“Racial Hysteria Triumphs on Campus”

Read Heather Mac Donald’s column at City Journal.

Imagine an Ivy administration that encouraged frat boys and athletes to abuse women and get into trouble with the law. That’s analogous to the current situation, the only differences being the identities and characteristic weaknesses of the members of the respective groups being egged on and suppressed. The young hysterics desperately need guidance from mature adults who have their best interests at heart. Instead the system their parents trust and pay an arm and leg for indulges, out of cowardice or ideological zeal, the kids’ worst impulses.

Institutional racist or anti-female conspiracies, the figments of fevered leftist/feminist imagination, have never been less frequent, but anti-intellectual and anti-male conspiracies are everywhere.

The college administrators will do fine. The victimized students, mostly men, will learn hard lessons. Many, though not all, will emerge stronger for it. But many of the young leftist women, and some of the men, who have been overprotected and fed lies their entire lives, will have significant difficulty functioning in the real world.

If DCFS employees encourage or look the other way at the corruption of children it’s a scandal. How is it different when university administrators do the same thing with vulnerable young adults?

18 thoughts on ““Racial Hysteria Triumphs on Campus””

  1. I think sane-thinking people need to take the language back and refer to these groups not as social justice warriors, but as the cultural Marxists they are. Hiding behind the word justice is much easier than the word Marxist.

    Once that is established, we can ask the right questions, like ‘if marxism’s history has only produced the unhealthiest economies in the world, how can it be expected that cultural Marxists will produce healthy societies’

    Call a misanthrope a misanthrope.

  2. I agree with Peter completely, on both points.

    How is it different when university administrators do the same thing with vulnerable young adults?
    Because it’s politically useful to people currently in power. The students are expendable pawns.

  3. “As your position as master, it is your job to create a place of comfort and home for the students that live in Silliman.

    It is not about creating an intellectual space. It is not. Do you understand that? It’s about creating a home here. You are not doing that. You’re going against that.”

    I think we had this discussion recently about Ivy League schools and their powerful, undemocratic influence in society. Yale has an endowment of something like $24 billion, and they’ve used all that cash to create this poisonous environment. We now see the “sports-industrial complex” doing the same thing.

  4. Harvard and Yale and other well-endowed institutions are essentially hedge funds with universities attached.

    Big-time college sports is based on a conspiracy by which universities and professional sports teams collude to deny market compensation to talented athletes at the height of their abilities.

    Research universities are bureaucratic machines for extracting cash from govts and other funding institutions.

    Undergraduate education doesn’t rank very high in any of this.

    Much unbundling could profitably be done here.

  5. “Undergraduate education doesn’t rank very high in any of this.”

    This is key. Undergraduates get almost nothing of value from universities anymore.

    The “student athletes” are getting good coaching in preparation for a pro football career. That’s one reason why college coaches are paid so much. It is a bit like CEOs’ pay scale.

    To take one example that I know well, Clay Matthews was walk-on at USC where I attended and have had season football tickets for 56 years. He was too small but wanted to play and his father was a former pro plus he had an uncle who had been a pro football player.

    Matthews attended Agoura High School in Agoura Hills, California, where he played for the Agoura Chargers high school football team. Physically, Matthews was a late bloomer. His father was the team’s defensive coordinator, but declined to start his son because he was physically undersized. Matthews began developing physically in his senior season, but only garnered interest from Division I FCS schools and local community colleges.[1] He has described his own recruiting status out of high school as “not applicable.”[2] Like his father and uncle, Matthews opted to attend the University of Southern California with hopes of becoming a walk-on for the Trojans football team.

    After a college career at SC, he has been an all-pro for years. The college teams function as minor leagues but those players are not worth as much as they think. For example, Matt Lienert was the Heisman Trophy winner as SC quarterback but failed in his pro career. The second string SC quarterback, who was never a starting player and was always behind Lienert, is still playing in the NFL and is a starter with Dallas.

    Those Missouri players way over value themselves and will never play pro football. Good college programs, and there are not that many, maybe 30, create those pro players. Black players especially benefit

  6. The Russian general Suvorov has been quoted as saying:

    “Hard training, easy combat. Easy training, hard combat”

    Excessive focus on “comfort” in college will usually lead to a very uncomfortable later life.

  7. The parents of these pathetic children, who are members of the Coastal leftist upper class, raised them to be little snots. Their teachers in K-12 and college have preached Gramscian Marxism. And they are precisely what they were raised and taught to be.

    Behold America, the next generation of your rulers.

  8. “Students at Yale, Missouri Beg College Administrators to Play Mommy and Daddy: In loco parentis returns: Yale and Mizzou students want to be treated like kids again” by Robby Soave|Nov. 9, 2015
    https://reason.com/blog/2015/11/09/yale-missouri-students-speech-college

    “Perhaps the most astonishing thing about these students’ censorious actions is how profoundly conservative they are. By communicating an expectation that their master or president protect them from unsightly Halloween costumes, or promise them no more hurtful words will be said at their expense, students are essentially calling for a return to campus life under in loco parentis. They reject not merely a free and open campus dialogue, but adulthood itself.

    “A controversial column in The Yale Daily Herald makes this rejection undeniable:

    It’s unacceptable when the Master of your college is dismissive of your experiences. The Silliman Master’s role is not only to provide intellectual stimulation, but also to make Silliman a safe space that all students can come home to. His responsibility is to make it a place where your experiences are a valid concern to the administration and where you can feel free to talk with them about your pain without worrying that the conversation will turn into an argument every single time. We are supposed to feel encouraged to go to our Master and Associate Master with our concerns and feel that our opinions will be respected and heard.

