or of harboring ill will toward BYU. On all counts, you would be wrong. Do your homework. You will find that when a university formalizes its response to the diversity/equity/inclusion gambit in the manner BYU has just chosen, the above are typically just a few of the common consequences. We don’t even have to guess because the record is ample and consistent throughout the institutional world.
So, yes, at the very least, I have concerns. I believe President Worthen to be exceptional in his office, and I don’t doubt his devotion to BYU and its broad community. But decisions have consequences. And a camel is a large, unwieldy animal. Will the university continue on the path, contrary to Elder Holland’s wishes, to becoming just another, run-of-the-mill activism-first, academics-last school, among — and indistinguishable from — hundreds of others? Will Woke University-Provo Campus[6] shed all pretense and open for business? Or will BYU find a way to be more welcoming and equal, while simultaneously growing stronger in its mission and maintaining high academic standards, without swallowing whole the demonic, ludicrous CRT elixir?
With the announcement of the new Office of Belonging, President Worthen and the President’s Council are now on the clock. How they coral the camel will have everything to do with BYU’s future place in academia and, more importantly, in the lives of the thousands upon thousands of future students who long, at present, to enter her hallowed halls.
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1 https://www.city-journal.org/critical-race-theory-portland-public-schools?wallit_nosession=1
2 https://nypost.com/2021/07/06/teachers-pledge-to-break-anti-critical-race-theory-laws/
3 https://www.lamag.com/citythinkblog/cecily-myart-cruz-teachers-union/
