“…I learned today that my university (from which I have now resigned) confers a degree it calls “Doctor of Philosophy in Education for Social Justice.” A majority (18 out of 35) of the doctorates awarded by USD’s education school this year fell into this category.

This is a random sample (i.e. the first seven on the list) of the dissertation titles:

Black Parents’ Use of Educational Advocates: Disrupting Structural and Systemic Racism in Education

Culturally Affirming Independent School Board Governance (CAISBG): Narratives of Board Members of Color in K-12 Independent Schools

Restricted Access: Structural Gatekeeping and the Black Student Experience in Accounting Education

Ethnic Studies for Secondary Schooling: Collaborative Curricular Insights from a Working Collective

Challenging Dominant Ideologies: Transforming Teaching and Learning that Support Classroom Learning Environments of Latinx Students

Liberatory Love: Exploring Educators’ Perspectives in Alternative Education

Constructing Portraits of Elementary Teachers of Ethnic Studies: Examining the Narratives of Anti-Racist Educators in an Era of Common Core Curriculum and Instruction.

Most of the rest contain words like “antiracist,” “equity,” “equity-centered,” “racial reckoning,” or “radical.”

This sheds a bit of light on an ugly event that happened a couple of years ago. One of my organizations—Californians for Equal Rights Foundation—rented an auditorium at USD’s school of education for a Saturday conference held in the summertime. Long before the conference, we had a signed contract and were paying good money for the room and catering. This should have been a positive for the school as the building would have been otherwise quite empty. At the last minute—after speakers had been lined up and many tickets sold–the school curtly informed us we couldn’t have the room. The claim was the school needed it for some unspecified reason. My phone calls were not returned. I had to threaten to sue to get the university to find us a room at the business school. It was obvious at the time this was politically motivated.

Perhaps I was naïve to have expected better from USD. In any event, the school’s social justice doctorate program provides a bit of extra evidence of where the school of education was coming from.

Needless to say, Californians for Equal Rights Foundation holds its summer conferences elsewhere these days. USD need not tarnish its left-wing bona fides by allowing a conference sponsored by a non-profit group dedicated to opposing race discrimination to take place on its property. Fine…”