SJSU prof: New university prez pushing anti-intellectual “social justice re-education” agenda

When repatriation activists took offense to Dr. Elizabeth Weiss' tweet in 2021, the San Jose State professor was punished and publicly lambasted by her university. Here, Weiss analyzes SJSU president Teniente-Matson's troubling plan to shift objectives towards “inclusion” and combating “discrimination”—i.e., unwanted free thought. From the Martin Center.

Since 2004, San José State University (SJSU) has changed presidents nine times. Although each of these university heads was probably politically correct, the new president, Dr. Cynthia Teniente-Matson, is far more ideologically driven and intends to march us all, lockstep, into a future of diversity, equity, and inclusion. This shift includes mandatory language and behaviors that together abandon the previous mission of SJSU.

Teniente-Matson began her efforts by engaging in a “strategic recalibration” of the university’s mission statement, a process that involved adding vision and value statements. She has argued that the three new statements in question—mission, vision, and values—must unify the university and provide the “fundamentals of our purpose.”

The university’s DEI shift includes mandatory language and behaviors that together abandon the previous mission of SJSU. In part, this action has been driven by the outcome of SJSU’s latest WASC (Western Association of Schools and Colleges) accreditation report, which came out in July 2022. The report flagged issues having to do with campus climate, including faculty fears concerning retaliatory action. These problems are likely associated with the criminal actions of former director of sports medicine Scott Shaw, who sexually abused dozens of female student athletes; retaliatory actions by former director of athletics Marie Tuite against whistleblower coach Sage Hopkins; and inaction by former president Mary Papazian, which allowed Shaw to continue his abuse and protected Tuite against allegations of retaliation. Papazian resigned after this scandal, which started before her arrival, spanned more than a decade, and ended with an FBI investigation and Shaw’s arrest.

Surprisingly, this sex-abuse scandal was not even hinted at during Teniente-Matson’s April 24, 2023, campus summit to discuss the university climate and a reworking of its mission, vision, and values. Rather, Teniente-Matson decided to point the finger of blame elsewhere (at the 14:31 mark of the summit video):

You might be wondering why this is important. Well, let me share with you a quick side note. […] Like many places, we have challenges. Our campus has a history of narratives that might be based in historical inequities and discrimination, and from time to time these actions lead to hurtful and dismissive behaviors and the sense that some people feel unseen and unheard.

While Teniente-Matson was saying these words, she showed a slide with three images that presumably illustrated the “inequities and discrimination” in question. The first photograph was of an older, white, formally-dressed, bearded male looking as if he is about to shout. The third was of the events that inspired SJSU’s “Victory Salute (Olympic Black Power)” statue. Most interestingly, the middle image was of a white female sitting at a desk with a skeleton to her left, an anatomical model to her right, and a skull in front of her. I can only assume that this center picture was a thinly veiled attempt to blame the poor campus climate on a similar photograph of me holding a skull in a 2021 tweet.

This article originally appeared in the Martin Center. Read the whole thing here.

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