The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

The Campus Special Snowflake™ Blizzard

Posted on | February 5, 2017 | 1 Comment

We must protect their sensitive feelings:

  • A statue of Christopher Columbus will be removed from the campus of Pepperdine University because about two dozen students protested that the status is “a celebration of genocide and racial oppression.” The statue was originally donated to the school in 1992 — the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ voyage of discovery — by “Italian-American friends” of the university.
  • An email listserv for Women’s Studies academics erupted in controversy over a discussion of pregnancy, with one “transman” demanding that scholars boycott the list. The quarrel on the WMST-L list started when a discussion of an upcoming panel (“Pregnancy Without Women”) was criticized by Australian professor Sheila Jeffreys, a longtime critic of the transgender movement: “Only women get pregnant and it serves women not at all to pretend this is not true!” Grand Valley State University professor Cael Keegan erupted indignantly: “The lack of moderator intervention to stymie these kinds of oppressive, exclusionary assertions is also unacceptable. . . . I no longer have the patience to deal with this this kind of ‘feminism’ or this debate over my own worthiness or materiality as a human being.”
  • Barnard College plans to hire “10 new faculty members from underrepresented groups in 5 years.” An elite private women’s college where annual tuition is $50,394, Barnard’s Task Force on Diversity and Inclusion declared its goal as improving “representation, inclusion, and social justice” on campus.
  • An editorial in University of California-Berkeley student newspaper claimed that the campus riots which caused the cancellation of a speech by Milo Yiannopoulos was a “grand display” of freedom of speech. In a bizarre exercise of pretzel logic, the Daily Cal editorial huffed: “Yiannopoulos and his repulsive demeanor never belonged here. He isn’t a productive member of society, and he certainly doesn’t reflect the type of respectful and educated discourse UC Berkeley promotes.”

So, smashing windows and assaulting people is a “grand display” of free speech, but the urbane British journalist has a “repulsive demeanor”? An elite women’s college is hiring faculty by racial quotas? Saying that only women get pregnant is “oppressive” and “unacceptable”?

If Christopher Columbus had known what a mess Americans would make of their education system, maybe he would have stayed home.



 

Category: Education

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One Response to “The Campus Special Snowflake™ Blizzard”

  1. News of the Week (February 5th, 2017) | The Political Hat
    February 5th, 2017 @ 4:12 pm

    […] The Campus Special Snowflake™ Blizzard We must protect their sensitive feelings […]