RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Harvard Graduate School of Education 14th Annual Alumni of Color Conference will be held from Thursday, March 3 to Saturday, March 5, 2016 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The conference will be organized around three anti-American themes: Designing a New Blueprint for Democracy; Embracing the Mosaic as Muse; and Building Capacity for Sustainable Engagement. These three themes are defined in almost wholly negative ways. The conference organizers reject the melting pot concept, refuse to explicitly identify with non-violence (Gandhian satyagraha), and do not hesitate to depict the black minority as oppressed and dehumanized (presumably even that elite group that are Harvard alumni of color). The conference’s “search for new strategies” is thus being erected on negative premises, without any expressed love of country or one’s fellow man.

Designing a New Blueprint For Democracy. Guidelines for submissions states the following: “Our steering committee acknowledges that the foundation for democracy in this nation carries a legacy of intentional exclusion, oppression, disenfranchisement, and dehumanization that has disproportionately affected communities of color. The successful future of American democracy requires understanding and analyzing the origins and development of social and political systems designed to prevent persons of color from fully participating in the democratic process.”

Did it not occur to the organizers of this conference that the very existence of the conference with its attack on American democracy as “exclusionary” is a testimony to freedom of speech and inclusionary values? The bitter spirit in the conference’s call for a “new blueprint” sounds like an intense replay of the venom heard in the 1960s from the likes of H. Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael. In the light of advances in civil rights since the 1950s, it seems to this writer that the black community should be capable of a more balanced view of history. The steering committee should remember that over 300,000 mostly white soldiers died in the Civil War to end slavery. The 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments were passed to assure the right of participation in the political process to African-Americans. All kinds of black run groups have formed since 1865 to promote the advancement of people of color in various venues. Some of those “activists” have been extremely intemperate in their rhetoric, and educated persons of all ethnicities should be wise enough and kind enough to eschew their methods. The Armed Forces was finally desegregated after WWII. Schools throughout the South were desegregated, and the SATs were established to discover minority talent that might otherwise be hidden from view. Affirmative Action laws which increased black educational and employment opportunities came into effect, and are still in effect.

A Kansas University professor who used the n-word during a class discussion about race is on leave while the university investigates a discrimination complaint against her.

Thus begins an article about one Andrea Quenette, a thirty-three year-old assistant professor of communications, whose career has just been permanently blemished, if not ended, because a small group of KU graduate students decided to “expose” her use of language they allegedly found personally offensive.

The outrage occurred during a November 12 graduate class discussion of the relation between black undergraduate retention rates and systemic racism. Addressing the issue of systemic racism at KU, Quenette noted that although “I don’t experience racial discrimination so it’s hard for me to understand the challenges that other people face,” she nevertheless had to admit that “I haven’t seen those things happen, I haven’t seen that word spray-painted on our campus, I haven’t seen students physically assaulted.”

According to all concerned, no student objected openly to her politically incorrect language violation at the time. After class, however, the students (plus another graduate student who was not in the class) signed a letter calling for Quenette’s termination. I assume they are asking only for the termination of her employment, though I sincerely doubt any of them would hesitate to demand the termination of a professor’s life, if they thought such a demand would stand up in the kangaroo court of academic review. (Give it a few years, kids; we’ll get there yet.)

While students from Yale University in Connecticut to Claremont McKenna in California are protesting, demanding more cultural sensitivity, safe spaces and trigger warnings, some students at Princeton University in New Jersey are fighting back.

In response to a sit-in of the university president’s office by 200 members of the Black Justice League, over 1,300 members of the university community signed a petition to ensure that Princeton “maintains its commitment to free speech and open dialogue and condemns political correctness to the extent that it infringes upon those fundamental academic values.”
As signatures on the petition climbed, students formed the Princeton Open Campus Coalition. They wrote to Princeton University President Christopher Eisgruber and asked to meet with him to discuss preserving the freedom of speech and civil debate that are the hallmarks of a classical education. Evan Draim, a Princeton senior and one of the group’s founders, told me in an email: “We hope that our peers at other colleges gain inspiration from what we are doing at Princeton.”

The Black Justice League’s demands include a dorm for those who want to celebrate black affinity; mandatory diversity training; and a requirement that students take a course on so-called marginalized peoples. They also want the renaming of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and the removal of a mural of President Woodrow Wilson. Wilson, who graduated from Princeton in 1879 and who served as the university’s president from 1902 until 1910, formally segregated the federal workforce.
Campus protests are the latest in many students’ efforts to be protected from situations that they find difficult.

Eisgruber has agreed to set aside four rooms on campus for the use of students of different cultures, and to consult with faculty and the board of trustees on other demands.
Asanni York, a junior who helped organize the protests, said the university was not doing enough to address racial problems on campus, and that “black students on this campus feel uncomfortable every day.” York told me: “I’m focused less on how President Eisgruber resolved the sit-in and more on how campus will change in the next two semesters.”
Wilson was a racist by today’s standards, but he was hardly a reactionary figure in his time. As university president, he tried unsuccessfully to disband Princeton’s now-famous eating clubs on the grounds that they were elitist, and he pioneered the idea that Princeton should be a university “in the nation’s service.” As America’s president, Wilson substantially expanded the size and scope of the federal government including such institutions as the Federal Reserve Board.