Western Washington University’s War on History
Social Justice Warriors at WWU seem to have completely forgotten the point of going to college.
Robby Soave writes at the Daily Beast.
The College That Wants to Ban ‘History’
Students at Western Washington University have reached a turning point in their campus’s hxstory. (For one thing, they’re now spelling it with an X—more on that later.) Activists are demanding the creation of a new college dedicated to social justice activism, a student committee to police offensive speech, and culturally segregated living arrangements at the school, which is in Bellingham, up in the very northwest corner of the state.
Students have the right to push for robust changes to campus conditions, of course. But if administrators care about free speech at all, they will ignore these calls to create an almost cartoonishly autocratic liberal thought police on campus.
WWU’s student-activist community—the frightening-sounding Assembly for Power and Liberation—made their demands public last week. The document begins by noting that the activists crashed a Feb. 12 Board of Trustees meeting in order to demand “accountability for the violence enacted on this campus,” and were subsequently surprised that none of the trustees accepted an invitation to come to an assembly meeting to “take accountability.” Pro-tip, students: If you ruin other people’s meetings, don’t be surprised when they skip out on yours.
The most substantial of the activists’ demands is a call for a new college that would essentially train students to become social justice warriors (a term often applied derogatorily by critics of leftism that nevertheless seems appropriate here). WWU must meet the needs of this new “College of Power and Liberation” by immediately hiring 10 faculty members—subject to the approval of student-activists. Finding the money to do all this is solely the responsibility of WWU’s administration, “whose accountability to students should be expressed through their fervent advocacy for students’ needs at both the local and state levels,” according to the activists, who want an extra $50,000 to throw a kick-off party for the new college. Another $45,000 will go toward paying students to do “de-colonial work on campus,” whatever that means.
Comments
Agree but make the tuition $300,000 a year COD, no loans because those who do it will be unreliable when it comes to paying it back. Mom and dad will put a stop to it.
Hysterical! I mean, hxsterical. Now, what do we do with words like sheep, heroin, sheet, shear, shed, etc., etc.
No one will ever hire these students. Just seeing WWU on the résumé would make me stamp a big red NO on the front and mail it back. It would be a please to pay for the return postage.
Perhaps some of these schools should review their admissions policies. It seems that many are admitting far too many students who would rather be somewhere else … maybe some other planet.