    But, in his ten weeks as a leader of the college, Master Christakis has not fostered this sense of community. He seems to lack the ability, quite frankly, to put aside his opinions long enough to listen to the very real hurt that the community feels. He doesn’t get it. And I don’t want to debate. I want to talk about my pain.

    The writer, Jencey Paz, goes on to make an explicit comparison between the role of the college master in her life and that of her father:

    My dad is a really stubborn man. We debate all the time, and I understand the value of hearing differing opinions. But there have been times when I have come to my father crying, when I was emotionally upset, and he heard me regardless of whether or not he agreed with me. He taught me that there is a time for debate, and there is a time for just hearing and acknowledging someone’s pain. ”¦

    Christakis hasn’t checked in on any of us. He hasn’t given us any indication that he is going to or wants to heal the community. If you know I’m in pain and you aren’t doing anything to try to help me, then how can you be sorry? Christakis is the Master of Silliman College, it is his job to take care of us, and he is failing.

    “The op-ed is easy to criticize””although it’s not okay to criticize it, according to The Herald’s editors, who eventually took it down “at the author’s request,” because it was reaching an audience outside its intended readership (Yale students).

  9. Those Missouri players way over value themselves and will never play pro football.

    This is why I believe these “student” players should be paid. End the charade. Call a spade a spade. They’re really minor league players.

    The free market will then put the correct value on their status and contribution. Their social influence will be transparent for anyone who wants to participate in this system, so there won’t be any illusions or surprises about what this is.

  10. It is difficult to respond to an outburst like that. If she is your daughter, let her have a good cry, give her a hug and a kiss, tell her you love her, and send her to bed.

    If it she your girlfriend, you let her have a good cry, while you stand there and think to yourself: “Dude, you need to dump this girl, pronto, she is crazy. But, man, the break up will be a $h;+ storm. Maybe I should wait until I leave for the summer and split up via e-mail.”

    If you are the provost of Yale or some academic officer like that, you must think this is really embarrassing. Our students have the emotional maturity of middle schoolers. What we need to do is introduce a mandatory course for freshmen in which they study the Manual of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations.

    I think Dennis Miller put it best: “Life is tough, wear a cup”

  11. “warrior”?! Now that is funny. Somebody should write a song. Too bad Gilbert and Sullivan are not with us .

    ‘she was the very model of a whiny wimpy warrior
    she shrieked so loud the sound was heard by dwarves who dwell in Moria.

  12. Here is a chunk out of the next exhibit:

    “Person Up, Yale Students: The problem with the protests isn’t that they’re radical, but that they’re not radical enough”
    By Mark Oppenheimer
    http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/194874/person-up-yale-students

    A number of years ago, I was talking to a brilliant undergraduate and feminist at Yale College, where I teach English. She was discussing something sexist and demeaning that had happened at one of Yale’s several off-campus fraternities””sexism is such a predictable fact of life at frats that I can’t even remember what the particular demeaning act was. It might have been a grope, a slur, some form of mockery. Anyway, the student was wondering aloud what the school’s response should be. I offered some sort of suggestion, probably having to do with which dean or committee she should take her complaint to. But then I added that what would really send a message to the fraternity would be if women organized a boycott of its parties. Imagine if the message went out that the brothers of Scamma Scamma Gamma weren’t worth women’s time, that the women on campus had decided that any guy who belonged to that fraternity was either a sexist or an enabler of sexism, not worth the time of any self-respecting Yale woman. Imagine if that fraternity’s parties became boring, all-male sausage-fests! Wouldn’t that be something?

    The student thought about it, agreed that that would be something terrific, but then said it could never happen. Women would never be able to make common cause that way. They could never achieve that kind of solidarity. The fraternity’s parties were too socially important. Maybe some women could be persuaded to skip the parties, but the hotties, the athletes, and the sorority girls would all keep going. And eventually others would return. A boycott was a nice pipe dream, she said, but impossible to achieve.

    The old saw is that when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Oppenheimer’s hammer is the one that goes with a sickle. To him, every problem looks like an opportunity for community organizing. Clearly, the girl is smarter than he is, and has a better sense of what the world is like. A moments reflection yields the real correct response to the girl’s problem, depending, of course, on context. If it were a grope, a slap across the face is called for, or perhaps a drink in the face. Mockery, OTOH, calls for witty repartee. One of the problems that campus leftists have created for themselves is an inability to discern the difference between real problems and minor annoyances. That and they have no sense of humor, so witty repartee is not in their kit bag.

    The Oppenheimer article is just packed with revealing details. I’ll be back.

  13. >>It might have been a grope, a slur, some form of mockery…One of the problems that campus leftists have created for themselves is an inability to discern the difference between real problems and minor annoyances.

    Agreed. And I’ll add that women are guilty of all of the above short of the groping. Also, the current meme on the feminist left is Lysistrata, that is women withholding sex and companionship, as a technique for getting whatever they want. There’s a plan.

  14. This has been initiated and sustained by certain faculty members (who show up at the end of the day). You see this a lot. The young woman who was kidnapped and killed by ISIS a while back was nurtured by an extremely radical faculty member at Northern Arizona University. The professor put here in contact with the appropriate radical action group who sent her to the Syria and deliberately into harms way. These hard leftists in the faculty are all over the US, not necessarily in large numbers but they fit in well with the generally liberal staff. You see their bush league relatives in public high schools all over the nation. Not devoted to their important job of teaching the kids, but very devoted to introducing leftist thought. These get caught more often by parents and embarrassed school boards. Enforcing professionalism in the faculties is the only way to stop this.

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