We fetishize elite colleges, but these past few weeks students on the University of Missouri’s football team have led a master class on how to drive change (that their peers at schools that are allegedly the cradles of our future leaders might learn something from). I take a look at that in U.S. News today:
William Buckley said he’d rather be governed by the first 2000 names in the Boston phone book than the faculty of Harvard. After the past few weeks on America’s college campuses, I think I’d like to take my chances with the University of Missouri’s football team.
Around the country students are calling for changes at colleges and universities. Some of the demands for change are more than reasonable – if not overdue. Others clearly trample free speech and are out of place in an intellectual environment.
But one protest stands out – the actions of the some of the University of Missouri’s football team…
Please stipulate that you agree with this post before clicking here to read the entire thing. And tweet your protest strategies to me @arotherham.
Sorry, I don’t agree with your argument. The president of a major state university was forced to resign on the basis of a handful of unproved allegations. One black professor claimed that she had been yelled at by racists in pick-up trucks. Why is it the responsibility of the university president to prevent such things? The difference between Mizzou and the Ivy League is that in Mizzou vigilante “justice” succeeded, while in the Ivy League administrators were harassed but not pushed from office. The new wave of political correctness on campuses is simply Kafka writ large: to be charged with a crime (“thought crimes” preferred, of course) is to be proven guilty of that crime.
Furthermore, Mr. Rotherham, you engage in politically correct posturing yourself, praising the black athletes of Mizzou who act, in contrast to the rich white boys at Harvard, who only talk. White guilt never dies.
Buckley also lamented:
In 1967, William F. Buckley, an alumnus then running an insurgent campaign for a seat on the Yale Corporation, declared that Yale had ceased to be the “kind of place where your family goes for generations” and had been transformed into an institution where “the son of an alumnus, who goes to a private preparatory school, now has less chance of getting in than some boy from P.S. 109 somewhere.”
It is a shame that “real” students have less power that athletes, many of whom wouldn’t even qualify to enter the colleges they attend if they were not given preferential treatment.