Agree that it is hard to find someone who founded a college that no one could object to. One of my kids attended a college that was founded by a slave owner, and named after a friend of his who was also a slave owner. The other one went to a college founded with the money from copper mines used to supply to Nazi Germany.
well said, @katiamom, particularly the last paragraph. God help us when young folks cease to care about those thorny issues, because too many of the rest of us sure don’t.
Both in the 60’s and now the protesters often are saying “I disagree with you so I am not going to allow you to speak.”
But they’re not taking on “the anti-racism cause” except in their own minds and, IMHO, largely as a series of ill-conceived gestures. For example, demanding Woodrow Wilson be removed has no relation to what anyone is actually doing to another person in the present. Or at Yale, demanding that Halloween costumes be policed and subject to discipline or that people be fired for arguing for free speech because this somehow violates their conception of a “safe space” - and as to that, see the thread I started about how Jews are being treated on campuses. The demand to rewrite history to exclude figures who were in their times racist is absurd and Talibanesque: get rid of Wilson, get rid of Yale’s name, get rid of all these “symbols” of the past, that’s all a giant, poorly reasoned, intellectually vapid approach to racism and to the struggles that people actually face.
That some kids at Amherst present a list of even more absurd demands speaks to how far they are removed from the actual struggles that actual people face in life to eat, to get work, to keep warm, as they argue about a mascot’s reference to a guy who has been dead since 1979 and who may not have ordered that smallpox infected blankets be given to anyone (and history says only 2 blankets were handed out at 1 fort). Better just to erase him from history. Better just to erase all of American history and rewrite it as “all those white bad people came and killed the natives and brought in African slaves” and say f*** to the rest.
I spent years studying Christian history, mostly interested in the period which led up to the Councils that created the “creed”. I’m Jewish. From my perspective, a huge majority of the Christian leadership were among the worst people in history: they burnt Jewish books, sometimes burnt Jewish people, destroyed Jewish sites and made others into Christian sites. Ever study the Crusades from a Jewish perspective? Can anyone explain why they spent so much time killing Jews (and in the 4th Crusade, killing other Christians)? But I study that stuff because it’s history, because it’s of importance in this world today. Another interest is the Roman Empire, particularly the period of its formation and then its first “highpoint” under a series of Emperors who a) had gay relationships and b) killed a ton of people and c) are sometimes remembered in both the Christian and Jewish traditions as monsters. I don’t study it to say, “There be monsters” but rather to view what they did and how they lived in the contexts of their times and for the reality of what they did versus myth, etc. But instead let’s get rid of Wilson because he was a racist and let’s forget that he tried to create a lasting world peace with the League of Nations. All that matters is he makes someone “uncomfortable” in their “safe space”. Bleep that. I don’t revere George Patton, who was a terrible racist and anti-semite, but he was a terrific general who helped us win the bleeping war.
@sherpa - i was referring to other campuses like Mizzou where athletes threatened not to play.
Also: I guess Princeton will have to remove that Woodrow Wilson Princeton in the Nation’s service prompt from its application supplement now.
It takes more sophisticated and critical thinking to be able to understand that a person could have been a racist and still have done things that deserve recognition. Very few people of the past could pass the PC test today.
Perhaps these students should be assigned a paper along those lines perhaps prognosticating on that which is considered acceptable behavior today that may not be looked on so favorably in the future.
“But they’re not taking on “the anti-racism cause” except in their own minds” @Lergnom – that may very well be the case in certain instances. These are still very young people, they get caught up in the emotion of the thing and may act irrationally. (Hey, adults are guilty of the same.) The wise university will turn these situations into teaching moments, and acknowledge the protest while also encouraging its faculty to actually, you know, TEACH their students about the more nuanced historical, social and political context of their cause. That’s how I’d like Princeton to react. That’s how I’d like all universities to react.
