A Central New York professor has launched a database of critical race theory (CRT) at colleges across America, saying he hopes to empower parents to avoid those schools.
William Jacobson, a conservative blogger and clinical professor of law at Cornell Law School, appeared on Fox News this week to promote his new website criticalrace.org. The site says it’s identified “critical race training” at more than 200 U.S. colleges and universities, including Cornell University, Syracuse University and more than 20 other higher education institutes in New York state.
“The website is a resource for parents and students who no longer can assume they will be left alone ... the entire ideology of CRT and ‘anti-racist’ training is that ‘silence is violence,’” Jacobson told Fox News on Tuesday. “As we head into college application and selection season, we need to get parents, in particular, to focus on CRT that will be forced on their kids.”
The website describes CRT is an academic movement which seeks to link racism, race, and power. Jacobson says critical race theorists and anti-racist advocates argue that systemic racism has led to significantly different legal and economic outcomes between different racial groups.
He criticized colleges that, in the wake of George Floyd’s death and nationwide Black Lives Matter protests, have responded by changing admissions policies, implemented anti-racism and diversity training, instituted disciplinary measures for “hate speech,” and provided anti-racist resources, such as the books “How to Be an Antiracist” and “White Fragility.”
Cornell, for example, has offered a “Diversity Entrepreneurship Program,” proposed a new Antiracism Center, and requires staff to undergo training on “Advancing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.”
“People need to understand that Higher Ed is the source of the problem,” Jacobson told Fox News. “It provides the ideological mothers’ milk for activists, and trains the people who then go onto jobs in government and primary/secondary education, and the ‘journalists’ who push this coverage.”
Former President Donald Trump similarly criticized CRT when he ordered all federal agencies to stop anti-bias trainings that rely on critical race theory or address white privilege.
“I ended it because it’s racist,” Trump said during the September presidential debate with now-President Joe Biden. “We were paying people hundreds of thousands of dollars to teach very bad ideas and frankly, very sick ideas. And really, they were teaching people to hate our country, and I’m not going to allow that to happen.”
Social justice advocates, meanwhile, have applauded schools that have embraced diversity training and other initiatives as helping combat systemic racism.
Attorney M.E. Hart, who has conducted these types of training sessions, told The Washington Post that they helps live up to “this nation’s promise – ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’”
Priscilla Ocen, a professor at the Loyola Law School, told Time magazine that CRT is also an important step towards an egalitarian society that is just and inclusive.
“In order to get there, we have to name the barriers to achieving a society that is inclusive,” Ocen said in September. “Our government at the moment is essentially afraid of addressing our history of inequality and if we can’t address it, then we can’t change it.”
Since taking office, Biden has issued several executive orders aimed at racial justice, including revoking Trump’s ban on diversity training and dissolving the 1776 Commission, which sought to downplay the role of slavery in American history through “patriotic” education programs.