More on Missouri—and more and more and more
The University of Missouri story is not over. It has legs, and it has tentacles. I wrote two posts about it yesterday, and one at Legal Insurrection today that’s even longer, and I’m still not done. Nor are they.
If you read my Legal Insurrection post—and I hope you do—you’ll see that it introduces and discusses elements of the story of which I was as yet unaware when I posted on my blog about the events. The gist of it is that both President Wolfe and Chancellor Loftin, the men who were pressured to resign and have done so, had been doing and saying things that one would think would placate the demanding mob, but didn’t even cause the protesters to break stride in their efforts to remove them. I also spent many hours—many, many hours—searching in vain for more details about the actual charges of racism at the campus, those charges to which Wolfe and Loftin were accused of paying insufficient attention. They amount to (a) two reports of black students being called the n-word, once by an unspecified group of men in a pickup truck who may or may not have been students themselves, and once by another man who is sometimes described as having been a drunken student, and (b) one report of a swastika smeared in feces on a bathroom wall in a dorm, by an unknown person for an unknown reason. That seems to be it.
So, as Amy Miller points out, a lot of people are puzzled about what Wolfe and Loftin did or did not do that deserve canning as punishment. I can answer that question quite simply: they didn’t deserve it, the social justice warrior mob demanded it, and what the social justice warrior mob wants on college campuses the social justice warrior mob gets. Enlisting the football team in the fight was the icing on the cake, because football is very powerful on the college campus as well.
As I wrote yesterday, for the most part the American university died quite some time ago.
There are some other things I learned while researching that LI post. I already knew that the sequence of events began with an allegation by the student body president Payton Head (who is black) that he was harassed by some people in a truck shouting the n-word at him. But I hadn’t yet read the Facebook post in which he announced this. I’ve read it now, and it’s an interesting document, a veritable textbook of victimology, an immediate call to action, and an indictment of those who need to check their privilege, with a rather vague description of the offense and its alleged perpetrators.
Take a look. After you read it, you will not be surprised to learn that Head has been described in the school newspaper as “an activist for social change since he stepped foot on MU.”
Speaking of activists, there are other activists in this Mizzou protest movement, as one might expect. For example, the graduate student who started a hunger strike had this to say about his own history and inspiration:
But when you talk about most recently on campus, in terms of protesting and mobilizing communities, that really came from my experience organizing during Ferguson, after the murder of Mike Brown. Because the University of Missouri is only two hours away from Ferguson, and being able to have that experience”¦
”¦[I]t’s a part of the Black Lives Matter movement. But in another sense, this is really unique to campus just because of the example that we got from some of those who were organizing in Ferguson. There are three queer black women, who used their knowledge from Ferguson organizing in creating an organization called MU for Mike Brown. And from that, that’s really where a lot of what has been going on on campus has been morphed from.
Then we have the second complaint of n-word use. This time there were more witnesses, but the identity of the perpetrator (and whether it was even a student) seems likewise vague.
The deeper one goes into the facts at Missouri, the more it seems clear (or at least highly likely) that the actual complaints were minor at best, and that it is not at all certain that the alleged offenders were students there. What on earth was the administration supposed to do about it? There was nothing they could have done that they didn’t do. These incidents were pretexts for flexing the muscles of the movement. The activists have found themselves—particularly with the addition of the football team, which has muscle both literal and financial—to be strong indeed.
The left is very sophisticated. The left is very tireless. The left is very organized. The left is very savvy about politics and power. The left is a giant octopus whose reach is vast, and it is in nearly total control of the American university.
