The University Cesspool

     Via Maura Dowling comes this set of horrors being perpetrated upon first-year students at the University of Wisconsin Law School:

     The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) is alerting the public to a mandatory “Re-Orientation” session happening tomorrow, Friday, January 19th, for all first-year law students at the University of Wisconsin Law School in Madison, Wisconsin. In preparation for the session, law students are asked to study a description of “racist” behaviors, including the false claim that non-discrimination is “racist” and a collection of other assertions about “whites” and “people of color” that actually are racist.

     It would be one thing if the law school proposed an academic debate about such matters. But no one believes for one moment that’s what this session is about. This “DEI training” is a form of indoctrination and demeans law students based on their race. WILL strongly condemns this meeting’s proposed subject matter and demands that any racially discriminatory instruction be removed. By pushing racist ideology on law students, the University is defying federal law, creating a racially hostile environment, and harming individual student dignity.

     The list of “racist” no-nos is itself illuminating:

1. Only white people can be racist.
2. Advocating for a “colorblind” society is racist and “negates” the “experiences of people of color.”
3. It is racist to attack affirmative action.
4. All white people experience “privilege based on your white skin color. You benefit from the system of oppression and advantage, no matter what your intentions are.”
5. White people have a “fear of people of color, and what would happen if they gained control.”
6. White people are all infected with “whiteness,” “white guilt,” “denial,” “fear,” and “privilege.” Ridding white people of “racist conditioning” “will never happen.”
7. There are no exceptional, white people such that “all are tainted by skin color.”
8. White people are the “beneficiaries of racism and white privilege.”
9. White people should never talk about “their own story of hardship” because it “diminishes the experiences of people of color.”
10. White people “attempt to, defend or cover up the racist actions of other white people.”

     It’s been more than twenty years, but the following episode remains vivid in my memory:

     Being the stepfather of two bright young women, both of whom recently passed through institutions of higher learning, it was necessary for your Curmudgeon to acquaint himself with a most noxious modern collegiate phenomenon: the mandatory diversity / sensitivity orientation seminar. He’d heard about this particular insult to intelligence and taste well before his girls had to confront it. Apparently, the standard practice is to herd the incoming freshmen into a large auditorium, parade all sorts of offensive things before them, and demand that they learn to tolerate and respect the practitioners of the vices and perversions exhibited. The freshmen are held captive to this assault for several hours; no one is permitted to leave.

     Before his elder stepdaughter had to face this ordeal, your Curmudgeon instructed her to keep her cell phone fully charged and powered up. He gave her a script to follow, should she desire to leave the place of confinement:

Burly Upperclass Doorwarden: Return to your seat, please.
Curmudgeonly Stepdaughter: I’d prefer to leave. This is making me physically ill.

BUD: I’m sorry, but no one is permitted to leave until the presentation has concluded.
CS: Do you see what I have here?

BUD: A cell phone. What of it?
CS: This of it. My stepfather is standing just beyond these doors with his cell phone and his Browning Hi-Power automatic. If I press this little button here, he’s going to shoot his way through that door. Now will you stand aside, or shall I make the call?

     (Fortunately, this proved not to be necessary, but one must be prepared.)

     That’s the state of our universities, from top to bottom: To avert forcible indoctrination by the Leftist / SJW / BLM / alphabet crowd, one must be willing to threaten: violence, arrests and indictments, lawsuits, adverse publicity, protracted pouting, the lot. To incarcerate anyone against his will is a felony crime called false imprisonment. That includes being locked into a “mandatory reorientation.” Yet universities are being permitted to get away with it, God alone knows why.

     Antonio Gramsci and his followers emphasized capturing the schools as among the most important of all Marxist initiatives. The sad truth is that they’ve succeeded so completely that there’s no possibility of driving them out and returning the “education system” to the job of educating. America would be better off bulldozing every school of any elevation than trying to reform them.

     Today, Charles Sykes’s early tour de force Profscam seems a little dated, but that’s only because the disease is far more advanced today than it was in the Eighties when the book was published. Sykes’s opening recommendation remains entirely applicable: burn down the universities and hang the professors. Optionally, plow the ruins under with salt. Salt’s still pretty cheap, after all.