Ok, cool :rolleyes:. Just remember not to apply to Gonzaga then.
The common clay of the new West?
You know, …
It’s weird. This is a bit like the end of the judicial filibuster: both sides seem ok / happy with the outcome. Conservatives are crowing about ivory-tower elitists getting their just desserts, and liberals seem smugly satisfied that those racists in fly-over country are finally getting what’s coming to them.
You make a lot of interesting points.
Mizzou is probably not going to be the last place to deal with enrollment problems and two things come to mind:
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There is a growing divide in this country between largely white rural/suburban America and multicultural urban America. I don’t want to beat the election results to death – there are other threads for that. But it’s clear that there is a culture war between an ethnic & cultural majority that has a palpable fear of losing its culture to sophisticated and even not-so-sophisticated city dwellers who have a different set of values. Colleges have historically been the place where even conservatives have felt somewhat comfortable subjecting their children to a variety of experiences with the assumption that their thinking can be challenged in ways that don’t assault their value system. A conservative family has typically had no problem sending their children to listen to ‘liberal’ professors because the assumption is that, our little prince or princess, will be able to keep his value system and not feel guilty about it. In recent years, though, probably beginning with the Occupy movement, they perceive that the left has become more aggressive and they feel threatened by it. And to some degree, I understand it.
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The other problem, though, is that the value of college is increasingly difficult to see – at least in terms to the 20th Century model of industrialized education. People rightly question why they should pay $50-100,000 for a degree that may or may not get them an interview with someone. Skills are becoming more important than “education”. It’s true that a degree is often a pre-requisite for many jobs but that might change as algorithms break down the hiring process and sift through applications more efficiently.
The ways people try to undermine legitimate protesters never ceases to frustrate me. You can’t argue with their actual points, so you start insisting they are just want to protest. Or they want to be offended. They have anger problems.
Do I agree with pro-life protesters? Not at all. Do I pretend they are just choosing to be offended? Not at all. I fully believe they are as devoted as they say they are. I may argue that some of their rhetoric is false, but I don’t try to challenge their sincerity. I don’t posit that they are bad people.
People who see the injustice in the world and try to fight it are by default good people. You can’t undermine that. The only way the world ever gets better are these people who fight against the way things are.
You can disagree all you want with what they want, but trying to portray protesting itself as bad? That’s just bullshit.
If people are avoiding a college because it has protests there, that’s dumb. If they’re worried about being labeled racist, then don’t do racist things so that you won’t, and take the attitude that, if someone calls you racist, you listen to them and fix the issue, whether it was legitimate racism or a misunderstanding.
And if you’re avoiding the place because they haven’t really fixed their racism problem, then more power to ya. That’s protesting.
Oh sure. I mean, say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism - at least it’s an ethos.
So, there’s no chance any NON-racist whites were turned off by the protests, huh? Not even a possibility worth mentioning.
No problem, I was just genuinely confused. I was (am) pretty sure we agree on the issue overall. I’m married, so I should be more used to being in trouble without understanding why…
For sure, a lot of protests about racial justice (especially several of the really egregious cases of police misconduct) are pretty obvious reasons even reasonable people might protest. Protesting over the University “not doing various things it probably legally can’t do, and almost certainly shouldn’t do” because some freak smeared their feces into a swastika is so illegitimate a reason to protest that I question the sincerity of the protesters to begin with and view it as just a form of college recreation for them–which is fine until it extends to things like assault/threatened assault (which is what actually happened to at least two student journalists.)
(underlining mine)
I don’t know a whole lot of what’s been happening at Mizzou other than some articles I read when the President resigned a couple years ago, but I would suggest that it’s more likely that the ‘swastika feces’ incident was the straw that broke the camel’s back, rather than a single incident that sparked a bunch of protest-happy students and faculty to run amok. Here’s a WP articlethat backs up that theory. I therefore offer that your underlined statement is reductive, and you may want to revisit it.
Note here that I also do not condone assault and threats of assault, just to be clear.
You do bring up a good point. There may have been some white people who are only sympathetic and enabling to racists, not racists themselves, that may have been turned off by the protests.