It'd be a shame to pile on to Ryerson's year long 110 page make work project. After all, we already did.
An alert reader who caught Margaret Wente's evisceration of the Ryerson Task Force on Anti-Racism yesterday had the patience and strength of will to slog through the report. (PDF 1.2M 110pp)
The Appendix B Backgound section is definitely worth the read. (See below the fold)
Cheers,
lance
From page 64 of the PDF:
Questionnaires for faculty, students and staff were designed and mounted on surveymonkey.com in early March 2009. They were publicized within the Ryerson community and posed questions about experiences and impressions of the racial climate at Ryerson. On March 27, the Taskforce discovered tampering had taken place, including a large number of replies that contained what we can only describe as mocking, racist and false information. The surveys were taken down. It is possible that the tampering was instigated within Ryerson, but in any event it was co-ordinated by an outside neoconservative website (www.smalldeadanimals.com). Information posted on that site allowed us to purge the bogus data. The surveys were remounted with a link from Blackboard and were restricted to Ryerson email addresses. However a considerable amount of time was lost, the summer break intervened and the re-mounted survey produced very few additional responses. Since the overall number of respondents was relatively small, no detailed analysis can be done. However, the data can be used to show some of the themes that emerged from some of the questions. What follows therefore is not a question-by-question analysis but a summary of some of the major themes. (It should be noted that the numbers cited here are not definitive since not all of the questions were answered and the survey software was not identical for the two attempts.) This summary was done by Dr. Frances Henry, an independent outside academic expert engaged by the Taskforce.
So, smalldeadanimals is an "outside, neoconservative" website, eh?
That must get pretty cold in a SK winter.
Of course, one wonders what is meant by a "diversity" that excludes Canadian hosers.
Is this perhaps racist? Anti-Canadian? Or do you only get to be a Canadian if you support diversity, as per the CBC mind-set?
So what does that make the rest of us, who see "diversity" as code language for "cultural genocide" aimed at our culture?
How did it come to pass that a master race developed among us, with the knowledge and insight necessary to choose which diversity was good, and which was ungood?
Oh right, I just answered my own question, it was bred down at the Animal Farm.
Wasn't it intolerant & racist of them to assume many of us SDA readers aren't 60 plus year old trans-gendered "two spirited" Japanese Jews!?!
...my feeling are so hurt.
the bleating of the grievance mongering racial grifters is tooooooooooo funny.
Race baters looking to expand their industry via "Sensitivity and race officers". The left have built quite an empire on their mythical racism is everywhere beasts, I suspect they've made quite a tidy sum at various levels of activism.
Heh. I remember that survey. I recall completing it myself. I'm glad that a few minutes of my time to complete their bogus survey helped to screw up their summer.
You da judge
http://ybtj.cjsonline.gov.uk/
A truly strange experiment
I thought in their little world that labeling people was a no no?
Not very enlightened of them to label Kate and all of us who took the survey, as neocons......
tsk tsk.
Marge Wente says:
"Yet, to anyone who reads the fine print, the message is clear: The kids are all right. It's the adults who are out to lunch."
Just what is it on Ryerson's lunch menu that is causing such stupidity? Ah yes, Judy Rebbick leading the charge.
Cheers
Hans-Christian Georg Rupprecht, Commander in Chief
1st Saint Nicolaas Army
Army Group “True North"
Anti-racism is just a code name for racism based on identity politics, just as human rights now mean loss of human rights, and the spin doctors remain employed.
So they had a presumption of results they would receive from Ryerson students and staff, and when SDA types (yes, we are "a type") didn't comply with that degree of "messed up"/racial dis-harmonizers or what_ever, we are the messed up ones?
Perhaps they should have asked the ex premier of Saskatchewan Lorne Calvert to provide a fire wall for their survey.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias
We have had some interesting previous discussions
of Confirmation Bias here at Small Dead Animals.
Would you describe this as a survey that went horribly wrong?
I recall Maher Arar having a similar problem in his recent survey. To get the correct answers to these questionnaires, it is necessary to stratify the respondents properly (statistics 101). I find it amusing that the left hasn't yet discovered the power of the net. Hats off to SDA.
Hans Rupprecht @ 7:58 PM, that's exactly what went through my mind. When I saw her name on the list I knew they wouldn't accept the responses as they were received. The study could only be valid if it "proved" racism was rampant at Ryerson.
Also, read item # 3 of the notes starting on page 53.
Funny ... isn't it?
How the same names keep popping up on many of the same sort of efforts.
Judy Rebick indeed......
What the heck is "racialized"? I thought we all belong to one race or another.
