Recently, one of my neighbors saw students
from Elizabethtown College, where I taught for many years, walking down the
street wearing what looked like the puzzle pieces featured as symbols by
Autistic Awareness.
When he asked why they were wearing the all-white
puzzle pieces, one of the coeds proudly explained that they were dramatizing
the outrage of “white privilege.” About 50 students and alums had pledged to
wear these puzzle pins for the next month until everyone became sensitive to
how we were oppressing blacks.
A detailed Daily Mail story
concerning this campaign against “white privilege” informed readers, “The
school’s 203-acre campus is situated in Lancaster County, where according to
the latest US Census data from 2015, more than 90 percent of the population is
white.” The article also featured a picture of our administrative building,
which it noted was packed full of white people. The borough where the president
of the College Democrats wants “to get people to talk openly about race and
white privilege” is likewise overwhelmingly white.
The student handing out puzzle pins poured her heart out to the local CBS
affiliate with these words: “People of color have to wake up every day and
think about race and just about their life. What they have to do to not
negatively impact their life. As a white person, we don’t usually have to think
about that.”
If this young woman is as deeply concerned
as she suggests about the presumed suffering of blacks in the U.S., she should
go somewhere where she can find some to help. The few blacks who live in
Lancaster County don’t need her help and live here precisely because they want
to wake up each morning without having to fear the crime that infests our large
cities.
One of our close friends in the borough
happens to be a black woman, an accountant, who voted for Trump. She scoffs at
the idea that the problems of many black Americans are caused by the “privileges”
enjoyed by whites.
The British paper correctly underlined the
hypocrisy of whites pretending to be advocating for oppressed blacks while
choosing to reside in a lily-white environment. This is the dirty little secret
at Elizabethtown that I indiscreetly revealed in newspaper articles while I
held an endowed chair at the college.
For decades, some of our departments, such
as social work, education, and communications, have been full of young radicals
who opt for a college that is at a safe distance from the minorities whom they
claim to be championing. More than one such student has complained to me: “We
don’t recruit enough students from inner cities to give us diversity.” To that,
I usually responded: “If you want diversity, then why don’t you go to a college
in a black neighborhood, say Temple in Philadelphia?” This invariably caused
the complainer to walk away.
The adolescents sporting the puzzle pins
exemplify the prevailing spirit at the institution, but such grandstanding
hasn’t always been the custom at the college. When I arrived there in the
1980s, Elizabethtown College seemed to be on the right path, educationally,
fiscally, and in most other ways.
The president who hired me, Gerhard
Spiegler, was a German scholar who hoped to make the institution into a
first-rate center of learning. Spiegler hoped to elevate academic standards for
students and faculty alike, and he practiced Teutonic thrift by keeping the
size and salaries of the administration exceedingly low. He was hated by most
of the old guard on campus, particularly by the faculty with terminal master’s
degrees in education who taught their courses, as he would say, on “automatic
pilot.”
Spiegler also hired assistants who were
able to increase the school’s meager endowment and to raise funds for new
buildings. Among the buildings that he arranged to erect were a
state-of-the-art library and an Anabaptist Center, created for the study of the
German Pietist sect that had established Elizabethtown College in 1899. He
worked energetically to retain the loyalty of traditional Brethren alumni and
donors and continued to look upon their coreligionists as a recruiting base.
Unlike much of the faculty, Spiegler leaned
politically toward the Right and had no patience for academic agitators,
especially for troublemakers who combined radical political views with a lack
of professional accomplishments. Unfortunately, the troublemakers outlasted
Spiegler, who laid down his duties in 1996.
During the next two administrations, the
troublemakers got the “hope of change” they thought they wanted. It came in the
form of lavishly salaried administrators (certainly by comparison to those who
preceded them), rapidly escalating tuition, and a shifting emphasis at the
college from a strict Pietist environment to the PC fad du jour, lately
“white privilege.”
I’ve never seen an institution change so
fundamentally within just a few years. The changes came on a number of fronts.
The cultural transformation moved from such
Anabaptist-sounding activities as peace studies, to diversity deans and
diversity studies through consciousness-raising events for blacks, women, and
gays, “safe spaces” for LGBT, and special living arrangements for the
transgendered. Black History and Women’s Months went on interminably and
brought to the college a steady stream of outraged victim speakers.
Such commotions served a practical as well
as ideological function. They gave special prominence to non-ideational
disciplines (that is, majors that are more open to expressing grievances than
teaching written bodies of knowledge), and the social justice exhibitionists
are usually drawn from the students and faculty in these areas. Not
insignificantly, those departments are now the cash cows at the college: they
don’t require much in the way of equipment and have delivered loads of
tuition-bearing students.
Needless to say, there’s no way the college
could return to its historic Anabaptist roots. When I retired six years ago,
less than one percent of the students belonged to one of the German “peace
churches” once heavily represented at the college. The largest religious
denomination among the student body is now Catholic, and our students, faculty,
and administrators all lean strongly toward the left wing of the Democratic
Party.
But the increasing emphasis on PC and
diversity is bringing declining benefits. The incurious students who praise
“hands-on learning” (which typically involves little serious learning) seem
less and less likely to choose a middling college with a price tag of $55,000 a
year. (Even with the negotiated bargains given to prospective buyers, the
average yearly cost is around $30,000.) Students can major in primary
education, social work, and communications for considerably less at a state
institution, where they can also do their demonstrating.
In a nutshell, the college has become too
expensive for what it offers its average student; an erosion of the customer
base has started. Since 2009, the student body has declined from 1,866 to 1,707
and the school is encountering increasing difficulty meeting its annual goal of
450 entering freshmen. This year it trimmed $3 million from its budget.
Justified fear has set in among the faculty that further savings will be
extracted from their salaries and benefits.
It’s hard to imagine why one would go to
Elizabethtown to partake of a uniqueness that no longer exists. If someone
wants safe spaces for LGBT or intends to march against “white privilege,” why
choose an expensive college that’s unknown to people outside our region?
Some things have improved at the college
since I began teaching. There are more buildings and faculty, and the faculty
is, on the whole, better credentialed than it was in the 1980s. Our diligent
students are more likely to be accepted into the better professional schools
and graduate programs than thirty years ago. Elizabethtown College has also in
recent years produced Rhodes and Fulbright Scholars, an accomplishment that
should give it far better bragging privileges than social justice
grandstanding.
The school could have made those
improvements without the disastrous decisions. It could have kept costs lower,
avoided administrative bloating, been more selective about the students it
admitted and aimed at the academic excellence that always seemed pushed to the
back in official statements about the college’s goals.
Administrators and their faculty enablers
could have built on their traditional Protestant, regional heritage. Instead,
they exchanged that heritage for the chance to become a caricature of Berkeley.
The college is now hurting.
Reprinted with the author’s permission.
Paul Gottfried [send him mail] is Horace Raffensperger
Professor Emeritus of Humanities at Elizabethtown College and author of Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt, The Strange Death of Marxism, and Conservatism in America: Making Sense of the American
Right. His latest books are Fascism: The Career of a Concept and Encounters: My Life with Nixon, Marcuse, and Other
Friends and Teachers.
Copyright © 2017 The James
G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal and Paul Gottfried
Previous article by Paul Gottfried: You “F” Word
