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Dishonor on
the campus
Suzanne
Fields (archive)
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when you think the politically correct clowns on the campus can't get any more
ridiculous, they shoot another live white man out of a canon. Steve Hinkle
is an undergraduate at California Polytechnic University. He has been found guilty
in the campus kangaroo court of posting a flier on a student bulletin board offending
the sensibilities of a small group of students so intellectually fragile they
belong in a day-care center. The flier invited one and all to a speech by
Mason Weaver, a black man, author of a book called "It's OK To Leave the Plantation,"
comparing black dependency on government to dependency on the old massa down on
the old plantation. The metaphor is hardly new, but the book was not written
for the faint of heart. The offended students hadn't read the book, indeed had
not heard of it and didn't know anything about it, but the title upset them. They
called the campus police to report "a suspicious white male passing out literature
of an offensive racial nature." The incident should have ended right here,
with the Cal Poly administrators using the incident as an opportunity to give
the students a little instruction in the First Amendment. But when they learned
that the students who called the police were holding a Bible study meeting, they
charged Steve Hinkle with "disrupting" a "campus event." (They stopped short of
burning the Bible, with its stories about slaves.) The Foundation for Individual
Rights, which looks after free speech rights on the nation's campuses, scoffs
at the "disruption" charge. The bulletin board with the offending announcement
was in a public student lounge. At the hearing, the vice president for student
affairs described the offense in explicit terms: "You are a young white male member
of (the Cal Poly Republicans)," he told Hinkle. "To students of color, this may
be a collision of experience. . The chemistry has racial implications, and you
are naïve not to acknowledge it." Translation: You're white and dumb not
to realize that free speech is dangerous (and you're a Republican as well). He
was ordered to write letters of apology to the students, apologizing for being
white, dumb and Republican. He refused. "I get offended all the time on campus
when teachers bash conservatives," he said. "Since when do we have a right not
to be offended?" Now he faces stricter punishment, which could lead to expulsion.
This is academic freedom run amok, having become farce. It demonstrates how quickly
diversity encourages division. Instead of fostering debate, diversity teaches
students to find offense. In an ambitious survey of more than 4,000 students,
professors and administrators on 140 campuses, three distinguished social scientists
discovered that diversity does not improve relations between races or contribute
to learning. In fact, Stanley Rothman, Seymour Martin Lipset and Neil Nevitte
found, "The higher the enrollment diversity, the more likely students were to
say that they had personally experienced discrimination on campus." As the
enrollment of black students rises, satisfaction among all students falls. This
doesn't mean that actual discrimination increases, but suggests that the perception
of discrimination does. When individual identity is sacrificed to group
identity, diversity encourages discord and the campus is balkanized. The triumphs
and failures of that ambiguous term, even with the Supreme Court's decision in
the Michigan case, have not been measured. "The results we have found should
lead to further study of interracial relations on campus, the educational backgrounds
of minority students and the academic effects of affirmative action," the three
social scientists write in the magazine Public Interest. In a wonderful
new book by Peter Wood, Diversity:
The Invention of a Concept, the author looks at the many ways the diversity
concept has been used to undercut free speech, individualism, equality of sex,
religion, ethnicity, and even the sense of national unity. He urges us to
look again at the affecting appeal of Martin Luther King in his famous "Letter
from Birmingham Jail": "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment
of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly." King
emphasized the strength in America's myriad of connections reinforced by respect
for difference, with an emphasis on commonalities. Those Cal Poly students who
wanted to prevent Steve Hinkle from putting up his flier, those administrators
who demanded that he apologize for his free speech, the student who charged him
with bad "chemistry," are pulling at threads in our common garment of destiny. They
won't unravel it, but they weaken the weave - and dishonor and disrespect themselves.
©2003 Tribune Media Services
Contact Suzanne Fields | Read Fields's biography
Losing
bin Laden: How Bill Clinton's Failures Unleashed Global Terror |
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