MESSAGE
| DATE | 2015-11-26 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
|
| SUBJECT | Subject: [Hangout-NYLXS] A message for Thanksgiving
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George Wills:
America’s higher education brought low
Comments 923
University of Missouri professor Melissa Click confronts a journalist in
Columbia, Mo., this month. (Mark Schierbecker/Associated Press)
By George F. Will Opinion writer November 25 at 8:37 PM
Give thanks this day for some indirect blessings of liberty, including
the behavior-beyond-satire of what are generously called institutions of
higher education. People who are imprecisely called educators have
taught, by their negative examples, what intelligence is not.
Melissa Click is the University of Missouri academic who shouted “I need
some muscle over here” to prevent a photojournalist from informing the
public about a public demonstration intended to influence the public.
Click’s academic credentials include a University of Massachusetts
doctoral dissertation titled “It’s ‘a good thing’: The Commodification
of Femininity, Affluence, and Whiteness in the Martha Stewart
Phenomenon.” Her curriculum vitae says she has a graduate certificate in
“advanced feminist studies.” Advanced. The best kind.
George F. Will writes a twice-weekly column on politics and domestic and
foreign affairs. He began his column with The Post in 1974, and he
received the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1977. He is also a
contributor to FOX News’ daytime and primetime programming. View Archive
University of Missouri law students, who evidently cut class the day the
First Amendment was taught, wrote a social media policy that included
this: “Do not comment despairingly [disparagingly?] on others.” A
grammatically challenged Ithaca College professor produced this cri de
coeur regarding the school’s president: “There have been a litany of
episodes and incidents during [his] tenure here which have led to
frustration because, when brought to his attention, the view of the
protesters is that he has been unresponsive.” Symptomatic of Ithaca’s
intellectual flavor is another professor, who says agriculture is
“capitalist, racialized patriarchy.”
The University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, an irony-free campus, declared
the phrase “politically correct” a microaggression. The master of Yale’s
Pierson College said his regrettable title reminds distressed students
of slavery. Wesleyan University’s student government threatened to cut
the school newspaper’s funding because it published a column critical of
campus leftists. Wesleyan created a “safe space,” a.k.a. a house, for
LGBTTQQFAGPBDSM students (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender,
Transsexual, Queer, Questioning, Flexual, Asexual, Genderf---,
Polyamorous, Bondage/Discipline, Dominance/Submission, Sadism/Masochism).
A Washington State University professor said she would lower the grade
of any student who used the term “illegal immigrants” when referring to
immigrants here illegally. Another Washington State professor warned in
his syllabus that white students who want “to do well” in his
“Introduction to Multicultural Literature” should show their “grasp of
history and social relations” by “deferring to the experiences of people
of color.” Another Washington State teacher, in her syllabus for “Women
& Popular Culture,” warned that students risk “failure for the semester”
if they use “derogatory/oppressive language” such as “referring to
women/men as females or males.”
The University of Tennessee’s Office for Diversity and Inclusion,
worried that students might be uncomfortable with gender-specific
pronouns (“he,” “she,” “him,” “her”), suggests gender-neutral noises
(“ze,” “hir,” “xe,” “xem,” “xyr”). The University of California system’s
sensitivity auditors stipulated that “hostile” and “derogatory” thoughts
include “I believe the most qualified person should get the job” and
“America is the land of opportunity.” The University of Wisconsin at
Stevens Point’s list of racial microaggressions includes “America is a
melting pot” and “There is only one race, the human race.”
Some Johns Hopkins University students proclaimed themselves
microaggressed by the possibility of a Chick-fil-A restaurant on campus.
(Chick-fil-A’s chief executive defines marriage as Barack Obama did
until 2012.) Mount Holyoke College canceled its annual production of
“The Vagina Monologues” because it is insufficiently inclusive regarding
women without vaginas and men who, as the saying goes, “self-identify”
as women. “Gender,” said a student, “is a wide and varied experience,
one that cannot simply be reduced to biological or anatomical
distinctions,” and the show “is inherently reductionist and exclusive.”
Writing in the University of California at Berkeley paper, two
geographically challenged students objected to a class featuring Plato
and Aristotle and other “economically privileged white males from five
imperial countries (England, France, Germany, Italy and the United
States).” A branch of the University of California at Irvine’s student
government passed a resolution against the display of flags. Written by
a student in the School of Social Ecology ( “transformative research to
alleviate social inequality and human suffering”), the resolution said
flags are “weapons for nationalism” and “construct” dangerous “cultural
mythologies and narratives” and “paradigms of conformity” and
“homogenized standards” and interfere with “designing a culturally
inclusive space.”
Students on Columbia University’s Multicultural Affairs Advisory Board
suggested trigger warnings for persons who might be traumatized by
reading, say, Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” wherein some myths portray bad
sexual behavior. But a feminist blog warned that the phrase “trigger
warning” itself needs a warning attached to it because it might remind
people of guns. But, then, the word “warning” might [substitute word for
“trigger”] fright.
So, today give thanks that 2015 has raised an important question about
American higher education: What, exactly, is it higher than?
Read more from George F. Will’s archive or follow him on Facebook.
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