A university finally stands up to woke virtue signaling
Where have all the adults gone?
That is one of the questions I keep wondering about wherever I look in America or the wider West these days.
We have politicians who behave like schoolchildren, teachers who live in fear of their students and bosses and CEOs who are terrorized by their most junior employees.
When did all the adults leave the room?
I started to get an answer to that question last week when I was at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Because as I told an audience there, two things happened the day I was there that suggested that some adults, at least, want to take back the room.
The first thing that happened was that the university’s board of governors voted to ban compelled speech.
That is, they voted against the pathetic DEI (or DIE) statements which so many institutions in this country now demand at the door.
You know the sort of thing.
The form-filling which demands students and professionals say what they have done to promote diversity, inclusion, and equity.
It is a political test.
Nothing else.
For instance, if you asked me what I have done to promote diversity, inclusion, and equity I would answer “Very little. Because I don’t accept the premise.”
Diversity is a fact, not something you promote.
The same goes for inclusion.
And as for equity. I don’t believe in it.
Equality is a great aspiration, and we already have the law for that.
But equity — the idea that everybody should have not just equal opportunities but equal outcomes?
Sorry, but that’s a hard “no” from me.
I don’t like equal outcomes in sports, and I don’t care for them in education or economics either.
In any case, it’s never going to happen.
So as an aspiration, it is — among much else — a complete waste of time.
Universities and corporations that demand people swear fealty to these ideas are simply keeping out anybody who doesn’t consent to their radical view of the world and wasting everybody’s time.
But the second thing that happened on that day at Chapel Hill was that the university became the latest campus to launch an Alumni Free Speech Alliance group.
An increasing number of colleges are doing this.
Because across the country alumni of our major educational institutions are becoming increasingly alarmed at what is going on in this country’s institutions.
And they’d like to do something about it.
With the right leadership such organizations can put pressure on university administrators and others when they go out of line and start institutions DIE and other woke idiocies.
Because the great problem from this — as with so much else — is that all this is such a distraction.
This week we saw a similar distraction with Randi Weingarten’s weird meltdown on the steps of the Supreme Court.
The most powerful woman in American education stood there, foaming at the mouth, cursing and jumping up and down with performative rage.
Why?
Because of the case in the Supreme Court about student debt.
Weingarten ranted that “Frankly, and this is what really pisses me off, during the pandemic, we understood that small businesses were hurting, and we helped them, and it didn’t go to the Supreme Court to challenge it. Big businesses were hurting, and we helped them, and it didn’t go to the Supreme Court to challenge it.”
You know what else happened during the pandemic?
Weingarten and her comrades made sure that American schoolchildren needlessly lost years of their education.
They didn’t need to.
But when it came down to it, Weingarten cared more about her union than she did about American kids.
Her meltdown on the Supreme court steps are a distraction from that fact.
A distraction that Weingarten and company are only too happy to play.
Because while they are making up nonsense political purity tests and putting on political displays educational standards in this country are going only one way.
Speak to any academic in America and ask them if they can say the following sentence with a straight face.
“Every year the students come up to university knowing more and more.”
I have never met a professor who could say that. It only ever goes the other way, with university professors having to teach students basics that they should have learned at school.
And if that was the case up till now, imagine how much worse it is going to get once the kids who missed their education during COVID start to make their way through the system.
I was recently speaking to one expert about this and asked what we should expect. His answer was alarming.
Remember the so-called “July effect” where they say that more accidents and mishaps happen in American hospitals in July because that is when the new trainee doctors come online in the health system?
Well we can expect year upon year of the July effect right through American life. From the education system on.
That is what we should all fear.
And it is why we cannot afford the distractions of DIE or Weingarten’s headline-grabbing. The future of American education is in serious trouble.
And it’s our youth who are losing out. It’s time the adults re-entered the room to help them out.
Fentanyl is not political
I felt slightly sick yesterday seeing the footage of President Biden reacting to the testimony of Rebecca Kiessling, the American mom who lost her two young sons to fentanyl.
Because a Republican had tried to blame Biden for the deaths, Biden reacted with a smirk when asked about it.
“The interesting thing is that fentanyl the boys took came during the last administration,” Biden said with a laugh, as though his getting off the hook was the issue.
With all due respect, Mr. President, that is not the issue.
Fentanyl isn’t a Republican or Democrat problem, a Trump or Biden problem.
It is an American problem.
And rather than ducking responsibility for fentanyl coming in a couple of years ago how about doing something today to stop hundreds of thousands more lives being shattered by this appalling drug?