I’ll close with more Allan Bloom, from his Closing of the American Mind, written in 1989. It’s long, but it’s important:
Every educational system has a moral goal that it tries to attain and that informs its curriculum. It wants to produce a certain kind of human being. This intention is more or less explicit, more or less a result of reflection,; but even the neutral subject, like reading and writing and arithmetic, take their place in a vision of the educated person. In some nations the goal was the pious person, in others the warlike, in others the industrious. Always important is the political regime, which needs citizens who are in accord with its fundamental principle. Aristocracies want gentlemen, oligarchies men who respect and pursue money, and democracies lovers of equality. Democratic education, whether it admits it or not, wants and needs to produce men and women who have the tastes, knowledge, and character supportive of a democratic regime. Over the history of our republic, there have obviously been changes of opinion as to what kind of man is best for our regime. We began with the model of the rational and industrious man, who was honest, respected the laws, and was dedicated to the family (his own family””what has in its decay been dubbed the nuclear family). Above all he was to know the rights doctrine; the Constitution, which embodied it; and American history, which presented and celebrated the founding of a nation “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” A powerful attachment to the letter and spirit of the Declaration of Independence gently conveyed, appealing to each man’s reason, was the goal of the education of democratic man. This called for something very different from the kind of attachment required for traditional communities where myth and passion as well as severe discipline, authority, and the extended family produced an instinctive, unqualified, even fanatic patriotism, unlike the reflected, rational, calm, even self-interested loyalty””not so much to country but to the form of government and its rational principles””required in the United States”¦
But openness”¦eventually won out over natural rights, partly through a theoretical critique, partly because of a political rebellion against nature’s last constraints. Civic education turned away from concentrating on the Founding to concentrating on openness based on history and social science. There was even a general tendency to debunk the Founding, to prove the beginnings were flawed in order to license a greater openness to the new. What began in Charles Beard’s Marxism and Carl Becker’s historicism became routine. We are used to hearing the Founders being charged with being racists, murderers of Indians, representatives of class interests. I asked my first history professor in the university, a very famous scholar, whether the picture he gave us of George Washington did not have the effect of making us despise our regime. “Not at all,” he said, “it doesn’t depend on individuals but on our having good democratic values.” To which I rejoined, “But you just showed us that Washington was only using those values to further the class interests of the Virginia squirearchy.” He got angry, and that was the end of it. He was comforted by a gentle assurance that the values of democracy are part of the movement of history and did not require his elucidation or defense. He could carry on his historical studies with the moral certitude that they would lead to greater openness and hence more democracy. The lessons of fascism and the vulnerability of democracy, which we had all just experienced, had no effect on him.
Liberalism without natural rights, the kind that we knew from John Stuart Mill and John Dewey, taught us that the only danger confronting us is being closed to the emergent, the new, the manifestations of progress. No attention had to be paid to the fundamental principles or the moral virtues that inclined men to live according to them.
Exactly as predicted in my last posts…
🙂
That Omaha kid has been at Columbia for seven years.
Seven years!
OWH story said he was a good football player. Hard worker.
The Praeger Handbook of Victimology
By Janet K. Wilson
you can buy it at amazon
http://www.amazon.com/Praeger-Handbook-Victimology-Janet-Wilson/dp/0313359350
ie, they realized that this kind of thing was at the core of everything, and if you changed it at all, everything else would either follow (or fall apart which they deny would happen). at the same time, the other sides of the communist coin was doing similar work in defining race victimologists, and lgbt victims, and so on.
due to coordination, they ended up settling on the same old white jewish males scapegoat that invented capitalism, and their saviors from last century that prevented progress to a communist world, and so now are the only things to be exterminated..
this also negated any opposition, as anyone who claimed to have a horrid non utopian life, could blame the target… anyone claiming they had a good one, was mind poisoned by the target.
game set match…
only those who dig deep into the history and go back would know ANY of this stuff… kind of like only avid bass fishermen and such know the spectrum of lures and techniques, outside of that, it might as well not exist to most..
Without virgil, dante gets lost in hell!
http://www.omaha.com/news/metro/omaha-central-grad-ends-hunger-strike-over-racial-issues-at/article_0ce481c2-8739-11e5-b80f-2333434f833f.html?mode=jqm
The Left is like an unblinded Sampson in the Temple. It will pull the Temple down on top of itself, and the rest of us. A phoenix will not emerge. A great wasteland will be all there is.
How many uncritical readers of the MSM are aware of the many instances of serious allegations of rape and sexual assault brought in recent years against black members of the football team at Missouri? How many are aware of the disgraceful behavior of Professor Click in attempting to prevent a young journalist from doing his job? How many are aware that the current football coach makes a salary of $4 million per year at a public university?
What a godawful spectacle a mob drunk on power is.
Note: I made this comment under Neo’s last post, but it fits better under this post, so I’m repeating it.
–
Effective campus activism requires student leadership up front, while faculty and alumni play key but comparatively background and more defined roles.
It wouldn’t be accurate to call the faculty and alumni activist roles ‘support’ roles because they’re important. All the roles are important and they’re not redundant. ‘Co-starring’ roles is a more appropriate description for faculty and alumni while student activists must play the starring role.
It’s critical for conservatives who react distastefully to activism to understand that the campus activist game is necessarily played by rules that were engineered by the 1960s protestors. The rules of the campus activist game have since been developed and entrenched by subsequent campus activist iterations.
You can disagree with the nature of the campus activist game in your person, but if you want to mount an effective counter-Left campaign on campus, you don’t have a choice. You must play the campus activist game by rules that may chafe in order to counter the campus left and seize the metaphorical ground needed to reform the campus culture.
That introduction is to bring up the practical example of the Ivy League student-veterans, perhaps boosted by the distinctive competitive mindset that they acquired from their military service during the last decade, who countered the same type of leftist campus vigilantism on display today in order to establish their group on campus with a high-profile, growth orientation and restore ROTC to the University.
They changed their school’s reputation from having one of the famously worst anti-military legacies to being rated as one of the best military-friendly schools in the nation.
