“UC Berkeley’s descent from place of learning to victimology hothouse”
Image credit: A Voice For Men
Heather MacDonald is always a voice of
sanity, especially on her frequent topics (racial profiling, cops,
homelessness). At the LA Times yesterday, she had an op-ed on political
correctness and the violent “protests” on the Berkeley Campus. Here are a few
extracts:
Controversy
and unrest has followed Milo Yiannopoulos' speaking tour at U.S. colleges.
Even before
its students rioted in the streets, distressed that right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos would dare to open his
mouth in their presence, UC Berkeley presented a visual illustration of the
academy’s decline from a place of learning to a victimology hothouse. Within
walking distance on the Berkeley campus are emblems of both a vanished academic
world and the diversity-industrial complex that ousted it.
Emblem 1: In
Bauhaus-era typography, a quotation from Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Cardozo
adorns the law school’s otherwise brutalist facade.
“You will
study the wisdom of the past, for in a wilderness of conflicting counsels, a
trail has there been blazed. You will study the life of mankind, for this is
the life you must order, and, to order with wisdom, must know. You will study
the precepts of justice . . .”
. . .
No law school
today, if erecting itself from scratch, would think of parading such
sentiments, first uttered in 1925, on its exterior. Cardozo’s invocation of
“mankind” is alone cause for removal, but equally transgressive is his belief
that there is wisdom in the past and not just discrimination. He presents
learning as a heroic enterprise focused not on the self but on the vast world
beyond, both past and present. Education is the search for objective knowledge
that takes the learner into a grander universe of thought and achievement.
. . .
Emblem 2: UC
Berkeley’s Division of Equity and Inclusion has placed vertical banners across
the main campus reminding students of the contemporary university’s paramount
mission: assigning guilt and innocence within the ruthlessly competitive
hierarchy of victimhood. Each banner shows a photo of a student or a member of
the student-services bureaucracy, beside a purported quotation from that
student or bureaucrat. No rolling cadences here, no exhortations to
intellectual conquest. Instead, just whining or penitential snippets from the
academic lexicon of identity politics.
. . .
Berkeley funds the Division of Equity and
Inclusion with a cool $20 million annually and staffs it with 150 full-time
functionaries: It takes that much money and personnel to drum into students’
heads how horribly Berkeley treats its “othered” students.
. . .
What
this seemingly gratuitous admonition really means is: “Do not violate any
politically correct taboo.”
Cardozo
invited students to the life of the mind. The diversocrats who have
commandeered the American university invite students to a cultural reeducation
camp where they can confess their political sins or perfect their sense of
victimhood.
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