Didn't the twitter chalkening reach these very special snowflakes at WWU?

The disciplinary committee idea is creepy on its face for sure. That said, WWU and every other university in the country have pretty sorry track records in terms of how they address sexual violence against women and speech acts or group functions that explicitly and implicitly intimidate non-White students. So outside a panel of 15 SJW's laying down the law, there still needs to be some sort of existential threat against the fuckhead bros that have enjoyed virtual impunity on campuses for the last, say, 100 years.

That a 19 or 20 year old would have "significant voting power" over faculty hiring doesn't sound so great as well (sounds like a desire to affirm their own assumptions). I'm down with Paulo Freire, but I still respect wisdom, and finding a prof that knows how to lecture and bring to bear that wisdom is a joy, whether I agree with their implicit politics. The chasm between someone in their 30s who suffered major depression in grad school and read a vast amount of material... and an undergraduate who reads Twittter... is pretty vast.

That said, almost every discipline in contemporary academia has benefited from the critiques leveled by feminism, critical race theory, queer theory and the like. You can't trot out Whitewashed bullshit anymore without sounding stupid, frankly (which is probably why they don't invite Econ majors).

So, though these demands sound young and in part off the hook, maybe there are real reasons why those demands are being presented.

Students should not have any say in faculty personnel decisions, especially if they have anything to do with politics or speech. If that was the case, a lot of good academics would have been jettisoned by the Reagan Youth of my era. And according to this woman, the definition of micro-aggression (a concept I understand in the abstract) is just about anything the recipient wants it to be, including otherwise innocuous questions about where someone is from.

As for the "Committee for Social Transformation", that is just dumb. How are those students selected? What are they paid? What is the process for appeal, or are they just the final arbiter of what is acceptable? If so, are they immune from litigation?

And what exactly would one do with a degree in "Power and Liberation"? Yes, college is a time of discovery, blah blah blah, but state colleges also have a mission to prepare students for careers. What sort of career path would that give one? Academia, where they would be constantly on eggshells about what the current crop of students find acceptable?

Finally, she talks about the Ethnic Studies department (or was it a college?) being dismantled. About the only reason a university closes a department/college is because no one is enrolling in the program.

The fundamental tension that came up in Aisha's interview was at the end: minority students wanting more power.

I am 100% behind empowering more minority and marginalized students on and off campus. What I am concerned about is this particular group's desire to make it their group deciding how a sub-unit of the university is run. Shared governance among faculty, staff, and students emerged from the 60s and 70s. It has been undercut since. But it's still an important value. What this Committee is proposing isn't shared governance: it's governance by them alone. They're unelected and undemocratic. And they would have to contend with the fact that this is all still within a state university, which is accountable to the public through its governor-appointed board of regents.

There are some good ideas lurking behind some really bad ones that Aisha and her committee are pushing. Instead, they are pushing a structure that is fundamentally about giving a whole lot of power to one select group (with no voting or accountability for that group's members) and subsequently removing power from other players (faculty, the administration, other students not in their group), who actually do have accountability mechanisms for their own jobs.

The other thing that bugged me is that she was completely unprepared to substantiate her claims of offensive speech in class. Which professors are saying n_____? She doesn't say. What exactly about which specific anthropology class was offensive? If it's the overall narrative of some sub-parts of anthropology, wouldn't a more attainable and effective solution be a curriculum change to include alternative approaches? Why should an anthropology professor who has been trained in only one way and only taught in one way for decades be fired by a committee of students rather than offered by a group of faculty, staff, and students a new approach to include in her courses? If this committee wants to succeed and actually be taken seriously, they should work harder at substantiating their claims very specifically.

@4 - WWU was one of the first universities (though it was called a 'College' at that point) to create an Ethnic Studies curriculum in the early 1970's. The WWU catalog does not list that major, nor does Fairhaven. It was scrapped apparently. I will relisten to this podcast, but maybe someone in Slog Land has the backstory - I'd like to know what precipitated its' demise.

The whole purpose of this committee seems to smack of thought control. I also believe that such a a committee would end up operation on a make up the rules as you go along basis. This is how a reign of terror begins.

The "plan" that these students is proposing is batshit insane and I state this as a PoC. If this group wants to be at all taken serious in the future, they need to get a spokesperson who can do more than stumble through a nonsensical word salad and present a point of view that seems to amount than butthurt, snowflakey as fuck, and the kind of twee self-absorption that 19 year olds with no grip on actual adulthood (or reality) can vomit up.