Posted on 11/23/2015 4:45:04 AM PST by markomalley
The University of Ottawa in Canada notified Jennifer Scharf that her free weekly yoga classes were to be suspended...for cultural appropriation. Scharf had been offering free beginning yoga classes to students at the university since 2008.
“I’d been in touch to prepare for the new semester’s classes when, out of nowhere, I received an email telling me there were some issues in terms of a formal complaint,” she told The Independent.
The decision to cancel the classes came from the Ottawa Student Federation, a group that describes itself as an "instrument of political action."
According to the Ottawa Sun, staff from the Centre for Students with Disabilities, where the classes were held for students of all abilities, wrote in an email: “While yoga is a really great idea and accessible and great for students...there are cultural issues of implication involved in the practice. Yoga has been under a lot of controversy lately due to how it is being practiced”, and which cultures those practices “are being taken from”.
The email also informed Scharf many of those cultures “have experienced oppression, cultural genocide and diasporas due to colonialism and western supremacy... we need to be mindful of this and how we express ourselves while practising yoga.”
Scharf, trying to salvage her class from extinction, offered to change the name to "mindful stretching" but the school was not interested. Her request was rejected. “I think it’s easy to worry too much about accommodating everyone,” she said. “By saving one person’s feelings, we’re ruined the experience for so many others.”
The Washington Post contacted Scharf who told the paper she was unhappy, but accepted the decision.
“This particular class was intro to beginners yoga because I’m very sensitive to this issue,” she said. “I would never want anyone to think I was making some sort of spiritual claim other than the pure joy of being human that belongs to everyone free of religion.”
Who will they pretend to be now?
Please GOD, let their comeuppance come SOON!
Maybe this is a start to their comeuppance. Do we know this is not a Freeper type slyly using their own tactics against them?
Here’s what it means:
In order to be allowed, Yoga classes need to include a section where the instructor informs the class of the cultural appropriation and how it’s rooted in oppression.
This isn’t about stopping Yoga classes. It’s about turning them into a new distribution channel for PC indoctrination.
In my mechanics of materials engineering courses, how do I teach the crystals that they are being “oppressive” and “non-inclusive” by forcing all debris and lattice breaks into the granular boundaries between pure the metal and its alloys?
Can I stress-relieve these humanities students by heating them to 1250 degrees F for 6 hours while holding them under restraint against motion and strain?
Omg! We will starve to death in America! Even hamburgers and hot dogs came from Germany!
Not their (the SJW’s) problem. Your the instructor, you need to figure that out.
And if you don’t, you’ll get trashed in your student evals.
I saw just that in my grad school classes over 10 years ago. The “standard” evals included a section on whether the profs were including social justice type topics in their instruction. My managerial econ prof got seriously burned because he was all about numbers and calcs and formulas. So, unfamiliar with how the then-new eval criteria would be used, we all answered that he didn’t.
A bunch of us went to the Dean over that. Got blown off. Something we remind the school of everytime they reach out to us asking for alumni donations.
They better not, those racist bastages!
Mark
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