We have been keeping up with the ordeal of Cornell University law professor William Jacobson, who is under fire from students and fellow faculty members for his conservative views. The most recent attacks against him have come in the past weeks because he had the temerity to criticize Black Lives Matter. Recently, Jacobson wrote an op-ed in Real Clear Politics describing the goings on at Cornell.
In Jacobson's blog, Legal Insurrection, he has posted a report on the actions that Cornell has taken in regards to "racial justice". You can read it here.
This is scary stuff. Perhaps, this is the proper place to insert a suggestion for Cornell en lieu of all this proposed indoctrination. Why not just have students and staff read a good book on Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights era? But that would be too simple and readers might conclude, "Wow. Things were really bad then. It's not like that now."
Can't have that.
Instead. everybody must come to he conclusion that America is an evil, racist, imperialist country where people of color have no opportunity whatsoever, thus, we must "change the system".
What Cornell is instituting has nothing to do with democracy, freedom of thought, or even racial justice-however you choose to define that term. This is about pure mind control. Every student, every teacher, every administrator, and every staff worker at Cornell must think uniformly in line with what the university president outlined.
The fact is that ever since the 1960s, we have been educating our youth about the history and injustice of slavery and Jim Crow, just as German students study the Third Reich and the Holocaust. I have no objection to having courses on those subjects. The purpose should be that we understand the dark chapters in our history in order they not be repeated. But when the purpose of these courses is to teach our children that today's America is a racist country and that innocent black people are being terrorized by our police and by white nationalists, then we have crossed the line into indoctrination-and a false indoctrination at that.
America today is a decent country which, unfortunately is still dealing with racial issues. Similarly, Germany today is a decent country that has no connection with the Nazi era. German schools teach their students about the Nazi era-not to teach them that Germany today is an evil country-rather to ensure that history is never repeated.
Returning to Cornell, it should mentioned that rather than looking for institutionalized racism against black and brown students on campus, which I doubt exists, they should be dealing with the hate directed at their Jewish students on campus-something that is real and can be well documented.
Campus anti-Semitism is a nationwide issue, and Cornell is hardly alone. However, in recent years, Cornell has had many problems in this area, and we don't see serious efforts to confront it. Indeed, it was not even mentioned in the university president's statement.
Every decent-thinking person wants to see black students treated the same as white students on every college campus. The laws are in place to insure that happens. We do need to work together to fix our nation's racial divisions. However, treating black students as if they were handicapped children, unable to fend for themselves, serves nobody's purpose. Likewise enforcing some form of group thinking does not serve the purpose of a university or a society in general.
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