Scottish universities have hit the headlines again for all the wrong reasons. This time it is St Andrews and news of the mandatory tests that can only be passed if you give politically and emotionally correct answers.
The tests cover a number of issues including consent, where you are taught about correct relationships; sustainability, where you are trained to be an environmentalist; and diversity, where you are instructed to acknowledge your unconscious bias.
As with much of this type of half-baked indoctrination training, you can get as many questions wrong as you like – just so long as you are prepared to do it again and again until you give the “correct” answers. They can be completed in about five minutes, and once you realise it is an indoctrination exercise it’s impossible to fail.
Some questions, however, may catch you out, like the one about equality, which, according to those who invented the diversity test, does not mean treating people the same but treating people differently, in a way that “is appropriate to their needs”.
Like the virtue signalling squeal that you must “Educate Yourself!”, this training has nothing to do with education. It is closer to moral education, a new type of etiquette where you must demonstrate an Orwellian form of right-think.
St Andrews has defensively said they are unaware of anyone who has failed. I suspect this is true. But once again it simply demonstrates that this is not about education. After all, what is the point of a university module if it is impossible to fail.
Of course, if someone decided that they were not prepared to be patronised in this way, St Andrews might find themselves in something of a dilemma. I must admit, I would suggest to any and all future students that they do just that or better still, refuse to take the test in the first place.
Somewhat comically, a spokesperson for the university has argued that someone “would have to take the questions deliberately and wholly out of context to argue they in any way restrict free speech”. I can only conclude that this individual has not read John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty or Voltaire’s Candide, where the idiocy of dogmatic thinking is exposed and ridiculed.
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Indeed, these enlightened heavyweights would no doubt mock St Andrews as an embarrassment of an institution and a danger to the spirit of free thought that is so important to the life of the academy and indeed to a free and democratic culture.
Not only is this not free speech, or thought, it is compelled speech, a form of knee-taking that is more akin to the religious dogma that Voltaire and Mill railed against than it is to critical and free thinking that you would expect to be the bread and butter of every university, let alone one as prestigious as St Andrews.
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I assume this university, which is filled with millionaire Americans well versed in parading their victimhood, have indeed pushed for these group-think tests. But since when did we base our university education on the demands of students? This denial of responsibility is truly pathetic.
At the end of this latest ridiculous test, students were asked to answer the following, “Acknowledging your personal guilt is a useful starting point in overcoming unconscious bias”: In case you haven’t got it yet, the correct answer is Yes!
In the end, it appears that not only do St Andrews students have to think correctly, they have to express their gratitude for the process as well. Truly shameful.
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