In the modern list of cultural crimes, “cultural appropriation” can rank from a white person in blackface to someone wearing a sombrero, and I suspect the list will continually grow until a Caucasian singing a spiritual is handcuffed and dragged off stage by Diana Moon Glampers herself. She sent out an alert not long ago to warn that there had been an act of “cultural appropriation” on campus, and that it was being investigated.įirst, “cultural appropriation” is a term that didn’t exist just a few years ago but now has been elevated to a Crime Against Humanity. We now have a Diversity Officer who, in reality, is the chief political officer on campus, and she is trying to turn as many students as possible into campus activists ready to pounce at the next alleged injustice. Unfortunately, the university where important things once mattered is being transformed into a place where everything is politicized, and a politicized place is a sick society that, in your words, lives by lies. For my entire career here, I have had students of all backgrounds, races, nationalities, and orientations and have found the experience very rewarding and would do it again. Non-elites tend not to become activists because they are not full of themselves or believe the rest of the world exists for their amusement. I prefer the non-elite students to elites, who have a ridiculous sense of self-entitlement and who always are looking for new and better ways to be offended. (That is fine college is not for everyone, and I strongly believe that there are many good jobs in the trades that for many people would be much more fulfilling than becoming a bureaucrat, which is many graduates become these days. In my own teaching experience here, I have had students who probably could have done well anywhere and others that probably didn’t belong in college at all. Many are first-generation college students, a good portion of our students are African American, and our entrance standards are not difficult. The curriculum was a fairly classical one in that and students received the kind of educations that were not markedly different than what previous generations had enjoyed. This was a university that while its faculty leaned left (And what faculty at a state university does NOT lean left?), there still existed a commitment to the last vestiges of academic liberalism, free speech, and real diversity.
I’m in my last semester at my college, having started here decades ago, when it was a more open, more tolerant place.
He has given me permission to post it, with the proviso that I slightly edit it to preserve his identity: I received this message yesterday from an occasional correspondent, a veteran college professor.
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