On Saturday I wrote about ‘wokeness’ run amok at my undergrad alma mater, San Jose State University. Today we get a postscript with, for once, a happy ending. The Campus Fix writes the embattled anthropology prof has negotiated a decent settlement of her dilemma.
Weiss, who had been effectively canceled by her department for ardently supporting the studying of Native American remains, will retire at the end of the 2023-24 school year with full retirement benefits and emeritus status as part of the agreement.
The anthropologist has accepted a position as an inaugural faculty fellow with the nonpartisan Heterodox Academy’s new Center for Academic Pluralism, which seeks to produce scholarship that supports intellectual and viewpoint diversity unencumbered by political correctness on campus.
Weiss is also poised to become a board member with the National Association of Scholars, which supports intellectual diversity and academic freedom.
Of her soon-to-be former employer, Weiss has written this ‘epitaph.’
In the mission, vision, and values statements, social-justice terms such as “equity,” “belonging,” “diversity,” and “inclusion” appear multiple times. Nowhere do we find the words “freedom,” “truth,” “skills,” or “knowledge.” This is the future SJSU is building.
When I’m being charitable, I view what she documents as the desperate efforts of administrators to keep the campus operating in a state with rapidly declining numbers of that subset of young people who have historically found benefit in a college education. However I rarely feel charitable toward college administrators, it's a role I endured for two years before happily resuming my professorial career.
