In an extreme bout of snowflake Political Correctness in 2015 ...
... a student body at the University of Ottawa prevented disabled students from attending yoga classes.
The free classes had been on offer since 2008, and were attended by up to 60 disabled students and to stretch their bodies and discover their limits. The instructor, who was giving her time for free, said that “I'm not pretending to be some enlightened yogi master, and the point (of the program) isn't to educate people on the finer points of the ancient Yogi scripture," and "is to get people to have higher physical awareness for their own physical health and enjoyment.” They classes were open to all races, creeds and colours.
However, that wasn't good enough for the dick-brains at the universities Student Federation, who determined in 2015 that the beginner-level classes, that focused on physical yoga poses, and not on any ancient yogi scripture, and which were held at the campus’s Centre for Students with Disabilities, still weren’t inclusive enough .... although how much more inclusive they can be if they were free and open to all disabled students its hard to say.
The instructor, Jennifer Scharf who also works full time at the Ram Lotus Centre said that the complaint that killed the program came from a “social justice warrior with a fainting heart ideology, in search of a cause celebre. People are just looking for a reason to be offended by anything they can find. There’s a real divide between reasonable people and those people just looking to jump on a bandwagon. Unfortunately, it ends up with good people getting punished for doing good things.”
Student federation president Romeo Ahimakin denied the decision resulted from a complaint, but emails from Julie Seguin, a full time student federation official sympathized with Scharf, and contradicted his denials, by defending the use of the term "yoga" and saying, "I am also still of the opinion that a single complaint does not outweigh all of the good that these classes have done". She added that "labeling the CSDs yoga lessons as cultural appropriation is questionable (and) debatable"; and called on further discussion with the student executive.
The thick buffoons who came to this decision, informed the press in a pompous statement that the cultures yoga stems from, “have experienced oppression, cultural genocide and diaspora's due to colonialism and western supremacy. We need to be mindful of this and how we express ourselves while practising yoga.”
Utter twaddle of course, as philosophical and physical yoga was being practised in India for at least 2,500 years, and millennia before the arrival of the colonial British, French and Portuguese .... the genocide claim seems a bit weak as well, as there are 1.2bn Indians. Of course you can't expect university students to know that ... they are after all dumber than they were 50 years ago. But even so you might have hoped that one of their student executive body might have been able to check the facts .... but apparently not.
Even an offer to rename the class, calling it “mindful stretching” instead of "yoga", but retaining the same content, was refused because (and its hard to believe this one), it didn't look good translated in to French.
So the disabled students have lost out, as there was no alternative. The student federation apparently doesn't mind any hardship (as none of them were personally put out in any way at all), and closed the class saying that the aim was only to reopen a yoga class when they could “make it better, more accessible and more inclusive to certain groups of people that feel left out in yoga-like spaces.” .... so never then.
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| Disabled Yoga Helps Keep Muscles Limber .... But Not In The University of Ottawa Centre for Students with Disabilities. |
... a student body at the University of Ottawa prevented disabled students from attending yoga classes.
The free classes had been on offer since 2008, and were attended by up to 60 disabled students and to stretch their bodies and discover their limits. The instructor, who was giving her time for free, said that “I'm not pretending to be some enlightened yogi master, and the point (of the program) isn't to educate people on the finer points of the ancient Yogi scripture," and "is to get people to have higher physical awareness for their own physical health and enjoyment.” They classes were open to all races, creeds and colours.
However, that wasn't good enough for the dick-brains at the universities Student Federation, who determined in 2015 that the beginner-level classes, that focused on physical yoga poses, and not on any ancient yogi scripture, and which were held at the campus’s Centre for Students with Disabilities, still weren’t inclusive enough .... although how much more inclusive they can be if they were free and open to all disabled students its hard to say.
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| Disappointed Instructor .... |
The instructor, Jennifer Scharf who also works full time at the Ram Lotus Centre said that the complaint that killed the program came from a “social justice warrior with a fainting heart ideology, in search of a cause celebre. People are just looking for a reason to be offended by anything they can find. There’s a real divide between reasonable people and those people just looking to jump on a bandwagon. Unfortunately, it ends up with good people getting punished for doing good things.”
Student federation president Romeo Ahimakin denied the decision resulted from a complaint, but emails from Julie Seguin, a full time student federation official sympathized with Scharf, and contradicted his denials, by defending the use of the term "yoga" and saying, "I am also still of the opinion that a single complaint does not outweigh all of the good that these classes have done". She added that "labeling the CSDs yoga lessons as cultural appropriation is questionable (and) debatable"; and called on further discussion with the student executive.
The thick buffoons who came to this decision, informed the press in a pompous statement that the cultures yoga stems from, “have experienced oppression, cultural genocide and diaspora's due to colonialism and western supremacy. We need to be mindful of this and how we express ourselves while practising yoga.”
Utter twaddle of course, as philosophical and physical yoga was being practised in India for at least 2,500 years, and millennia before the arrival of the colonial British, French and Portuguese .... the genocide claim seems a bit weak as well, as there are 1.2bn Indians. Of course you can't expect university students to know that ... they are after all dumber than they were 50 years ago. But even so you might have hoped that one of their student executive body might have been able to check the facts .... but apparently not.
Even an offer to rename the class, calling it “mindful stretching” instead of "yoga", but retaining the same content, was refused because (and its hard to believe this one), it didn't look good translated in to French.
So the disabled students have lost out, as there was no alternative. The student federation apparently doesn't mind any hardship (as none of them were personally put out in any way at all), and closed the class saying that the aim was only to reopen a yoga class when they could “make it better, more accessible and more inclusive to certain groups of people that feel left out in yoga-like spaces.” .... so never then.
The Yoga class was brought back -- but with a new teacher who admits she's asked herself whether she was hired "because I'm Indian." Yep the pretentious little pricks who sat on the student board of the student federation hired an Indian yoga teacher after sacking the too white instructor.
ReplyDeleteHowever Ms Scharf showed better manners that students and claimed no ill will but just expressed concern that "My biggest concern is that the student centre did not tell (Shah) about the context of the situation."
Romeo Ahimakin, the acting president of the student federation at the U of O, repeated the same cultural concerns cited in the now deleted email exchange. But oddly the classes are still called "Yoga". I think that tells what this was really all about ... anti-white cancel culture.
Thanks for the update to this old post. Students are too immature at 18 - 22 yrs old too be allowed to make decisions affecting other peoples lives. If I was Ms Scharf I would have sued their stupid little arses in to the stone age.
DeleteFor another view of this story and the student group responsible for this ethnic wokiness, go here.