Hampshire College: Identity-Based Housing – Accuracy in Academia

June 26, 2017, Alex Nitzberg, Leave a comment

Combining identity politics, social justice doctrine and the concept of safe-spaces, Hampshire College allows students to self-segregate by living in Identity-Based Housing. The colleges website explains:

Residence Life and Housing facilitates the continuation of many identity-based housing communities started by students. These residential spaces give support to members of our community with social identities that have been historically marginalized in this country, and strive to counter systemic oppression. This arises from our commitment to fostering diverse, socially just, and inclusive communities.

We recognize that our societythrough its laws, institutional structures, and customshas privileged some social groups while systematically disadvantaging and disenfranchising others. Even as we struggle to end these practices, we recognize that day-to-day life for members of these disadvantaged groups can be hurtful and exhausting.

The websites explanation of identity-based housing also states:

Identity-based housing is an institutional structure designed to assist members of historically oppressed groups in supporting each other. It helps to create an added level of psychological comfort and safety for those who choose to live in those spaces, often providing the foundation for those students to be able to engage fully in the greater community.

Creating these safe spaces, in collaboration with centers on campus, will benefit the entire community. We must have the full engagement of all our community members, especially those whose experiences, ideas, and perspectives are different from those of the Colleges mainstream population. It is through these means that we, as a full community, are most likely to challenge assumptions, craft new solutions to problems, and perform to our highest ability.

The Permanent Identity-Based Mods listed include: LGBTQQIAAP, Queer, Women of Color, Students of Color and Asian Heritage.

Pan-Afrikan Diaspora, Trans Stability Mod and QPOC are designated as Not-Yet-Permanent Identity-Based Mods. Marginalized Gender Identities is categorized as On Hiatus for 2017-2018.

Under the guidelines for developing an identity-based mod, the second guideline explains: The group must be unified by a social identity (such as race, culture, gender, or sexual orientation). The third guideline says, The unifying social identity must currently experience or has historically experienced oppression within or outside the Hampshire community.

Hampshire College also offers Intentional Housing Communities which it explains, are living spaces in which the residents have chosen to come together around a particular area of interest that will contribute to and cultivate the campuss culture of learning. Some of those listed on the website include the Hampshire Basketball Mod, the Kosher Mod, the STEM Mod, the Mindfulness Mod, the Greenhouse Mod and the Middle Eastern Immersion Mod.

The intentional housing community called the Gender Justice Mod (formerly Womens Empowerment Mod), contains the following deluge of leftist lingo within part of its description: We understand our struggle against cissexist heteropatriarchy as part of a broader struggle against all systems of domination, includingbut not limited towhite supremacy, capitalism, imperialism, and ableism.

In 2015 AIA Executive Director Mal Kline documented some of the courses offered at Hampshire College.

Some of the upcoming Fall 2017 course offerings listed under the subject Critical Social Inquiry include:

White Supremacy and Appropriate Whiteness in the Age of Trump

Critical Ethnic Studies: From Settler Colonialism to Trumpism

Border Matters: Mexico and the United States

Feminist, Queer, and Trans Theories of Race

Feminisms Sciences

Autonomism, and Labor: Business Ethics for Radicals

Black Girlhood Studies

Queer Feelings: The Emotional and Affective Life of Gender, Sexuality, and Race

A course titled, A Philosophy of Tattoos and Tattoo Art is listed under the subject of Cognitive Science.

Hampshire Colleges course descriptions are available here.

Alex Nitzberg is a freelance conservative journalist and commentator and the host of The Alex Nitzberg Show podcast. Follow him on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

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Hampshire College: Identity-Based Housing - Accuracy in Academia