Will Dan Savage tell Wolfe that this gets better too? It was Michael Sam’s old school, after all.
Despite the fact that Michael Sam has publicly acknowledged he “experienced no racial issues” at the University of Missouri, “Mizzou” has been ground zero for a recent racial uproar.
The football team joined a strike to get eight demands met. What demands? Here’s a list. They demanded, among other things, a handwritten note from Tim Wolfe acknowledging his white male privilege and removal of Wolfe from his position, with any replacement to be chosen by a “collective” which shall include students among its number.
The list meanders on, thick with buzzwords like “oppression, awareness, inclusion, marginalized, diversity and social justices centers”. Also standing out in that list were words like “commitment, amendment, must, enforces, mandatory, all, retention rates, sustain, increase funding, hiring, awareness, resources, personnel.
Ironically: just last week, we ran a story featuring a school just 122 miles down the road from Mizzou. Harris-Stowe State College was just slapped with a $4.8 Million dollar fine for acting on exactly the same sort of impulse. At Harris-Stowe, punitive action (read: wrongful dismissal) was taken against duly-hired teachers for the unforgivable fact that they were white.
What we are watching is the self-destructing of a school. They just don’t realize it yet. What are they asking for? Improved retention? You mean, help them not drop out of school?
Will inflating the cost of education with mandatory racial sensitivity training “retain” them, or make school more affordable to the single mom, or inner-city youth struggling to afford classes that might be their only shot at bettering their futures?
Will going on a melanin witch-hunt magically cure the racial tensions you claim exist? Hardly.
The very use of “privilege” as a pejorative is itself racist, because it repeats the mistake bigots everywhere make: treating individuals as groups, as though one white person were completely interchangeable with any other.
What these students haven’t figured out is that if you make demands on the spending, you prevent it from being used elsewhere … perhaps student assistance, or tools to help people with learning disabilities complete the courses. Or reduce legitimate courses available. Or you raise the cost of tuition until people study elsewhere. This really is lose-lose.
Silly statist, you are demanding and empowering a new Authoritarian to take the place of the guy you just ousted.
And you actually want him (her?) to enforce, compel, insist, and otherwise make the students and staff at the University enforce your worldview. Better men and women than you have taken the high road: persuasion. Nope, you prefer “OBEY”.
These students have just shown America that if you can hold college football hostage, management will capitulate — however Pie-In-The-Sky those demands might have been.
And now we can expect this tactic more often. Because radicals aren’t afraid to fight dirty to advance their agenda.
