Reports indicate that most Whites think these shocking resignations reflect little more than political correctness run amok. To be fair, life at the University of Missouri is taking on the spectacle of lunatics running the asylum.
Hours after a wave of student and faculty protests over racial tensions led to the resignation of the president of the University of Missouri [Mizzou] system on Monday, the chancellor of the campus here said he would step down and the governing board announced a series of steps aimed at improving the racial climate…
It was the football team that delivered what might have been the fatal blow to the tenures of the two officials, when players announced on Saturday that they would refuse to play as long as Mr. Wolfe remained in office, and their head coach, Gary Pinkel, said he supported them.
(New York Times, November 9, 2015)
Meanwhile, protesters are still demanding, among other things, implementation of all kinds of diversity programs, the hiring of a new diversity, inclusion and equity czar (to enforce “a culture of respect”), and a say in the hiring of all future university presidents. They are making these demands under the rallying cry of #Concerned Student 1950 – in homage to the year the first Black student enrolled at Mizzou.
It might be helpful to know that these protesters (Black and White) are trying to improve a racial climate that has been beset by dark clouds for years. Evidently, far too many Whites, who compose 77 percent of the total student body of 35,441, have been getting cheap thrills out of hurling racial epithets, scrawling swastikas of human feces on dorm walls, and otherwise harassing Blacks, who compose only 7 percent. And they have been doing this with impunity.
Indeed, it speaks volumes that, in tendering his resignation, Mizzou President Timothy M. Wolfe confessed his own insensitivity, and made the seemingly transformative admission that it should not have taken Black graduate student Jonathan Butler going on a hunger strike to get the university to hear and act upon the well-documented grievances of its Black students.
Except that Butler’s hunger strike did not force Wolfe to resign.
After all, Butler was already into the second week of his well-publicized strike. More to the point, I suspect Wolfe and other Mizzou administrators blithely ignored it as just a grandstanding, self-immolating stunt.
Instead, the triggering act was 30 Black Football players announcing on Saturday that they would not attend practice or play another game until he resigned. Their White coach and fellow White players made this act all the more challenging when they announced their intent to stand in solidarity with these Black players.
In fact, school administrators made no secret of their prevailing concern that forfeiting just this weekend’s game against Brigham Young would cost Mizzou over $1 million. And, since Wolfe made around $400,000 annually, he was clearly far more expendable than the Football players.
It was really that simple, folks. Nobody resigned. Mizzou’s Board of Curators threw the president and chancellor under the bus to protect its bottom line.
But I would be remiss not to acknowledge that the administrators might also have been a little concerned about Mizzou suffering irreparable reputational damage – given the way this racial conflict was beginning to trend on social media.
All the same, I am convinced that, more than any concession the university makes with respect to diversity initiatives, student athletes exercising the asymmetrical power they have at major American universities might be this racial conflict’s most significant legacy.
In which case I hope I can be forgiven for taking some credit for not only recognizing this power but urging Blacks to use it, judiciously.
For here, in part, is how I admonished student athletes to deal with the grievance of universities exploiting their talents to make hundreds of millions, while failing to give them a good education, let alone fair compensation.
I urge the star players on all NCAA Division 1 Football teams to organize a wildcat strike this fall and demand fair compensation for the services they provide. Then let the NCAA and university presidents make the unconscionable and utterly unsustainable argument that these kids should be forced to continue generating billions in revenues for them in exchange for nothing more than a college degree that, in most cases, is not worth the paper it’s written on.
(“Death Penalty for University of Miami Hurricanes,” The iPINIONS Journal, August 23, 2011)
Of course, Black Americans have a storied history of using civil disobedience, boycotts, and strikes to demand some measure of racial justice. These Football players going on strike is entirely consistent with that history. To say nothing of the instructive message their strike sends to aggrieved Black students around the country about forcing change without resorting to wanton, self-destructive and self-defeating violence.
My concern, however, is that no resignation or diversity initiative will stop a White fool from hurling racial epithets at a Black student, especially if his target is an isolated female. What’s more, chances are very good that such assaults would never be caught on tape. Therefore, holding perpetrators to account would amount, in most cases, to little more than a she said, he said farce.
And yes, these fools are invariably White males. Moreover, I can well imagine some of them being hell-bent now on striking back against these diversity initiatives the only way they know how; namely, by cowardly hurling racial epithets and defacing buildings with racist graffiti. Never mind the mockery such incidents make of prevailing assumptions about Millennials being so racially progressive as to be colorblind. Hell you’d think we were back in the heyday of “Bigotry and Violence on American College Campuses” during the late 1970s and 1980s – as documented by the United States Commission on Civil Right 1990….
Again, facts indicate that the protests in this case were wholly warranted. But I fear Black students going down a race-grievance rabbit hole by mounting protests in a futile attempt to change racist hearts and minds.
For example, I’ve read enough to appreciate that Black students at Yale University have been subjected for years to the same kinds of institutional racism that provoked Black students at Mizzou to protest – complete with a Yale president who apparently couldn’t care less about their grievances. Yet, somehow, these Ivy Leaguers have allowed the media to frame their protests as borne of racial grievances over a “White girls only” Halloween party and White students wearing “racially insensitive Halloween costumes.”
(Perhaps this media narrative would change if a Black student went on a hunger strike. But I doubt Yale’s Football players refusing to play until its president resigned would have the same impact.)
Whatever the case, students should aim such protests primarily at changing institutional practices and policies they deem racist. Their objectives should be things like ensuring greater diversity in faculty hiring (faculty at Mizzou is 75 percent White; 3 percent Black) and in student enrollment, as well as, apropos of my bête noire, in getting colleges to pay student athletes commensurate with the revenues they generate.
Protesting to get colleges to stop White students from calling Black students the n-word, or to force White Students to allow Black girls to attend their Halloween parties, hardly seems worthy.
Of course, I’m on record lamenting the way the baby-boomer parents of these kids have raised them with sense and sensibilities that make them feel entitled to all kinds of presumptions, deference, and privileges. And, if school administrators think helicopter parenting has made these college kids too sensitive and defenseless, they’re in for a rude awakening with the next generation of coeds, half of whom will have grown up “suffering” some form of autism — with all of the expectations of coddling that entails.
But this is not the commentary to delve any further into that.
Related commentaries:
Ferguson effect…
Death penalty…paying student athletes…