The American Council of
Trustees and Alumni publishes occasional reports on what college students know.
Nearly 10 percent of the college graduates surveyed thought Judith Sheindlin,
TV’s “Judge Judy,” is a member of the U.S. Supreme Court. Less than 20 percent
of the college graduates knew the effect of the Emancipation Proclamation. More
than a quarter of the college graduates did not know Franklin D. Roosevelt was
president during World War II; one-third did not know he was the president who
spearheaded the New Deal. But
it is a little mystery why so many college students are illiterate, innumerate
and resistant to understanding. Let’s look at it.
Student activists at
Brown University complained of emotional stress and poor grades after they
spent months of protesting for various causes. They blamed the university for
insisting that they complete their coursework. One of the objects of their
protest was an op-ed in The Brown Daily Herald, the university newspaper, that
was deemed racist because it defended the celebration of Columbus Day. Brown
University’s faculty recently took care of that and renamed Columbus Day
“Indigenous People’s Day.”
Professor Salvador
Vidal-Ortiz of American University told his students that capitalism
dehumanizes brown people and black people. If his students had one iota of
brains, they might ask him why it is that brown and black people all over the
world are seeking to flee to countries toward the capitalist end of the
economic spectrum rather than the communist end. Campus Reform reports that
Vidal-Ortiz, during the Q&A of a book talk at the University of Virginia,
said he tells his students that though he is light-skinned, he refuses to be
called white. “I will not be labeled as something that I know is violent,” he
said.
College administrators
are short on guts and backbone. But there is a glimmer of hope every now and then. Young
Americans for Liberty at Rutgers University invited Breitbart News’ technology
editor, Milo Yiannopoulos, who is a homosexual, to give a lecture. Yiannopoulos
describes his lecture tour as “The Most Dangerous Faggot Tour.” His lecture was
titled “How the Progressive Left Is Destroying American Education.” There were
about 400 students who attended his lecture, plus there were protesters who
smeared themselves with fake blood. Despite student opposition, Rutgers
University President Robert Barchi called on his university to stand up for
free speech, saying, “That freedom is fundamental to our university, our
society, and our nation.” That was also Yiannopoulos’ message, namely: “The
purpose of the university is to interrogate new ideas, discover ourselves, meet
new people and explore the world. What it ought to be is a free space without
trigger warnings. In my view, anyone who asks for a trigger warning should be expelled.
What they’ve demonstrated is that they are incapable of being exposed to new
ideas.”
Then there is Dr. Everett Piper, president of Oklahoma
Wesleyan University, who bravely told his students, “This is not a daycare.
It’s a university.”
Stanford University’s
board of trustees is to be congratulated for not caving into the diversity
crowd in its selection of highly distinguished scientist Marc Tessier-Lavigne
as university president. Students furiously denounced the choice because
Tessier-Lavigne is a white man. The student-run Stanford Political Journal
wrote: “We believe the Search Committee intended to select the best possible
candidate, and, of course, white men should not have automatically been
precluded from the search. However … it would have been fitting for Stanford to
select a president that deviates from the traditional white, straight, male
mode.”
The University of
Missouri System’s board of curators is also to be congratulated for firing
professor Melissa Click, who was videotaped intimidating a student reporter
during demonstrations that led to the cowardly resignations of the system’s
president, Timothy M. Wolfe, and chancellor, R. Bowen Loftin. Her firing was
not a result of administrator and faculty decency. Private donations had plummeted, and Missouri
lawmakers were proposing an $8 million cut in the system’s budget. That proves
what I have always held: Nothing opens the closed minds of administrators
better than the sounds of pocketbooks snapping shut.
