“That behavior has no place in civil society – not 35 years ago, not today. It stands in stark opposition to William & Mary’s core values of equity and inclusion, which sustain our mission of learning, teaching, and research.”
—William and Mary president Katherine Rowe, explaining the justification behind the school’s disinvitation of Virginia Governor Ralph Northam to peak at the school following the revelation that he wore blackface in 1984, when he was a medical student.
This is the quality of thought, logic and fairness being displayed at the highest levels of our education institutions? Bad behavior in 2019 has no place in 2019’s society, and bad behavior in 1984 had no place in 1984 civil society. It may have no place in 2019’s civil society, but since it didn’t occur in that society, that doesn’t matter. What matters in civil society now is what those in that society now they behave now, and how we can trust them to to behave in the future.
There is no reason to believe, now, today, based on his relevant, recent conduct, that Governor Northam is going to engage in the conduct in question now, or that his conduct in 1984 suggests that he is likely to engage in that conduct in the future.
The principle William and Mary is asserting holds that every individual on its faculty and administration should be judged by their worst moments, mistakes and poor judgment whenever they occurred in the past, regardless of whether such acts were anomalies, and without consideration of how experience, personal growth, evolved attitudes or wisdom might have intervened.
Before 1918, women were not permitted to attend William and Mary. Before 1970, blacks were not admitted. Why should we not now judge the college according to its behavior in 1917 and 1969? Well, to do so would be unfair and illogical.
It would be fair, however, to judge the college based on its cowardly, pandering, unjust treatment of Governor Northam now.
Ethics Alarms 
Rule 1. for progressive reasoning:
Critical thinking skills are to take a back seat to virtue signalling.
YES! That’s all this lazy, cowardly, pandering stupid, stupid woman is doing! Where is the outrage? I am I literally the only one pointing this out? How can we have any trust in our higher education when its leaders are this shallow and foolish?
The answer, Jack, is that we can’t. We haven’t been able to in a long time. The fact is that we continued to trust them well beyond the point at which we should have stopped. Because of that, they believe that they can get away with virtually anything today. Worse, there is still some level of trust with many parents. As I have said before, we are doomed!
Jack,
I worked in higher ed for 20 years. I retired in 2012 because I because I could no longer put up with the outward shows of inclusivity and acceptance while having to navigate the treacherous shoals of internal politics of exclusion and intimidation.
Chris, I taught a Beginning Psychology course for a local community college to a bunch of soldiers for several years. That was an experience. You want to talk about “inclusive”, hang out with a bunch of combat soldiers. Talk about “racial insensitivity…color blindness” those soldiers didn’t even know some fellow soldiers were black…or female…or Latino…or whatever. And THEY DIDN’T CARE!!!. I’d guess “I got your back” is a hell of a lot more important than “Wait…you’re black” in survival situations.
When I taught Econ I had the same experience with students. I recently spoke with a former colleague who taught the same subject and she said all faculty are walking on egshells to avoid hurting any feelings.
Isn’t that the way we want it to be all over? I’m beginning to reconsider Heilein’s proposed universal enlistment for citizenship in the Starship Troopers novel.
Wanna vote? Serve the body politic.
Marie, he didn’t propose universal enlistment, he proposed military service as the only path to citizenship. But wouldn’t that be great? You want to come to the United States and become a citizen? Great! Just sign up for four years in the Mobile Infantry! Obviate the need for a wall, anyway.
We were taught in Army basic (C-6-10!) that everyone was the same color: green.
It worked
In the police business everyone is blue. Period.
Did you expect better from the College of the Kissing Cousins?
The thing is, they probably aren’t this shallow and foolish. They just understand that they must engage in this absurd moral preening or face the opprobrium of their peers and students, not to mention the Twitter mob.
We’ve got to stop reflexively applying Hanlon’s Razor to the Left, especially the higher education left. They are almost certainly more competent than this comment suggests. It was most likely made with full intention.
Spot on, Glenn. These administrators are reprehensible. They’d sell their grandmothers for diversity points. Spineless and gutless don’t even get close. I’m beginning to think we are going to need to home school our grand children through four years of college.
Well, there are college left who don’t feel the need to buy into this nonsense, but they don’t get state funding. They also get pressured by accreditation bodies.
What a goat rodeo.
I’m mostly embarrassed by and for the trustees who enable this sort of behavior by administrations. If it’s all just about preserving access to federal grant monies, that’s awful. I guess they’re all just dancing the higher ed boogie-woogie.
We really should ask Katherine Rowe if she was talking about the blackface issue or the concept of infanticide Northam seemed to be supporting earlier in the week.
If she responds the blackface issue then simply ask her if infanticide is acceptable in 2019 civil society.
She’d just say that choice doesn’t equal infanticide, or some other non-answer like that.
Yep, she’s just reading from the script handed her by the highly compensated Vice President of Diversity and his or her extensive staff.
I am curious to know what they say and commemorate about Thomas Roderick Dew and how he helped to shape today’s core values of equity and inclusion at William and Mary. Of course, those were different times.
