Students at the University of Notre Dame are calling for “white authors” to be removed from the university curriculum in order to “decolonize” the university.
According to the student activists, “diversifying the canon” by removing white men “helps eliminate the violence of only privileging white scholarship.”
According to a report by The College Fix, a student activist group at the University of Notre Dame called “End Hate at ND” is demanding that the university drastically rewrite course curriculum in order to better represent the world as they see it.
The student activist group published a list of demands to their Instagram page. The students demanded that the curriculum be revised so that the works of authors who are “of Color, Indigenous, Black, queer, or not male” account for at least 50 percent of required readings.
Cultural competence is key in building empathy for marginalized folks. No course or program of study should have a view limited to white, western, and/or male voices. We demand that people who are of Color, Indigenous, Black, queer, or not male are represented in the authorship of at least half course and major required readings. Diversifying the canon helps eliminate the violence of only privileging white scholarship. Everyone should see themselves represented in coursework.
Breitbart report: The students are also protesting against rules that prevent students of the opposite sex from spending the night in each other’s dorm room. The practice, which is called “parietals,” forces students to end visits with students of the opposite sex at midnight on weeknights and 2:00 a.m. on weekends. Student protesters contend that the practice enforces a sense of “heteronormativity” that propagates “homophobia” on campus.
Patrick Reilly of the National Catholic Register published a column on the fight against “parietals” at Notre Dame on Friday. Reilly makes the case that ending this tradition of limiting opposite-sex visitation time would be a “disaster.”
“Even more, Notre Dame should consider further limiting nighttime visitation and insisting on open doors when someone of the opposite sex is present,” Reilly wrote. “Even better, the university would provide sufficient meeting spaces for students in other buildings and end opposite-sex visitation to dorm rooms altogether.”