Notably, in contrast to conservatives who complain about leftist ‘Gramscian’ gains yet habitually refuse to play the activist game that’s necessary to counter leftists, the Ivy League student-veterans took it upon themselves to compete head-on against the campus left in the campus activist game that’s traditionally dominated by the left.
Anyone can look dominant when the competition refuses to compete.
The campus activist game can be won. They did it. But the game must be played to win.
the Allan Bloom quote is a farce…
But you would have to know the history of things to know that its a farce and built on what sounds good or rather the iota of truth that holds up the lies or fakery of ommission.
without THAT history, you would think that he is taking up a naturalist position that things did not become this way the way things became this way
[this is legendary in writings because whether intentionally or not, they always leave out the inconvenient history of communism, socialism, and other horrid isms!!!!]
in the whole post the only thing that clues a bit that the author knows what he is leaving out is this
Liberalism without natural rights, the kind that we knew from John Stuart Mill and John Dewey…..
first of all the liberalism that he refers to there is NOT the liberalism of the progressive left, and dewey did not follow john stewart mills liberalism any more than bernie sanders does..
and we still dont know if bloom knows the history or not, or even is willing to expose that the term liberalism (a positive and capitalist) has been taken over by the people who use terms that way in history to be (communism).
[edited for length by n-n]
I just had a thought when I was reading your piece that you linked to. It was stated that about 10% of the students on campus were black and that they felt ‘marginalized.’ I am wondering if it is possible some of these loudmouths grew up and went to school in majority-black neighborhoods and towns and have never been exposed to other races beyond their own. Maybe they are not used to being the minority in number and couldn’t adapt to, shocker, the REAL world in the U.S. where blacks only make up about 13% of the overall population.
Maybe this is the sole factor for them feeling ‘marginalized.’ They arrive with an automatic chip on their shoulders about being the ‘minority’ and want to act as if this is outrageous and must be stopped. When that is regular society.
Highlander:
Well, at least they stopped short of killing and dismembering him. Mobs are extremely dangerous.
The left is very sophisticated. The left is very tireless. The left is very organized. The left is very savvy about politics and power. The left is a giant octopus whose reach is vast, and it is in nearly total control of the American university.
All true. But what happened at Missouri could have been stopped in its tracks were it not for money. What should have happened there is no football game. But this was the reality:
I call total BS on everything the coach said about why they caved. It was the money.
Artfldgr:
I believe that your criticism of Bloom’s quote is based on a misunderstanding. Have you ever read his book? Maybe you should.
And he is not equating Dewey and Mill or saying one followed or agreed with the other. He is saying that they both espoused something called “liberalism” but each espoused a liberalism without natural rights. He is also not using the word “liberalism” to mean the same thing as the liberal political movement that we know today.
K-E
Butler, the hunger striker, went to Omaha Central; 61% minority.
i tried to keep it short with just links to prior posts, and the words and such… even that is too long and i hope doesnt get cut down as it will send people to the points made over half a decade ago.
Based in Marxist theory, critical pedagogy draws on radical democracy, anarchism, feminism, and other movements for social justice. Critical pedagogue Ira Shor defines critical pedagogy as:
“Habits of thought, reading, writing, and speaking which go beneath surface meaning, first impressions, dominant myths, official pronouncements, traditional clichés, received wisdom, and mere opinions, to understand the deep meaning, root causes, social context, ideology, and personal consequences of any action, event, object, process, organization, experience, text, subject matter, policy, mass media, or discourse.” (Empowering Education, 129)
i cant jam almost 200 years of history that is pertinent and mostly unknown into a 300 word post… even churchill could not do that… could he?
sorry… but people dont listen to warnings until they react, ergo, the left calls them reactionaries, and now, as they are being driven off a cliff like a herd of animals, they want to know what to do? sorry, that was decades ago, not now… now your on the precipice…
teetering, and there is nothing that can be done any more than avoiding stage one cancer leads to stage four cancer when the patient would do anything they ignored earlier.
waiting for certainty while hiding in reasonableness is what i warned even FARTHER back when huxley was running interference against any warning, facts, etc..
October 30th, 2009
Finally: Obama gets a foreign policy success–unfortunately, it’s in Honduras, not Iran
Artfldgr Says:
Some literature on the hows of deception
November 3rd, 2009 at 3:06 pm
http://neoneocon.com/2009/10/30/finally-obama-gets-a-foreign-policy-success-unfortunately-its-in-honduras-not-iran/#comment-132122
since i have said it already, just read the past…
to repost it would be to be cut down and erased, and i am trying desperately to avoid that by not being too long…
Cornhead:
Payton Head, the original complainant and student body president, is from the south side of Chicago.
