A video in which a University of Vermont professor calmly explains his concern about “social justice” teaching on campus that reduces people to a “racial category” has prompted calls for his resignation.
But education professor Aaron Kindsvatter, in a follow-up YouTube video, says he won’t resign, reported Campus Reform.
“Nope, not a chance, never going to happen, no way,” he said in the March 16 video. “Haven’t even thought about it.”
In the March 8 video that caused a stir on his campus and beyond, “Racism and the Secular Religion at the University of Vermont,” he said “whiteness falls under the umbrella … of critical social justice, and the thinking that informs it is so crude and so lacking in falsifiability.”
Kindsvatter said that the notion of whiteness “speaks so eloquently to our tribal impulses.” The same logic, he added, “can easily find its way to desperate persons who need a group to hate and who will adopt the suppositions that inform whiteness towards their own ends.”
He recalled first hearing the term whiteness when “a faculty member offered to help me with it like it was some kind of disease.”
Kindsvatter described the experience as “dehumanizing.”
He said the pressure to find wisdom in Ibram X. Kendi and other authors produced a “spiritual sickness” within him.
At the end of his video he asked: “Would you please stop reducing my personhood to a racial category in your teachings?”
A petition on campus calling for his resignation, describing his comments as “harmful to our campus’ community of color,” has drawn 3,400 signatures.
However, a counter petition, garnering more than 4,400 signatures, asks that Kindsvatter assume control of all diversity measures at the university.
Campus Reform reported University of Vermont Provost Patricia Prelock said in an email to student newspaper The Vermont Cynic that “we will continue to lean into our [diversity equity and inclusion] efforts, and in so doing, create further opportunities to strengthen our community.”
“We know there is anger, pain, and sadness when the lived experiences of individuals committed to DEI are denied or diminished,” the email stated.
See the original video, posted March 8:
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