HIGHER ED GONE WILD:
.
[ Emphasis {commentary} in red type by Leo Rugiens ]
.
Rob Tracinski wrote yesterday that Mizzou and Yale show why it’s time to burn universities to the ground. http://vlt.tc/26at Today, Joy Pullmann argues that the cause could be in part due to the modern Mommy Wars, and the inability of kids to learn the need to self-regulate. http://vlt.tc/26ch Whatever the case in these specific instances, the overall story from these and other institutions over the course of the past several years provides plenty of examples of what happens when a half century of monolithic progressive leadership for institutions metastasizes, creating a level of thought-policing more invasive than ever, encroaching on every action and aspect of student life.
There is no place for academic freedom in such a place: there is only the constant tug of war over safe spaces, speech codes, thought crimes, infringement, victimhood, and privilege. The students at the University of Missouri the other day were singing “We shall overcome” and chanting calls for “revolution”. The normal rebelliousness of youth is all fine and good, until they start demanding people be the next up against the wall.
And that’s what they did in this case, forcing the University of Missouri system president to resign, for no particular reason and not because he did anything particularly egregious. http://vlt.tc/26bq “Not everyone was pleased with the resignations. W. Dudley McCarter, a former president of the university’s alumni group, said alumni, in calls and emails on Monday, had expressed disappointment in Mr. Wolfe’s decision. “They feel like he was backed into a corner and was made a scapegoat for things he didn’t do,” Mr. McCarter said.” More here. http://vlt.tc/26ba
As David French notes, the idea that President Tim Wolfe was the problem doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. http://vlt.tc/26cb “The idea that Wolfe presided over a racially insensitive educational empire is a sad joke. A timeline of racial outrages in Columbia is sparse indeed, showing two allegations of racial name-calling (on a campus with 35,000 students) and one disturbing incident in which a swastika was drawn on a dorm wall with human waste. No rational, sentient human being believes system presidents can be responsible for what lunatics do with their own feces, or that they can prevent any given student from shouting racial slurs. Not even the worst communist dictatorships could control the speech of all their subjects. Wolfe couldn’t stop drunk undergraduates from hurling insensitive insults even if he established his own gulag and deployed commissars across campus.”
Unfortunately, the blood of the scapegoat shows little sign of satisfying the mob – it never really does. Here’s the Mizzou media professor and others who tried to block a student photographer from covering their safe space event. http://vlt.tc/26bo “On Monday afternoon, activists who had demanded Wolfe’s resignation abruptly demanded that media stop covering their activities on the public campus of the taxpayer-funded university. At the center of those demands was Melissa Click, an assistant professor of mass media within Mizzou’s communications department. In the video below, you can see Click ask for “muscle” to help her bully a Mizzou student into not covering the ongoing mob protests…
“They have an education to get and a life to live,” a woman identified as Janna Basler, the assistant director of Greek Life & Leadership at the university, yelled at the photographer… “You are infringing on what they need right now, which is to be alone,” Basler, a taxpayer-funded university employee, said of the assembled crowd. Basler did not elaborate on how participation in a large, anti-speech mob was consistent with needing to be alone.” The struggle goes on. http://vlt.tc/26c7
No comments:
Post a Comment