What do the editors of the Wall Street Journal want? They
are at the same time drawing contrasts aimed at differentiating between the
genders, the races, the religions and the skin colors, and refusing to study
the differences that may or may not exist between those groups.
Worse, they oppose the people in academia who wish to
conduct such studies; their excuse being that this kind of studies will be a
waste of time and money. And what is truly galling about their stance is that
they do all that while discussing free speech, which they pretend to defend.
The editors of the Journal pack all those realities – at
times deliberately; at times inadvertently – in the piece they wrote under the
title: “A Campus Mayhem Syllabus” and the subtitle: “The grievance protests
spread, and the adults keep rolling over,” which they published in the Journal
on November 22, 2015.
By the time you get to the second sentence of the first
paragraph, you learn in what mood these people were while expressing their
thoughts. The following is what hits you in the face without warning, and wakes
you to the reality of what was motivating them: “The grievances and demands
vary, but the disease is the same: Faculty and administrators who elevate
racial and gender diversity above all other values, including free speech.”
They call a disease, the choice that was made by the people in charge. And
that’s nothing less than a foul mood.
The fact that today's faculty and administrators were the
students of yesteryear, gave the editors the opportunity to wax nostalgic in
some places, in an effort to help them see things the way that the editors do.
Here is an example: “In a better era she'd have won free beer on campus but
this time, a student cursed out a sociologist for being 'insensitive.'” To
those of us who remember that era vividly, the editors' tease has backfired.
The reason is that calling others insensitive was the most potent tool in the
hand of the Jews who used it to go from being a group forbidden to join the
faculty of any college, to virtually owning the entire academic caboodle.
That editors' faux pas should lead us to anticipate that
they will have no luck convincing anyone to fulfill their wish for them. And
what they wish for is expressed in the form of a lament. It goes like this:
“Yale President promised a center exploring 'race, ethnicity and other aspects
of social identity' … He talked up Yale's $50 million commitment to
diversifying the faculty.” That is going to happen, and the editors will not
stop it.
Their disillusion with the current situation goes deeper
still. That's because: “An estimated 100 campuses have joined the fun, all
alleging systematic racial injustices … But most redolent of our times is Princeton University Wilson 's legacy, among other concessions.”
Note the word “concession.” While the students and the
president of the university consider that to discuss the legacy of a former
president is a necessity that’s as sacred as to honor free speech, the editors
of the Wall Street Journal consider kicking off that discussion to have been a
bargaining chip the current president failed to use to the maximum in his
give-and-take with the students.
It is apparent that the editors of the Journal caught the
American disease of reducing everything, including free speech, to a commercial
value. In their view, free speech has become an object that can be bought, sold
and bartered like pork bellies or lumber on the commodities exchange.
But instead of seeing the oddity in what they, as journalists
– together with the politicians – have done to America 's system of democracy, the
editors counsel the college presidents whom they accuse of capitulating easily,
to reread Orwell. And they fail to see that the institutions of higher learning
are the last line of defense standing between maintaining a system where ideas
are exchanged freely and openly, and slipping into a system where people will
be accused of things as trivial as denying the Holocaust and thrown in jail.