RUTHFULLY YOURS

In my building and among my acquaintances high school seniors are nervously awaiting responses to their college applications. A friend of mine- a brilliant intellectual writer and editor, whose child is among them, remarked at a recent dinner that college catalogues should read as follows:

Dear Applicants,

Your parents have inculcated you with faith and respect for free speech and open debate. You have been taught to admire Judeo/Christian values, Western Civilization and culture, the genius of the founding fathers, and American exceptionalism. You are generally patriotic and liberal in the John Stuart Mill definition of the word.

Come to our college and for a tuition of $70,000.00 per year we will free your mind from all the foregoing and outdated cant.

Parents who plan on refinancing their homes in order to send their children off to college should instead consider encouraging them to specialize in a trade.

Speaking as a Ph.D. in philosophy who has spent the last 17 years teaching at the college level, I’m perhaps the last person from whom advice of this sort is expected. But it is precisely because of my familiarity with academia that I beseech the college bound and their enablers—I mean their supporters—to revisit their plans.

Whether one regards a post-secondary institution as a means to either a remunerative profession or a genuine education, the tragic fact of the matter is that the contemporary academic world is about as politicized a cultural institution as any. More specifically, it is a bastion of Political Correctness, a decidedly leftist ideology that tolerates no competition.

For the last 11 years, Professor Duke Pesta, who is currently an associate professor of English at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, has taught literature at a range of colleges. At the outset of each semester, he would quiz his students on their knowledge of American and Western history. What he found is that the “overwhelming” number of them believed that slavery—an institution, mind you, that is as old as humanity itself, was practiced in virtually every society the planet over, and that lasted only some 87 years in the United States—was an exclusively American phenomenon.

“Most of my students could not tell me anything meaningful about slavery outside of America,” Pesta told The College Fix. His students “are convinced that slavery was an American problem that more or less ended with the Civil War and they are very fuzzy about slavery prior to the Colonial era.”

“Their entire education about slavery,” he adds, “was confined to America.”

Yet it isn’t just students who display an astonishing ignorance of slavery. Over at Boston University, Saida Grundy, an Assistant Professor of sociology and African-American Studies, tweeted that slavery is “a white people…thing.”

College is now a politically correct joke.

Suffolk University’s interim president said Tuesday that the college will hold mandatory microaggression training for all faculty in response to an outcry last week after a Latina student wrote a viral blog post saying she was the victim of a professor’s racial bias.

What did this racial bias involve?

Tiffany Martinez.said an unidentified Suffolk sociology professor handed back a paper she had written and in front of the class and told Martinez, “This is not your language,” insinuating that Martinez had plagiarized.

Martinez posted a photo of the paper on her blog, showing where the professor appears to have written “please go back and indicate where you cut and paste.” The professor had circled the word “hence” in the paper and wrote, “this is not your word.”

“In this interaction, my undergraduate career was both challenged and critiqued,” the student wrote. “It is worth repeating how my professor assumed I could not use the word “hence,” a simple transitory word that connected two relating statements. The professor assumed I could not produce quality research.”

Most college students, regardless of whether their ancestors originated from southern Europe or not, do not tend to use hence in a sentence. Hence, it’s the sort of word that professors seize on and suspect that what they are seeing is cut and paste material. Tiffany’s interaction has happened thousands of times with students regardless of race.

For many Jewish students at the University of Michigan, their celebration of the Jewish New Year was unjustly marred by feelings of pain and ostracism. On Rosh Hashanah, a campus group called “Students Allied for Freedom and Equality” (SAFE) erected a so-called “apartheid” wall and mock Israeli checkpoints on the Diag, in the center of the campus. As one Jewish student described it, the wall falsely depicted Israel as an apartheid state, and falsely painted the soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces as vicious murderers.

Many Jewish students expressed how hurt, offended and marginalized they felt by SAFE’s actions. SAFE unapologetically justified them, claiming that the group’s goal was “to start the conversation about the oppression of Palestinians under occupation.” If that were true, then SAFE would have scheduled its anti-Israel demonstration on a day when Jewish students could be part of the conversation. Instead, as SAFE undoubtedly knew, many Jewish students were observing the holiday, either on campus or elsewhere, and were thus denied the opportunity to stand up for their Jewish homeland in dialogue with others in the campus community.

Over 1100 students signed a petition urging University President Mark Schlissel to speak out. In addition, four national organizations, including the Simon Weisenthal Center and StandWithUS, co-signed the Zionist Organization of America’s (ZOA) letter to President Schlissel, urging him to issue a statement condemning SAFE for erecting its “apartheid” wall and mock checkpoints on a Jewish holy day. While SAFE had the legal right to hold its demonstration on Rosh Hashanah, it was important for President Schlissel to acknowledge that SAFE’s actions had hurt members of the Jewish community and made them feel excluded.
Students, parents, donors, alumni, the regents, and members of the community should be asking President Schlissel why he seemingly takes the feelings and concerns of Jewish students less seriously than the concerns of other students who have felt hurt and marginalized on campus.

Jonathan Haidt, a professor of social psychology at New York University, argued in a recently published essay that while its traditional “telos” (end or goal) has been truth, within the last few decades the university has assumed another: Social Justice.

The university, however, can only have one telos.

The conflict between these two goals has raged for decades, Haidt claims. Last year, though, it became unmanageable when student groups at 86 universities and colleges around the country issued “demands” to administrators, demands for Social Justice that, by and large, were met.

The following statement is posted at BlackLiberationCollective.org:

“We demand at the minimum, Black students and Black faculty to be reflected by the national percentage of Black folk in the state and the country.

We demand free intuition for Black and indigenous students.

We demand a divestment from prisons and an investment in communities.”

A statement of “principles” follows. The Black Liberation Collective (BLC) opposes “anti-Blackness;” “sexism;” “ableism;” “capitalism;” “White privilege;” “inequality;” and “heteronormativity.” It rejects as well non-violence considered as a principle in contradistinction to a tactic.

“Anti-Black racism is woven in the fabric of our global society,” says the BLC. “When social systems are racialized by white supremacy, whiteness becomes the default of humanity and Blackness is stripped of its humanity, becoming a commodity, becoming disposable.”

Protesters at the University of California Berkeley shut down a bridge, preventing white people from crossing it. The protesters then posted an “eviction notice” on a campus building, and finally paraded through the student union and the campus entrance, disrupting students who were trying to study and blocking traffic in a central intersection.

A group of about 100 students united to block one side of a bridge, chanting, “Go around! Go around!” to any white people in the area. One black protester told a white student trying to cross, “I’m telling you, this isn’t about you. This is about whiteness, this is not about you. We don’t care about you.”

This new “safe space” segregation forced white students to go around the bridge, crossing Strawberry Creek below it.

Members of the University of California Police Department (UCPD) gathered to provide safety, and they gave helpful directions to white people who were physically prevented from crossing the bridge.

A lead protester shouted profanities at UCPD, even as the police had gathered to guarantee her safety. “Berkeley, why the f**k do you let UCPD do what they want with our bodies?” the protester belted, perhaps referring to the Black Lives Matter claims that police abuse people of color. “I’m talking to you, UCPD, I don’t give a f**k about you!”