by WILL FOLKS
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Clemson University is facing some serious financial headwinds – as well as pressure of a more literal sort. But it seems the Upstate South Carolina institution of higher learning – which has come under fire in recent years for its left-leaning ideological bent – isn’t letting any of that detract from its commitment to taxpayer-subsidized indoctrination.
As students returned to campus last month for the fall semester, one course on early childhood literacy taught by Dr. Heather Dunham veered far afield from its ostensible objective of preparing future teachers to help kids read.
The syllabus for Dunham’s class – entitled ‘Teaching Reading in the Early Grades‘ – did not commence with an overview of its K-3 literacy content, but rather kicked off with a definitionally divisive “land acknowledgement” statement ripped from the pages of a now-defunct website entitled Decolonize Clemson.
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RELATED | CLEMSON’S DAM DRAMA
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The statement read as follows…
We acknowledge that the main campus of Clemson University occupies the traditional and ancestral land of the Cherokee People. Clemson’s main campus is built on land seized through US military and diplomatic incursions culminating in the Treaty of Dewitt’s Corner in 1777. This is also land on which people enslaved by the Pickens, Clemson, and Calhoun families lived and worked, and that was transformed into the campus of Clemson University through convict labor.
We make this acknowledgement to remember the histories of violence that anticipate our gathering here, to recognize Indigenous and Black claims to life and land, and to recenter those claims as we commit to better ways of caring for each other and for this land. Learn more at Decolonize Clemson.
Decolonize Clemson is no longer online, but an archived version of the website contained language expanding on this declaration – noting “the ongoing violent exploitation of land, life and labor that particularly impacts indigenous and Black (emphasis original) people.”
Wait… ongoing?
Didn’t Ben Folds clear all this nonsense up years ago?
The statement further advocated on behalf of “education and action toward decolonization,” urging students at Clemson to “confront the ways we have been complicit with colonialism, and to recommit to decolonial thought and practice.”
So… what does any of this have to do with teaching kindergarteners and elementary school children to read?
Good question…
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“We also insist that land acknowledgments at Clemson recognize the lived experience of enslaved people, people conscripted to convict labor, and racialized people subjected to the ongoing material and ontological violences of white supremacy,” the statement continued.
Again… ongoing?
“In addition, we understand land acknowledgments as opportunities to think again about what land is and what it means beyond colonial frameworks like the university, the state, the nation,” the statement added. “And further to understand that, via the land grant system and the global project of U.S. occupation, in order for Clemson to exist, people and ecosystems have been displaced across the Americas and the world.”
According to her Clemson webpage, Dunham’s research and teaching focuses on “preparing preservice teachers to enact culturally sustaining literacy practices in classroom spaces, as well as working and learning with in-service teachers to engage critically with questions of language, identity, and equity in education.”
Culturally sustaining literary practices? Equity in education?
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Dunham was praised last August by the school as an “innovator” – a professor who “shapes new opportunities for students” and helps them explore “practical strategies for engaging young readers.”
“I work to build a classroom culture where everyone feels encouraged to share their ideas and take risks,” Durham said, adding by way of a backhanded compliment that she was “excited by the opportunities to do meaningful work in this part of the country, where there’s a real need for innovation in education.”
Conservatives in state government were less than thrilled by Clemson’s latest foray into the culture wars.
“South Carolina’s children need teachers who are confident in phonics, reading, writing, and comprehension,” state representative April Cromer said. “That should be the focus of a K–3 reading course, not political or ideological activism.
“Our future teachers deserve better,” Cromer added. “Our children deserve better. And Clemson owes South Carolina taxpayers an explanation.”
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR…
Will Folks is the founding editor of the news outlet you are currently reading. Prior to founding FITSNews, he served as press secretary to the governor of South Carolina. He lives in the Midlands region of the state with his wife and eight children.
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5 comments
I personally think it’s great when we get these kooky hypocritical woke types who will just come out and tell the world what they really believe. For decades in this State we had to deal with smarmy, mealy-mouthed stealth lefties in the educrat space who used certain passive aggressive code-speak and insider shibboleths to make their little jabs at capitalism, Christianity, and conservative values and push Democrat education indoctrination. The RINOs would never take a real look at what they truly were and shied away from directly engaging them because they didn’t want to be criticized for “attacking educators.” And the woke left just exploited the college tenure system to the hilt, while playing a gatekeeper function to keep the conservatives from ever getting onto the faculty (and thus also having the benefit of tenure.) They did their little discrimination DEI scams in college and admissions and scholarship grants largely under the radar for years. All this to build a citadel of entrenched leftism – and now that they have had it for a long time, they think nothing of hoisting this cultural marxism bullshit onto our kids. This professor probably has tenure, and is thus untouchable for this tripe, but if she doesn’t, she should be cut loose. But secondly, via social media and AI assisted research, one can probably easily find all her ideological allies in the nonprofit sector and in the state dept of education – and that is where the real counterstrike can happen, to defund those nonprofits and push out those aligned bureaucrats. Ellen Weaver, I’m looking at you.
At the risk of receiving verbal violence, which Jesus Christ equated with murder (if you read your Bible), I am morally compelled to share with you three truths and pray that you will consider them:
First truth: TRUE Christianity is THE OPPOSITE of Capitalism, at least in the latter’s covetous, consumeristic, conniving form. Jesus Christ said the love of money is the root of all evils AND He Turned over the tables of the money-changers in the Temple. Several of the Holy Commandments (or a unified one depending on which Bible Book you consult) say “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s ….” What is the “free market” if not advertising what your richer neighbor has (including his beautiful wife) and prodding you to want some of it or to have your wife look like his?
Capitalism is hoarding. But the New Testament says he who has two attires should give one of them to an attire-less. The Old Testament says to not glean the corners of your field but to leave them for the poor and for the foreigner.
Choose Capitalism if you want; but PLEASE do not advocate Capitalism as Christianity.
Second truth: The world is not divided into rightists and leftists, or between conservatives and wokists; it is divided between those who do real work (intellectual or physical) and those who do, or want to, earn money JUST TALKING. Among the former, you rarely find “conservative farmers” versus “woke farmers.” They all farm the land and tend to herds according to the laws of Nature learned through the human civilization since we evolved from nomadic hunters-gatherers into stable societies. But among the Just-Talkers, division is their money earner and they are best frenemies. In politics, law, campuses, and/or courts, conservatives would not exist but for the wokists and vice versa. When tested in their pocket books, so-called leftists or wokists ARE the first to hold racist views, to seclude themselves from minorities, and to throw immigrants under the proverbial bus. And we know from recent, intermediate, and farther history that “conservatives” secretly father bi-racial children and peddle child CSAM.
Third truth: The world is round. The Just-Talkers will soon run out of places to sell their arrogant empty talk; and the meek shall inherit the earth.
REMOVE THIS FOOL. She’s an illiterate idiot. Totally stupid. Get her out and stop funding any of this crap at Clemson.
Clemson needs to return to its founding purpose as an agricultural and mechanical college. Why do they even have a school of education? Winthrop, founded as a teachers college, is doing an adequate job of developing poor teachers, we don’t need Clemson duplicating that effort.
Because this is INVARIABLY how civilizations decline: the just-talkers are elevated over the real workers be they intellectual (physicians, engineers, agriculturists, etc.) or manual (farmers, miners, meat-packers, auto-workers, etc.). And the OPPOSITE is how new powers emerge and supplant the old powers. This is even how the U.S. replaced the U.K. Guess who is now positioning itself to replace the U.S. and even lectures its president on the Thucydides Trap?