Is anyone really surprised? In what is quickly beginning to look like a bad case of copycat hysteria, yet another American campus of higher learning has produced an uprising. It’s taken root among students who find certain people to be insufficiently enthusiastic about their agenda and they are calling for the removal of people from their positions and staging hunger strikes. This time it’s at the University of Kansas and the targets aren’t the school administration, but the elected student council. (HuffPo)
Racial tensions are growing at the University of Kansas with a call for three top Student Senate leaders to resign and a recent graduate initiating a hunger strike.
The Senate’s Student Executive Committee is demanding that Student Body President Jessie Pringle, Student Body Vice President Zach George and Chief of Staff Adam Moon step down by Wednesday and that the full Senate to take up impeachment measures if they refuse to leave, the Lawrence Journal-World (http://bit.ly/1LfUc9v ) reported. The committee registered a 6-3 “no confidence” vote Friday for the three leaders. One member abstained from the vote.
The resignation demand comes after last week’s unrest at the University of Missouri and after a forum that University of Kansas Chancellor Bernadette Gray-Little moderated on Wednesday, where a student group Rock Chalk Invisible Hawk presented diversity demands, which include hiring a director for the Office of Multicultural Affairs by Dec. 15, mandatory “inclusion and belonging” training for students and faculty and increased diversity in hiring.
And what were the incidents of racism and violence which brought this about? Poop swastikas? Nooses in the trees? Burning crosses on the lawn of a frat house? I’m afraid it’s nothing quite that explicit. Two of the three student senate leaders were cited for a failure to, “stand in solidarity with their black peers and proclaim that Black Lives Matter” at Wednesday’s forum. There was also a prolonged failure to act on their demands that all staff and incoming students take a mandatory “inclusion and belonging” class.
For this, the horrid, racist students must sacrifice their positions and make way for the new world order. (They’re refusing to do so thus far.) If they fail to step down, one guy (who’s not even a student there anymore) is going to starve himself until “I die or go to the hospital.”
Not for nothing, but everyone keeps saying we have an obesity epidemic among America’s youth, so…
I hope somebody gathers together the leaders of this “Rock Chalk Invisible Hawk” group and reads them an article from David Kaufman at the New York Post. Speaking as a self described survivor of being “a minority at a pair of elite East Coast universities” himself, Kaufman attempts to set the kids straight.
Reared on a diet of “microaggressions” and “hostile environments,” “safe spaces” and the need for “validation,” many of these students have seemingly conflated hurt feelings with actual outright discrimination.
The distinction is important — particularly at a moment when words like “violence,” “outrage” and “marginalization” have become little more than opportunistic jargon…
But at their moment of peak visibility, the protesters — much like Black Lives Matter leaders before them — are already succumbing to a lack of concrete objectives and clear platforms.
From mental wellness to abortion rights, health insurance to “queer” activism, the movement’s talking points are starting to sound random and all over the map. Trendy and (to use one of their favorite buzzwords) intersectional, these issues may make for fine sound-bites, but they do little to remedy the actual grievances now under debate.
These students have a tough road ahead of them once they get out into the real world, but I’ve really lost all sympathy at this point. Let them fall into infighting and tossing down the student leaders they elected. See where it gets them. If the school administration is incapable of maintaining some semblance of order and delivering the education they are being paid to provide, then they shouldn’t be in that business anyway. And it’s worth reminding these kids that running a university is a business. The product is the knowledge base they take with them when they graduate. (Assuming any of them do.)
Keeping with the tradition of providing a closing note for parents, the in-state tuition at the University of Kansas is $25,414. For out-of-state students it’s $41,252. Make sure you get your money’s worth.
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