By that standard, the millennial generation — or whatever you want to call us — has been intellectually mugged. It’s high time someone started talking about the stakes.

@Friend — A “loyalty oath” like that may raise eyebrows, but it should not cause surprise. NAS and CampusReform.org, where I write, have covered previously the insertion of new types of requirements into faculty job descriptions (see http://bit.ly/2BF170).

Lehigh, for example, wants to hire a 17th Century Brit Lit prof “whose scholarship and teaching in early modern and seventeenth-century British literature will augment our department’s focus on literature and social justice.”

“Please describe how your personal background informs your decision to pursue a graduate degree. Please include information on how you have overcome barriers to access in higher education, evidence of how you have come to understand the barriers faced by others, evidence of your academic service to advance equitable access to higher education for women, racial minorities, and individuals from other groups that have been historically underrepresented in higher education, evidence of your research focusing on underserved populations or related issues of inequality, or evidence of your leadership among such groups.”

This is apparently part of the general Berkeley graduate school application; i.e., it’s not just for political departments like social work. So if you want to be a graduate researcher on, say, the biology of sponges, you have to explain how your research focuses on underserved populations. (I suppose sponges don’t get nearly enough attention.)

If this question isn’t a political loyalty oath I don’t know what would be. I hope NAS will look into this and see if it indeed is a required part of every Berkeley graduate application in every subject.