Yesterday’s Tom Woods Letter, which all the influential people receive every weekday. Be one of them.
Meanwhile, as Donald Trump morphs into Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton before our eyes, the campuses are as loopy as ever.
CampusReform.org reports that students at Salem College have presented the administration with an “ultimatum” regarding the intolerable atmosphere of oppression that exists on campus.
This is how they characterize life under a typical left-leaning college administration.
“Pay attention,” the ultimatum reads. “It’s past time you take steps to implement the rights, policies, and demands necessary to alleviate the inequity and discrimination that permeate every facet of Salem College.”
I’m sure “inequity and discrimination” permeate “every facet” of the college. That sounds like something a reasonable person (as opposed to a hysteric) would say, doesn’t it?
One demand is that transgender students who “identify” as women be admitted to the all-female college.
Another is that the faculty undergo mandatory “diversity training” every year, which means: regurgitate a serious of dubious leftist propositions as if no other opinion could exist. For anyone who disagrees with us is an oppressor!
You can read the whole ten-page statement if you want to gouge your eyes out.
The college’s president and vice president issued a statement that read, in part, “We care deeply about our students, and we acknowledge the importance of the concerns that they have raised. We commit to working with students, faculty, staff, administration, and the boards in order to respond to the call to action.”
Other statements were forthcoming from the college; all of them spoke in solemn tones about the grave importance of the issues raised by the students.
My response would have been:
Salem College is always happy to entertain suggestions for improvement. But if you can honestly look around our campus and see nothing but inequity and oppression, here is the door.
If you’re genuinely interested in what an authoritarian campus environment might actually be like, I invite you to do something you are unaccustomed to: imagining yourselves in someone else’s shoes.
What must it be like to be anything other than a left-liberal on a college campus today?
Next to zero faculty members have any sympathy for you, and most can’t stand the sight of you.
Next to none of the speakers who come to campus reflect your views, and of the small handful who do, they come in fear of being terrorized and shouted down.
You don’t even dare dissent from the campus orthodoxy. Dissident voices are punished and shunned.
That kind of environment, incidentally, is precisely what you want more of at Salem College, so that you may be affirmed in all your existing views and demonize all dissidents.
That will not happen under my watch.
Your ultimatum now rests in my circular file, where it surely belongs.
By the way, you know where you won’t have to deal with crazy authoritarian students?
On vacation with me:
Potpourri:
(1) Next month I’m speaking in Seattle (Mises Institute) and Orlando (Republican Liberty Caucus Biannual Convention). I’ll be updating my events page accordingly.
(2) “I’ve built something great online but I don’t know how to get visitors!” Indeed. Today I wrote about the similar problem Roger Waters had when he first toured without Pink Floyd. At the end is my suggestion for more traffic. Link: http://happyearner.com/heres-what-humiliation-looks-like/
