Harvard’s Kennedy School Makes White Privilege Class Mandatory for Incoming Students

14 May, 2014 by Cassy Fiano

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There’s a good reason that a college degree has become less and less valuable over the years: universities are charging more and more exorbitant tuition fees while offering complete jokes of classes. Today’s higher education consists of studying porn, Miley Cyrus, and now at Harvard, how to check your privilege.

The wonks in training at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government will soon be subjected to a new and touchy-feely line of inquiry: Checking Your Privilege 101. In response to growing demand from student activists, administrators committed Friday to adding a class in power and privilege to its orientation program for incoming first-year students.

“We’re at one of the most powerful institutions in the world, yet we never critically examine power and privilege and what it means to have access to this power,” says Reetu Mody, a first-year masters student in public policy and a campus activist. “We’re excited to have the administration on board for training all Harvard Kennedy School first years.”

Privilege – a catchall term for the perks an individual enjoys in society because of his race, gender, or class – has been used to analyze social inequality for decades. It’s also enjoying something of a moment, thanks to social-justice bloggers and their critics, like Princeton freshman Tal Fortgang. In a viral article for the conservative Princeton Tory, Fortgang wrote that calls to “check his privilege” – that is, to consider how his good fortune might impair his ability to empathize with others in any given debate – “threaten to strike down opinions without regard for their merits” and “solely on the basis of the person that voiced them.” Being told to check his privilege is not overt reverse racism, Fortgang admitted, but it “toes the line.”

It doesn’t toe the line, it is reverse racism, and it’s being peddled by an institution that is supposed to broaden its students minds, not close them. But instead of actually educate their students, Harvard evidently prefers to trap them in a perpetual victim mentality, putting everyone into boxes and teaching them that their skin color matters far more than anything they have beneath it.

Also see: Politically Correct Fairy Tales