Diversity course at University of Kent

[andyoldlabour]

The university of Kent is introducing a mandatory 4 hour diversity course for students where it will be concentrating on topics such as White Privilege, Microaggressions and Pronouns.
Apparently seconhand clothes could be seen as an example of "white privilege".
"The course, titled Expect Respect and seen by The Telegraph, includes a white privilege quiz where participants are asked to pick which of 13 options are societal benefits allegedly enjoyed by white people in the UK.
If the student ticks all 13, a gold star is awarded, and if not, a button appears directing them to retry.
Staff have also been emailed by faculty managers to consider adding trigger warnings to exam papers, and carry out “pronoun checks, make a note of them and use them correctly” when meeting new students, such as they/them or ze/zir."

www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/wearing-second-hand-clothes-an-example-of-white-privilege-students-told/ar-AAOSULh?ocid=mailsignout&li=AAnZ9Ug

I don’t know about St Andrew’s but certainly in the universities I have worked at the admissions people won’t give a toss about your MP uncle, they want to make sure you have a genuine interest in the subject you are signing up to study for 3 years and have the basic literacy and logical reasoning skills to articulate your interest.

@Igneococcus

dd is in the process of applying to university (St A is on her list) and, to me as a non-British person who did all her education including tertiary elsewhere (dp as well), so much of the process feels designed to keep the plebs out. Those fecking personal statements, how is a kid growing up somewhere in rural Scotland like dd ever going to compete with the kid who mentions their MP uncle in line two of their statement (in one of the examples dd looked at) and their extensive travels or their gazillions of work experience placements. Lockdown for the last years of high school didn't help either. One is talking about their love of practicing with the English warbow . I absolutely hate all about it.

If they're on The Student Room, take with enormous pinch of salt. I'd be horrified if any university or UCAS used a PS like that as an example.

Yes, it's on Student Room, and we did think some of them just didn't ring true. I suggested to submit a link to her Goodreads page (not in earnest0.
She's fine now (there were tears at some point), quite happy about her personal statement and is meeting with a teacher this week to talk it through and her teachers are on to the reference. She needs to submit by the 15th October and this is the last week of school before the October break.
When I applied to university I filled in a form and handed in my school certificate, same for dp in a different country again.

I have a lot of sympathy with that point of view, @Igneococcus. I used to review personal statements for a postgraduate course as part of an old job. Some applicants took 'personal' very literally and told us quite inappropriate things. Almost all of them explained, not always convincingly, that they had had a passion for the subject since they were very young. It was noticeable that the more relevant professional and academic experience they had the less they wrote, as their CV spoke for itself.

The creators of the diversity course are, anyway, somewhat behind the times. It’s not second hand clothes but expensively distressed clothes that can be a marker of significant economic and social advantage.

This is from the latest Balenciaga catwalk.

No wonder she looks so miserable, @EdmontinaDonsAutumnalHues!

[marks self irretrievably as a non-user of Style and Beauty]

@SoManyQuestionsHere

Okay, so: I'm white! A white, professionally successful, functionally very upper-middle-class but from a very rural working class family woman, actually (and, yes, this all sort of matters):

Here's the thing about the diversity markers situation: SOME of this stuff is actually very valid. Such as, frivolous as it may seem, the "wearing 2nd hand and swearing" thing. You see, I don't sound rural working-class. That'll be because I won a scholarship to a naice school as a child and speak as though I could trace my family tree back to roughly around the 9th century. Which I most certainly can't. It's just that "oh, do fuck off, dear!" out of my mouth, spoken in clipped RP, comes across as a hard but surgical strike of a reprimand. This works neither for my British black working-class subordinate (taken as "uncultured") nor for my much more "cultured" (can actually trace his pedigree) but very German boss (taken as "2nd language speaker who hasn't quite grasped the nuances"). Same goes for dress codes, by the way: in the corporate world, you can turn up in basically anything, so long as you're the sort of person people will assume does it due to individuality or arrogance rather than not knowing any better. My "personal best" happens to be "yoga pants - for a contract negotiation". Underdressing is, genuinely, a way to posture and outwardly signal "power". If you are a person who already has significant power, that is! Nobody will invite you to a negotiation over millions without assuming you own plenty of suits - and you turning up looking casual is an effective way of saying "this is small-fry, I haven't even bothered to dress up for this" and hence: negotiating tactics.

Having said that, I generally tend to agree that it's all a bit silly - and I'm steadfastly refusing to do pronouns on the grounds that I happen to think it's all vapid virtue signalling. But, then again: privilege is real, I have it (except on sex) and that is precisely why I get away with it!

No harm in a little self-awareness here and there!

That's us subordinates told.

Would very much like to see the new Education Sec. indicate he will outlaw these quasi-religious tests that seek to threaten undergraduates with non-graduation if they do not swear fielty.

You couldn't get a degree in England without being a confirmed Anglican until 1826, when UCL, "The Godless Institution of Gower Street," as Matthew Arnold called it.

Excellent points, @Jaysmith71.