Skip to content
Breaking News Alert Georgia House Guts Bill That Would Have Given Election Board Power To Investigate Secretary Of State

Michigan Tech Professor Denounces School’s ‘Systemic Racism’ Training. The Cancel Mob Wants Him Fired

Share

As reported by The New Guard, a professor at Michigan Technological University is receiving threats from the woke campus mob and calls for his resignation or termination due to his disavowal of the institution’s December resolution that instructs all faculty to denounce “systemic racism.”

The resolution put forth by the university senate demands that all students receive systemic-racism training prior to being able to obtain their bachelor’s degree and that all faculty and staff must denounce a wide variety of forms of discrimination.

Michigan Technological University has taken an aggressive stance in response to the global Coronavirus pandemic, [but] unfortunately, little action has been taken to address the national racism endemic and ongoing white supremacist discourse present in our community and on our campus. In this galvanizing moment, the University Senate seeks to take leadership and offer collaboration to articulate the condemnation of racism and white supremacy, as administrative and academic units have remained silent. Members of the Executive Committee of the University Senate and the Committee for Promoting Equity and Understanding stand together to offer Senate Resolution 41-21, Embodying University Values, Condemning Hate Speech, White Supremacy, and Ethnically and Racially Motivated Intolerance.

Subsequent pages of the proposed resolution offer that “anti-blackness” and “systemic racism” have caused police brutality, the wealth gap, and the lack of African Americans in positions of power, and are the “core to our national history.”

Jeffrey B. Burl, who received his master of science and Ph.D. in electrical engineering at the University of California Irvine, wrote a letter in response to the senate in which he described the school’s affirmative action efforts as “biased against white males.” Burl railed against the training aimed at reinforcing the erroneous notion that “all white people are racists,” as well as the bastardization of Dr. Martin Luther King’s dream of equality, which MTU students conflate with equity.

“Women and people of color should be encouraged and given fair access and opportunity,” Burl wrote in his letter. “But, once someone goes to college (I have little experience outside of this group) white males are systematically discriminated against both at Michigan Tech and in the nation at large. I believe that anyone who is open-minded and honest will agree with this assertion.”

Below is Burl’s two-page letter obtained by The Federalist.

“The resolution that was proposed is a very racist thing. It singled out white people and said they are all bad, local people are racist, white people are racist. I got tired of being singled out,” Burl told The Federalist. “I believe the university senate is functioning half as a political action committee.”

Burl alluded to MTU’s “Diversity Literacy Workshop” that all faculty are forced to participate in, as well as brush up on every three years. “The problem with the training is that it’s one-sided. They have workshops that teach unintentional bias,” he said. “I look at those training and I see it as a propaganda deal. I can’t take them seriously. Eventually one just gets tired of being called bad things because of one’s skin color.”

In response to the professor’s condemnation of the senate resolution, he has been the subject of leftist calls on social media for his termination. Many of these people are seemingly not even affiliated with the university, just merely joining the cancel-culture mob to ruin yet another life unabiding by the prevailing orthodoxy.

A petition is circulating on Change.org titled “Terminate Michigan Technological University Associate Professor Jeffrey Burl,” and has more than 1,500 signatures as of Thursday. Signees frequently allude to his implicit “white privilege.”

Burl told The Federalist that university police called him to ensure he was safe after the mob began to attack him online. He also said the administration has released a statement about the situation and is investigating his comments in the letter. Associate deans at the university have been assisting students with getting out of his classes, he noted. Burl has also been contacted by conservatives and others at MTU who have told him they do not support the university senate and are not comfortable saying what they believe on campus.

“This kind of ignorance and hate does not belong at Michigan Tech nor any institution of higher learning. This petition is calling for his immediate termination. This petition also calls for a public statement from the University President, Dr. Richard J. Koubek, disavowing these views and reaffirming Michigan Tech’s commitment to diversity and inclusion,” wrote the MTU alumni who started the petition.

If a person on today’s college campus disagrees or says something that is not aligned with the established far-left and repressive norm, they are repudiated until the institution is harassed enough to fire or cancel them. As The Federalist reported in August 2020, Syracuse University placed a professor on leave in the College of Arts and Sciences for including “Wuhan Flu” on his syllabus. In June 2020, the University of California Los Angeles suspended School of Management professor Gordon Klein for questioning affirmative action, after students started a petition that reached more than 20,000 signatures. Jodi Shaw, a former student support coordinator at Smith College, resigned this week because of the liberal arts college’s “critical race training.”

“I think that most people are good,” Burl said. “Most white people are good, most black people are good. There are people that are not good on both sides, but when you push the narrative that all white people are white supremacists and racists, then what you do is you’re just fostering hate. That hate tends to increase political power and maintain it for a particular group.”

What is happening at MTU is representative of a broader social phenomenon that is not solely limited to the modern-day college campus. Say the wrong thing, and you risk being removed by Big Tech, or worse, economically affected. “Cancel culture is quickly becoming American culture,” Harvard law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz argued a few weeks ago on Fox News.

A whistleblower at Coca-Cola leaked the company’s woke antiracist training this past week, which put forth the notion that all white people are indubitably racist. The link on LinkedIn Learning has been removed and was stewarded by activist Robin DiAngelo, who headed up the discriminatory initiative. Last weekend, Amazon removed scholar Ryan T. Anderson’s 2018 book “When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment” for hateful content.

While Anderson is a public figure and Burl is a professor at a university in small-town Michigan, the same principle prevails. Today’s repressive institutions do not deal with ideological dissent and will mobilize until each and every opinion by the conservative opposition is squashed entirely.

“I don’t have any former students who will corroborate that I’ve been sexist or racist. I have a clear conscience,” Burl said.