Campus Informer - December 20, 2005

Oppressed whites, self-titled “deans,” and more news from schools around the country.

By Andrew Garib, Cornell University and Maggie Brock, University of South Carolina
Tuesday December 20, 2005

Oppressed White People at Winthrop University
Winthrop University

Christine Byington, copy editor at Winthrop University’s student newspaper, wrote a controversial article likening supposed oppression of whites in America today to what African Americans experienced in the Jim Crow South. The Johnsonian published the biracial student’s rambling diatribe against Affirmative Action, the supposed stifling opinions of whites on campus, which concluded by demonstrating a remarkable ability to walk in the tattered shoes of a systematically oppressed population fifty years ago, stating: “I think it’s sad when some whites feel they must stifle their opinions because of the color of their skin. That must be what life was like for blacks in the 1950s.”

Suffice to say many students at the South Carolina institution, which began admitting non-whites in 1964, were up in arms over the insensitive remarks. Students’ reactions to the article spurred the university into holding a forum attended by four hundred students. In fact, the reaction was so severe that it was a factor in Byington’s decision to leave school indefinitely.

Of course, the feedback wasn’t all negative. Most of the comments posted on the article’s page on the Johnsonian website supported Byington’s ignorant message. One observer wrote: “There is more racism towards white people now than there is towards blacks … Excuses aren’t going to get people out of the projects and into jobs, HARD WORK will.” The commenter went on to say “I’ve had my head buried under a rock for the last four months so if any major catastrophes have recently proven me wrong I stand corrected.”*

*- he or she did not actually say this, presumably for lack of space.

It’s Sewanee. We’re Not Racists Anymore
Sewanee: The University of The South

While infuriated conservative racists battle over the display of the rebel flag on campus in Louisiana, other institutions in the American South are getting real with their heritage.

Officials at the University of The South have invested in an extensive marketing campaign designed to attract more high-quality students from across the country, de-emphasizing the institution’s roots in the Confederacy. The school has renamed itself Sewanee: The University of The South, flags of the southern states have been removed from its chapel, and the university’s mace, dedicated to one of the founders of the Ku Klux Klan, is no longer an official symbol of the college, the New York Times reports.

According to the November 30th Times story, the “Southern heritage” used elsewhere to defend obstreperous displays of symbols of slavery and the Jim Crow era now plays second fiddle to the Tennessee school’s competitiveness as a national university. Administrators wish to attract a broader selection of students, including more non-whites, in order to make admissions more selective and to raise the national profile of a university that historically has catered to the white Southern elite. Less than 10 percent of Sewanee’s 1,400 students are non-white; only 4.5 percent attending the liberal arts university are black.

The change, of course, is not without its opponents. Recent graduate Erle J. Newton III wished the University of The South —uh, we mean, Sewanee — would retain its anti-diversity totems. “Those symbols should never have been removed in the first place,” Newton told the Times. “You cannot separate the University of the South from Southern history and from Confederate history.”

We can only guess if Sewanee’s students past and present miss the segregated bathrooms and dining halls from the good old days of the South, too.

Seven Hampton U Students Threatened With Expulsion for Activism
Hampton University

The big story in student activism is at Virginia’s Hampton University where chapters of United Students Against Sweatshops and Campus Anti-War Network, two stalwarts of progressive anti-war politics on campus, were at the wrong end of abused administrative power.

The two groups helped stage HU’s November 2nd walkout protesting the war in Iraq. Student activists also distributed materials criticizing the Bush administration and its stances towards everything from AIDS and Hurricane Katrina to homophobia and Sudan. The event, promoted by radio, flyers, stickers, and word of mouth, included peaceful events like speeches, poetry and musical performances. Apparently that was too much free speech for university police and administrators.

According to two of the activist leaders, HU police booked students for wearing paraphernalia promoting the event and temporarily confiscated the ID cards of three students they identified as leaders. One, Brandon King, claims he was threatened with expulsion by a police officer if he did not give up the names of other members of the organizing group.

Seven Hampton students went before an administrative hearing on December 2nd (postponed from a week earlier after numerous complaints of insufficient notice) and were not able to question the panel or serve as witnesses for each other. One student’s only crime was distributing a handful of flyers for the event.

