American University, the Unwitting Microcosm of . . . American Universities

1,099 words

I’ve generally tried to remain measured in my assessment of the growing entitlement of students across college campuses, aided and abetted by a delusional professoriate and administrators taking home six figures to gather data, print reports, and expel male students for having sex, but in light of recent events at Washington, DC daycare – sorry, I meant university, specifically American University – and the fact that I’ve just thrown out my shoulder, I’m not feeling particularly measured. This is copacetic, however, because for these safe space advocates, feelings are all that matter, hence the exhortation by Andrew Anglin for his followers to troll Taylor Dumpson (great name) – the first black some-position-about-diversity-or-something – has been construed as an “online threat.”

These people wail and moan about privilege, and yet at most college campuses, the admissions process is split into two categories: academic merit and cultural “enrichment.” The former category is reserved mostly for whites and Asians, who will be assessed on academic and standardized testing performance, and the latter category will include consideration for “hardship” and whatever convoluted criteria can shoe-horn under-qualified blacks and browns into the higher education system (with generous scholarships and financial aid!).

Due to these “threats” and the discovery of some banana-shaped nooses (their natural shape), a bunch of triggered . . . that’s too easy . . . “students of color” blocked traffic and demanded a town hall meeting where they behaved as you’d expect. Evidently the university responded in an unsatisfactory manner regarding the trolling and the bananas, and an alphabet soup of racial advocacy groups drew up a list of demands, the most egregious of which I am going to list:

• Implementation of training programs for all faculty to “deconstruct oppressive behavior in the classroom”
• Allow students to set the campus budget
• Increase hiring of “professors of color” tenfold (my emphasis) and give incremental raises to tenured “professors of color”
• Increase hiring of “people of color” in general
• “Mandatory trauma informed training specifically on the intersection of race and trauma”
• Establish a student task force to independently rule on racially motivated hate crimes and establishment of curricula (my emphasis)
• Establishment of resource centers for basically any identity you can imagine
• Separate black housing
• “Abandon the white supremacist and colonial curriculum in all schools for a more transformative and decolonized curriculum”

The university, naturally, acquiesced to a number of these demands, in addition to declaring an on-campus café a “sanctuary” for people of color (we are actually fine with self-segregation; it’s the next step before repatriation) and offering extensions on exams with no penalty to “students of color.” Special counselors will be made available to deal with students’ trauma, while at the VA, men and women freshly returned from combat tours of duty wait longer than they’d have to in a Montreal emergency room to see a mental health professional for trauma treatment.

You’ll notice the Leftist quotas and equity engineering all over this list of demands (after students were carrying signs saying “Not Here to Fill Your Quota”). The demands are so tired and nonsensical as to be pitiful, and yet what’s even more pathetic is the university once again kowtowing to teenagers with no perspective, with nothing to say apart from empty slogans and rehashed post-colonial equitable outcome dross. There is no merit involved, you see, only the complexion of your skin. The contradiction between what they are advocating for and the systemic oppression they are supposedly protesting against is so glaringly obvious that only these Heaven’s Gate types can’t see it. It’s so tragically familiar and so sad seeing these kinds of incidents replayed, day after day, week after week, with the same weak capitulations, in almost exactly the same way as Western governments react after yet another Muslim terrorist attack.

Apparently a number of the students went to the financial aid office and requested forms to withdraw from the school in protest, but obviously didn’t sign them. It’s a symbolic gesture as empty as the symbolic hunger strike at Yale and the space between their ears. They’re not going anywhere. They’ve got it too good. These are the most privileged individuals in human history; not only are they protected by the full force of the administrative and legal systems from actual harm, but from imagined psychological harm as well. They have so little in the way of temporal danger, they are set off by Andrew Anglin’s trolling – and fruit. And by the way, they’ve earned this protection based entirely on the complexion of their skin. #BlackPrivilege.

Now, let’s say these students actually decided to withdraw from the University. American would likely go to great lengths, as they already have, to maintain their service industry model and cater to their customers. That said, how many of these “students of color” do you think are actually paying full tuition? Who gives a shit if American “loses their business”? What we’re witnessing, in real time, is the thorough corruption of a great many formerly respectable institutions of higher learning. Leftist dogma has turned what used to be the rigorous pursuit of inquiry and knowledge at the university into a putrefied, noxious stew of regurgitated relativism. This scene has played out on campuses across America with such regularity and with such a similarity in reactions that it’s become a Modern Sisyphus Redux.

If you want so badly to have spaces exclusively for “people of color” and to escape systemic oppression, then leave America and live and study somewhere else, perhaps in the many flourishing socialist sub-Saharan African nations. Venezuela might be a good bet. Things seem to be going well there. You can partake in a decolonized curriculum, though of course you’ll have to learn a new language and avoid the European-influenced schools that either lose or send their best and brightest to the West to get an education. Go for something more culturally authentic as members of the Black Diaspora.

Look, I know it’s difficult here in the United States. White people have been culturally appropriating from personnes de couleur for, like, a hundred years. What if we agreed to stop culturally appropriating from each other? Would that make you happy? Yes? Okay, great!

Anglin had a piece last year about the disparity in inventions between the races, and I think it’s only fitting I end on a highly abridged version: since we are no longer culturally appropriating, now “people of color” can stop using the free market, the alphabet, the Gregorian calendar, representative democracy, philosophy, crowned roads, the Internet, modern plumbing, modern medicine, space travel, and Kool-Aid (I know that one will hurt), and we’ll stop rapping and eating peanut butter!