Another campus inquisition
Frank Bruni in the NYT writes:
A white biology professor named Bret Weinstein who identifies himself as a political progressive infuriated many students there, for two principal reasons. One, he objected openly to a proposal that there be an “equity justification/explanation” for all new faculty hires. His stated worry was that race would take precedence over all other considerations.
Two, he challenged a change to an annual event at Evergreen called the Day of Absence. Typically, it invited students and faculty of color to leave campus for talks elsewhere about diversity, sensitivity and related issues. This year, in the wake of Donald Trump’s election, organizers suggested that white students and faculty be the ones to depart instead.
Weinstein said in an email to an event organizer that he saw “a huge difference between a group or coalition deciding to voluntarily absent themselves from a shared space in order to highlight their vital and underappreciated roles” and that same group “encouraging another group to go away.”
“The first is a forceful call to consciousness,” he wrote. “The second is a show of force, and an act of oppression in and of itself.” He added that “on a college campus, one’s right to speak — or to be — must never be based on skin color.”
So a professor said that he thought it was a bad idea to coerce white students and staff to leave campus for a day. Not an unreasonable view. So surely a civil discussion ensured:
It was a reasonable perspective and a prompt for discussion, not fury. It drew fury nonetheless. Dozens of students interrupted one of his classes, screaming at him about racism, white privilege and even white supremacy. The campus police chief advised him, for his own safety, to steer clear of school grounds until tempers cooled. Students demanded that he and two other college employees whom they deemed insensitive to minorities be fired.
“Hey hey, ho ho, these racist teachers have got to go!” they chanted.
If I ran a university and students burst into a class screaming at a professor, I’d expel them from the university.
Confronted with a loud barrage of questions, he asks the students, “Would you like to hear the answer or not?”
“No!” several shout. And there you have it. They’re not conducting an interrogation. They’re staging an inquisition.
They are just another form of totalitarian ideology. And part of the reason why sensible moderate people vote for Donald Trump, because they saw him as the only person who would stand up this nonsense.