Despite fears the students would be expelled from the university, six, including King, were sentenced to serve 20 hours of community service, and one was only given a warning. But that’s after immense pressure from students and support from such well-known progressives as Michael Eric Dyson, Jill Nelson and Howard Zinn, according to BlackAmericaWeb.com.

The fact that the historically black university’s administration and board of trustees (whose members have plenty of ties to the Bush administration) even considered disciplining students for “actions to cajole or proselytize students,” “distributing and/or posting unauthorized information,” and “violating the administrative guidelines for student demonstrations” should horrify any advocate of free speech, progressive or conservative.

Liberal Academia’s Final Exam, Without An Editor

We may not like Anne Coulter’s nauseating diatribes, but at least we can say she does it all with style. Sadly, other less witty conservatives have chosen a different route to spread hyperbolic drivel throughout this great land.

Less dynamic than the discography of Kenny G and far more pointless, the website of the Network of College Conservatives (or NCC, “Liberal Academia’s Final Exam”) is part rallying call to all those victims of “higher education’s liberal indoctrination,” part personal fan site of its Colbert-esque creator Christopher Flickinger, with all the most idiotic and played-out talking points from the anti-intellectual right, done with wit and personality so glaringly forced and uninspired that it makes Jonah Goldberg actually look funny and insightful.

Riddled with spelling errors and empty black boxes marked “advertising space,” the NCC makes the phrase “parody of one’s self” laughably insufficient. The website features articles, news and talking points from the world of ultra-conservative “thought” (including articles like “Science Proves Global Warming is A Myth,” “Proof Evolution is Wrong” and “WMD’s [sic] Found In Iraq”) and a password-protected “NCC Classroom”—entirely devoid of content — that is accessible only to the site’s members. It’s a veritable “institute of higher conservative learning” where a recent graduate of Ohio University Scripps School of Journalism proclaims himself “dean.”

There’s also a one-entry Conservative’s Academic Dictionary (“Marxucator: A professor, teacher or instructor who uses his/her position of power and influence to bully, indoctrinate and brainwash students according to a Marxist ideology and/or philosophy”), an empty section encouraging teachers to contribute articles on academic bias, and a list of media references to the Network, complete with four entries (two of which are NCC press releases) since late November.

Despite the lackluster buzz and pitiful content, Flickinger, whose near-parody pictures of himself haunt the NCC’s meager pages, isn’t ashamed to claim an “overwhelming student response” to a network growing “fast and strong.” Then again, he’s also not afraid to stand up to the two monolithic bastions of liberal bias: academia and the media.

Driven by a blinding ego, and producing lame content reminiscent of Students for Academic Freedom, Dean Flickinger is the second-hand car salesman of conservative thought, complete with cheap gimmicks and a cheaper website. That’ll probably make the Network for College Conservatives a hit among conservatives, where he fits right in.

The Principle of Conservatism: Toeing the Line
Columbia University

Campus conservatives at Columbia University hoped that John Ashcroft’s presence would reinforce the image of a conservative voice gaining strength on their New York City campus. Sadly, the best it did was to reinforce the growing suspicion that the conservative movement is all talking points.

Campus Progress blogger Adam Pulver writes, “Although billed as an airing of the ‘principles that underlie conservatism,’ [Ashcroft’s] speech was about one thing and one thing only: 9/11,” as the anti-dancing fundamentalist spoke extensively (nearly exclusively) about his experiences surrounding the infamous terrorist attacks on the United States in 2001. Pulver observed that the former Bush administration attorney general also managed to hit on two or three other points stolen from the personal notes of Republican mastermind Karl Rove: homosexuals don’t need “any special protection,” public officials have the “prerogative” to discuss religion in their capacities, and dissenters from the administration’s line on the war on terrorism were “helping the terrorists.”

A grand day for Columbia’s right-wingers, the intellectually void political spectacle was prefaced with a $1000-a plate dinner with Ashcroft (don’t worry – the student rate was only $275), which reinforces one last conservative mainstay: money talks.