Education

Florida Prof Penalizes Students For Using The Term ‘Melting Pot’

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A University of Florida professor is warning her students not to use the term “melting pot,” unless they want to risk a hit to their grades.

Art professor Pamela Brekka’s policy was first reported by Campus Reform after the website obtained images of the syllabus and online assignments for her class, Art Appreciation: American Diversity and Global Arts. The class, which Brekka taught over the 2016 summer term, helps fulfill the university’s distributive requirement for the humanities, along with a separate diversity requirement.

In the introduction for several online assignment Brekka warns, in all-caps, “DO NOT EVER USE THE PHRASE ‘MELTING POT’ IN THIS CLASS. IN THIS CLASS WE CELEBRATE DIVERSITY, NOT SAMENESS.”

Brekka told Campus Reform that she objected to the term because it wasn’t an accurate description of the diversity in America. Calling the country a melting pot, she said, “signals a Euro-White Colonial standard, point blank, period.” Instead, Brekka prefers to describe America’s diversity as a salad, where individual ingredients are mixed together but remain distinct. (RELATED: NC State Warns ‘Land Of Opportunity’ Is A Microaggression)

Brekka claimed she didn’t have a strict policy of deducting points for using the term “melting pot,” but had done so in the past.

Brekka’s class also shows a clear progressive outlook in general. One graded discussion, for instance, uses as a basic premise that “architectural design has been dominated by men in order to promote a social/political order dominated by men.”

A student complained to Campus Reform that the tone of the class made it very political and not very educational.

“It’s almost as if the questions, how they’re worded, you can only answer them this one certain left-wing way,” the student said. “It was not a college level course … because we didn’t get a lot of the information.”

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