To be white, Christian, and proud of one’s heritage is now the kiss of death in academia.
There can be little doubt that the modern university, in its obsession with race, gender, and sexual orientation under the rubric of “social justice,” has violated its core mandate, which, in the words of Matthew Arnold from Culture and Anarchy, is to familiarize readers and students with “the best that has been thought and said.” The Academy has turned Arnold’s maxim on its head, instructing students in the worst that has been thought and said – and done. The curricular fetish of “social justice,” which is destroying the university as an institution of higher learning, continues to metastasize.
Indeed, the university as a social and cultural institution is a slow-motion train wreck picking up speed: equity hiring, affirmative action, anti-conservative and overt leftist politics, the “diversity and inclusion” myth on which the academy prides itself, groupthink, speech codes, snitch lines, trigger warnings, safe spaces, microaggressions, the attack on academic freedom – the list goes on.
The bogus issue that has recently acquired major prominence in the quagmire of campus politics is “whiteness,” especially the “hegemony” of straight white males and their champions, guilty, apparently, of every conceivable ill that has bedeviled the world since the first silverback descended from the trees. This is merely a prime manifestation of the reigning hysteria on college campuses, in particular its mephitic obsession with race. “The toxic racial climate of colleges looks to be perpetual,” warns Scott Greer in No Campus for White Men; anti-white ferocity “remains established as an unchallenged dogma.” There is no campus for some white woman as well. Witness the current vendetta against distinguished University of Chicago medievalist Rachel Fulton Brown.