I think what concerns some people about a few of these protests is crystalized in what one Princeton protester said:
It seems to me that in the past most major campus protests have campaigned against the “other;” South African apartheid, fossil fuel, gun and tobacco companies, various foreign wars, sweatshop labor, etc… While this current series of uprisings may have started as protests directed outwards (combatting violence against innocent African Americans) they seem to have developed a slightly cannibalistic element which creates an “us versus them” dynamic within the campus. So while these protesters may have legitimate complaints they can also be seen as biting the hand that feeds them and sowing campus discord. I’m not saying the protesters are wrong in their larger messaging. I can just see how some students and faculty could easily feel unjustly attacked simply for the color of their skin.
When one is a college student the opportunity to experience cognitive dissonance, perhaps for the first time, is perhaps at its greatest in all the time one will spend on this earth. Parenting can shake things up as well, but I think the life and mind of the college student, open and exposed to figures, ideas, principles and dialectics that may have seemed inviolable until the moment on campus when you realize each of those things had a beginning, a growth and development and a trajectory taken to become imbedded in our lore, our history, our collective mind.
I think all students will examine and push back against everything that was once merely a part of a jingoistic fabric that draped their tongues in a forced recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance, and (sometimes really, really bad) renderings of the Star Spangled Banner. They recited and sang because it was the church into which they were raised; they did not know they had a choice.
When a student begins to try to reconcile his/her freedoms and opportunities, her memories of her particular home community and information of the interactions laced with indignities that her group has faced, the point at which this information meets can find the student reacting both viscerally and emotionally. The hurts and indignities need not be limited to a group with which one identifies, either.
The one thing many of them have in common is their suspicion and indictment that it is the adults who have come before them that are the group who has not done enough to truthfully, thoughtfully, comprehensively paint a picture of the road walked to now as a member of this society. This is more the youth vs. all those who are no longer.
College kids are o p e n. They are excited and their minds and spirits accessible to just about everything. They will angry, they will cause foment, they will create poetry and dance and make discoveries about themselves that also challenge their previously unexamined ideas of self.
The ideals they come to espouse today, in these moments, are really questions. They are questioning.
Love this.
The kids that are in the President’s office reflect a massive failure by the admissions office. Hopefully a head or two will roll there.
But what about the vast majority of college students who are too busy trying to complete their degrees and work part time to support themselves and to minimize their debt burden? They do not have the luxury of being supported by wealthy parents or the scholarships drawn from multi billion dollar endowments.
This whole discussion, especially the utopian sociology is quite elitist.
My oh my. Discomfort at Princeton, long known as “the Northern School for Southern Gentlemen.” Oh, the irony.
I reconciled the flawed character of notable persons with my love of history a long time ago. Washington owned slaves (and I am not sure he freed them upon his death). Jefferson’s foibles are well known. John Quincy Adams was arguably ambivalent about slavery despite his role in the Amistad case; nevertheless he loved to rile pro-slavers in Congress. A favorite critic and commentator of mine, H.L. Mencken, had feet of clay; he was a typical racist of his day. Margaret Mitchell endowed scholarships for Black college students, as did Mark Twain, but Mitchell refused to be a roommate with to black classmate at her own college in the north. Twain’s use of crude language regarding Black folks was common. Susan B. Anthony had white supremacist views similar to Woodrow Wilson. F.D. Roosevelt, the greatest president of the 20th century, imprisoned the grandparents and parents, all innocent, of many of my childhood friends. What are these students today to do? They should speak out, comment eloquently and write forcefully, if any discriminatory colloquial views are revered today. Screaming and hurling insults doesn’t enlighten, elevate or persuade anyone.
Sure thing. Since law students know all about equitable compensation, they should be willing to pay the descendants the present value of the land that was donated and have that added to their tuition. Fair enough, right?
Add me to the parade.
Of course, racism was mainstream up to WW2, and only slowly got pushed back over the next several decades. So most historical persons were racist to some degree.
How did students with such a low level of critical thinking skills get into Princeton?
I could see how this behavior could cause colleges to pull back from working hard to diversify their student body. That woyld be a misfire of huge proportions by the protestors if that were the end result of their actions now. I can’t see colleges being eager to invite more students who are behaving like this onto campus.
“How did students with such a low level of critical thinking skills get into Princeton?”
Princeton does lower the bar for URM.