Amazing how racist the anti-racists are. If I was a student at Ryerson I'd be demanding a reduction in my tuition fees as the money spent on this report might as well have been burned; actually that would have been a far better use of the money as it would have produced plant food in the process.
There's only one race ... the human race.
felis corpulentis : we do - it is called the human race!
It'll be a long time before Ryerson will realize Martin Luther King's most laudable dream -- for the day when a man will be judged, not by the color of his skin, but by the content of his character -- certainly not as long as their are professional race-baiters whose livelihoods depend on perpetuating a non-existent problem.
Dr. Frances Henry is practically a Judy Rebick clone, who over the years has written a number of newspaper articles on racism real or imagined, usually with her tag-team partner Carol Tator.
Grace-Edward Galabuzi is another name that I've seen in the papers a few times in this context.
thanks Kate -great memories - always thought Cliff to be a class act. Rock n Roll Juvenile was a great album of the 70s. Anyway watching it sent me on an hour long cruise thru other links on the page ie Paul Revere & the Raiders - greatly under rated also. Kicks was my fave.
From there on to Ramones, Clash, and Rockabilly versions of both. LOL
The thing that I find so stunning is the incompetence of the researchers - clearly they have problems in planning their research to being with, if they are willing to put a survey on surveymonkey open to the public. There is nothing wrong with survey monkey, but if you are a university you should have access to a wide range of methods to implement a survey to Ryerson students only (if that was their target audience). If they are incompetent in the administration of a simple survey (something I teach in research for beginners), their analysis of results will be a mess and untrustworthy.
Wait till I tell my friends that some of them are "racialized people" and everyone else is white.
The best part is where they conclude that no analysis can be done, but then they decide to use the stories anyway. As an above commenter noted, the compiler of the themes was none other than Dr. Frances Henry, the York academic who has previously concluded Queen's University has a "culture of whiteness" that hurts its reputation. That report led to all kinds of interesting things--like the proposed secret, eavesdropping, "dialogue facilitators" for the university's residences.
Note that despite the paucity of replies to their survey (only about 300 replies in a student community of over 20,000) - the report was still written.
Another interesting tidbit is that the rhetoric is meaningless, i.e., without specific context. You could have written that same report, inserting another institutional name than Ryerson (i.e., they did this before at Queen's), because the report is itself, a template, a fictionalized account of a theory and not based in reality.
The template used is the old dried up theme of angst caused by colonialism, white supremacy and blah blah. The fact that this is a myth, that none of this applies to the university setting - is irrelevant.
How about such comments as an assertion that people 'took risks' in being interviewed! What? What risks?
The report declares that 'racism is not a key concern of the university' and hopes the report will change this. Why should it? Racism is not a key concern because, factually, the students aren't bothered by such. Fiction versus fact.
This 'fiction versus fact' approach is obvious in the non-statistical analysis, with the use of such terms as 'many' 'some' (how many?) and other such ambiguous descriptions.
What the heck is a 'racialized student or professor'?
Note how there is no hard data base; the 'evidence' is all anecdotal, subjective, and in the majority of cases, irrelevant to a teaching institution; these events could happen in the workplace and on the street.
Note how these anecdotal reports include any topic that is 'disturbing' as a 'racist topic'. That is, in one class, the issue of stoning women to death in Muslim countries, and the issue of 'honour killing' was brought up. The Muslim student objected to such a class and felt her objections would affect her grade. No proof, of course, but the point is - that this report is asserting that discussion of FACTS, about what happens in these Middle East countries, that follow Sharia law, is a 'racist' action.
So - anything that makes one 'uncomfortable' is not allowed in a university - even the truth. heh.
Again, this report is not based on facts but on fiction - and the fiction is an old, dried template of the 1970's ignorant themes.
I worked at Ryerson for 4 years, ending in late 2006. The 'reverse' racism there is unbelievable. If you are white, you are made to feel almost daily as though you are the problem for everything. Heterosexual? You are a repressed homophobe. Male? Here's a knife to cut off your bollocks, because you're a bad person for having them. Conservative/Libertarian? Hide.
One apt description of the Judy Rebick type from another blog:
the “Educated Idiots Award” (EIA), which is given to the arrogant intellectuals unacquainted with real life who foist their insane ideas upon the “unenlightened” rest of us.
Gosh, was that a year ago? Good times! Well, whoever slogged through the report: Sir/Madam, I salute you, you crazy b@stard! It must have been like venturing up the Moonbat Congo in search of the rogue PC Stalinist, his/her compound decked out with the heads of Sanity, Logic, Fairness and Common Sense, impaled on pikes. Pikes of stupidity.
DrD @1:26 - maybe Ryerson-type people have a vested interest in not being judged on the "content of (their) character(s)".