Artfldgr:
Length is a problem, and repetitiveness as well. But more of a problem is your continued insistence that people ignored you or discounted you.
No one habitually pooh-poohed your prognostications or discussions of the influence of the left except huxley, to the best of my recollection. There may have been others, but if so there weren’t many. In fact, most people here have agreed on the influence of the left, and have agreed for a long long time. They may not know every detail, but they actually don’t need every detail.
I ignore him and discount him all the time. Indeed, I still think there ought to be a “Skip to End” button at the top of his posts. It saves wear and tear on the scroll wheel.
This young man, Australian, has brilliantly and chillingly skewered the “social” “justice” lynch mob mentality in this short video, “Modern Educayshun.” He really nails it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKcWu0tsiZM
(The girl in particular is scarily spot-on.)
The father of the hunger striker makes millions at UPRR.
http://people.equilar.com/bio/eric-butler-union-pacific/salary/690589#.VkJwNXpOKrW
Talk of mgmt layoffs at UPRR due to declining coal shipments. The Left, of course, hates coal. Certainly hope Eric Butler doesn’t lose his multi-million dollar job due to left wing activism. That would be hurtful.
Cornhead,
That would be poetic justice.
Parker:
Eric Butler is so rich he could just do his pastor gig if he lost his job at UPRR.
So many of these Lefties are so rich or otherwise in some protected class (e.g. unionized school teachers) that they are protected from all the realities of their politics.
Roy:
But I very much doubt you discount the message that the left is very active in all of this, and has been active in it for many decades, and has been successful at accomplishing many of its goals. That’s the point, I think.
The problem once again is with the passive non-black student body, 90% of the school, and their abject refusal to defend their culture. They elect this black as president of student gov’t and he craps on them? Because, unwitnessed, he claims someone called him a N…… from a pickup truck at night?
Roll over and play dead? Not a solution.
Frog
Mizzou student body really ought to crack back on Left black activists. Where are the conservative Law students? That school’s reputation is ruined. And their football and basketball teams stink too!
It’s time for you to join their evolutionary theories, Corn. They made it just for you.
The vast majority of these running dog lackeys are following the band wagon to prove their hipster credentials. Laugh in their faces and had out diapers and ear plugs to shield them from microaggressions. The correct way to deal with the leaders is to do recon, catch them unaware, and ______. (Use your imagination.)
campus reform
Afrikan Black Coalition seeks to ‘overthrow the Constitution,’ ‘stop white people’
http://www.campusreform.org/?ID=6965
The multi-university Afrikan Black Coalition is calling for black people to engage in revolution and overthrow the Constitution, citing the need to “stop white people” in the “white supremacist world” of America.
The Coalition declares, “White people have historically had problems making too many “mistakes.” White people need to be stopped. Period.”
“A New Constitution or the Bullet.”
“If America fails to allow all people of this nation to write a new constitution, then it will be the bullet. Revolution is inevitable in a society that does not value the lives of all people,” the Coalition threatened.
The Coalition goes on to declare that institutional racism (the same ‘evil’ the student protestors at the University of Missouri claimed to be combatting) can’t be overcome unless the Constitution is overthrown.
“A Constitution written by only white men will never serve the interests Black [sic] people. The Constitution was written for the ruling class of white men which constructed whiteness to be more valuable than any other race,” the Coalition argues. “When we discuss institutional racism, it is essential that we realize the Constitution created it.”
“For the left, it’s never about the issue, it’s always about the revolution.” David Horowitz
This is NOT about insufficiently sensitive administrators. It’s NOT about racial epithets. It’s NOT about offensive stereotypes.
Those are the needed excuses aka ‘fulcrum’, to be used as leverage. A perfect example of Alinsky’s RULE 4: “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” and thus, seize the moral high ground. i.e. only despicable racists are against equality.
The goal and object is control of the narrative and the acquisition of increased power. This will not end with the resignation of the President at MU, etc. Look at the eight “demands” made of the administration. Leftist radical “People of color” in charge and arbiters of politically correct thought, speech and behavior.
But that is just their immediate short term goal, their long term goal is to extend that narrative and control to American society at large. They well know that Lincoln was right, “The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.”
Their goal is nothing less than the establishment of The United Socialist States of Amerika with a new, Marxist-in-all-but-name constitution.
A constitution that reflects the supreme status of the State with it’s citizen’s conditional ‘privileges’ always subject to abrogation solely at the State’s determination as to justification.
“Their goal is to dismantle capitalism [i.e. the American republic], one brick at a time, and for them to become the new nomenklatura in a social democratic state.” FredHJr.
Those Mizzou students and Community members who wish to demonstrate their disapproval of the BLM’s manipulation of the football team should consider a protest that would gain serious attention from their Board of Regents. Specifically, they should boycott future football games, and by doing so withhold big financial support of the football team, and the University’s budget.