LOLOLOL. And the university is San Diego State! Feast your eyes! For years, it has consistently been one of the shittiest, drugs-guns-frats-and-jocks-choked scandals in America.
One of the more notorious drug raids in this country took place at SDSU’s well-armed Theta Chi fraternity. One of UD‘s colleagues left her university to last barely six years as SDSU’s president, his unflagging personal greed an insult to students, faculty, alumni, and of course the state legislature.
It’s such a bad school. UD‘s so not surprised it hired people to add segregation to its stupidities and misdeeds.
September 26th, 2020 at 6:35AM
No, there’s no defending this or any of SDSU’s other excesses. When I was growing up in Southern California, kids who wanted to major in inebriation often chose San Diego State or one of the Arizona schools (the ones who wanted to major in THC made their way to Santa Cruz).
But the IHE article is more than a bit over the top. “Is the answer to getting beyond racism policing the color line with all the rigor of the post-Civil War South?” Really? Policing the color line with all the rigor of the post-Civil War South? Does he know how the color line was actually policed back then (hint: it was a bit nastier than exclusionary seminars). The author either needs to consult with a scholar of that era (or someone who lived through it; a lot of them are still alive), or he needs to choose his hyperbole a bit more carefully. (He also doubles down by making an additional analogy to Jim Crow.)
One real “tell” in the piece (since we’re going with gambling analogies) is the use of Dr. King’s “content of their character” line. I know nothing about the author’s politics, but this line has been dragged out by disingenuous conservatives ever since they decided to quit fighting the MLK holiday and deconstruct his words instead. I’m not saying Dr. King would have approved of what SDSU tried to do, but he almost certainly wouldn’t consider life in 2020 to be the fulfillment of his dream.
September 26th, 2020 at 7:18AM
TAFKAU: Agree with all that. The IHE piece admirably took on the absurdly knotty (and often nutty) issue of race in academia (and the larger world) without working its way very far out of the knot — other than pointing out ways in which the Krug fiasco highlights absolutist/social constructionist contradictions at the heart of identity politics.
But oh how my heart broke when I made my way through this zomboid effort to respond to the opinion piece! I won’t read it again – too triggering – but when something’s so badly written as to be impossible to understand from sentence to sentence, you wonder why the people in this fight are (to quote the Genius of the Carpathians) not sending us their best.
I think MLK would have been appalled at segregationist safe-space self-esteem sessions.