How could W&M not accept blacks until 1970? What about the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts of 1965? W&M has just gone down 1,000 percent in my opinion, not that I would expect it to be any different from any other of the egregiously ‘progressive’ liberal arts colleges today. STAY AWAY! And if some alumni had any guts they’d stop their donations, unless of course, which is probably the case, they’re all cut from the W&M mold anyway. This is all out of control. And it’s frightening.
I told someone that I didn’t think the photo was a big deal. They got upset. I asked them “What if this was a ‘tasteless costume’ costume party with a prize for the costume in the worst taste?” It wouldn’t be a great idea today, but back when we as a country had a sense of humor and believed in freedom, it wasn’t an unheard of concept.
Even worse, it wasn’t even considered offensive by most African Americans.
The worst thing is that we don’t even know if Northam is one of the people in the picture, and he claims not. I think we have to take him at his word, because somebody out there knows who it was. Forget for a moment he admitted wearing blackface at one point – the picture is the thing everyone is upset over, not his admission.
So is the very presence of such a picture that was placed on Northam’s page by the editors without his consent an indictment of his character, especially if the people in the offending pic were not him?
Could your friend please address that question?
Oh, man, this was really excellent, Jack. This this is a rare example of actual hypocrisy, an institution pretending to have historical virtue when it manifestly does not, then demanding the same of… well, virtually everyone, you’d have to say. On that basis, I’d guess almost everyone is “…in stark opposition to William & Mary’s core values…”, at least to some degree. Must be lonely up there on that ivory tower.
William & Mary did not dissolve as an institution because of it’s retrospective ethical failings, yet Northam must fall on his sword because shut up.
My undergraduate alma mater admitted its first black student in 1856 (who became a doctor) and had the first female doctor graduate in 1871. In 1876, the first female engineering student graduated. In graduate school, William and Mary students looked down on me for going to such a pedestrian school. Now I understand it was probably because in their eyes, I mixed with ‘rabble’ like blacks and women.
Remember, this is typical behavior for Democrats. Cassius Clay was one of the principle Republican men responsibility for freeing the slaves in the United States. From his speeches to his abolitionist newspaper to his insistence that Lincoln free the slaves in the seceded states, he was on the forefront. The only reason the South wasn’t successful is that England and France did not enter the war on the side of slavery. Russia prevented them from doing that. Russia sent their fleet to the East and West coasts of the US with orders to attack British or French ships if the entered the war. Clay arranged that. He donated some of his land to help found Berea College, open to all races after the Civil War. It was the first integrated college in the southern US and offered free college for all students. The Democrats despised him for that. A black man named in his honor changed his name to honor white men who owned and sold black slaves to the approval of Democrats across the country. Berea College mentions one sentence about this founding mission on their webpage today. Today, white men who owned black slaves are more highly praised by Democrats than the brave abolitionists who risked and gave their lives for black freedom in this country. The main group that continues to enslave people in Africa today is praised by the Democratic Party while groups that fight against such slavery are despised. Democrats care about the appearance of racism, but actually support racism. Didn’t Obama give the eulogy for Sen. Byrd?
Some random notes, hope you don’t mind
I looked over the Berea College website and also followed the various links. What is interesting to me is that, with its specific Christian orientation, it inclines in all aspects toward what I would call the ‘democratic ideal’, to egalitarianism both simple and radical, and essentially to what is the Democrat Party project in America. (What values the Republicans hold to is anyone’s guess, I frankly do not understand). Berea College synthesizes a form and expression of American radicalism. It is ‘progressive’ in the French Revolutionary and in the Rousseauian and the Lockean sense. I cannot see how it could be ‘conservative’ in any sense (but then I struggle to define conservatism, traditionalism, and much else).
One of the ‘centers’ within the college [defined as: “Curricular/co-curricular activities”] is *the bell hooks Institute* (bell hooks: acclaimed intellectual, feminist theorist, cultural critic, artist and writer) which — but I am not necessarily criticizing this — indicates a fairly radical tendency. They take “God has made of one blood all peoples of the earth” (Acts 17:26)” to mean an absolute universalism (to all appearances it seems that this is what they aspire to).
Yet, the full quote from Acts is: “He has made from one blood every nation of men to live on the entire face of the earth, having appointed fixed times and the boundaries of their habitation”.
You might think — as one attempting against powerful currents of American Radicalism and one attempting to develop a conservative perspective — that I am opposed to this universalism or the radicalism that it entails, and which Berea seems to sponsor, but this is not necessarily so. I am more interested in the philosophical dimension of how people’s ideas about *this reality* translate into social and political praxis. I would wish to be able to define a conservatism to oppose the radicalism of the present, but it may prove impossible given the strength of the currents.
The *Great Commitments* of Berea College (visible on the website) can only lead precisely to a *multicultural republic* and to a *radical activist feminism*. The notion of being, or becoming, ‘one blood’ obviously can only mean that it is in God’s will that people of different races, ethnicities and regions ‘blend together’ as there is no qualifying restraint (though in Acts, at least as far as that selected phrase goes, there is the added ‘the boundaries of their habitation’.
The more that I read, the better I understand, that America is an expression of the hierarchy-opposed radicalism of the French Revolution. It is a radicalism that does seem to have more restraints, yet it is a radicalism nonetheless.
Again, I am not saying any of this is ‘wrong’ — people do what they do and live in accord with the values and ideas that have determined them — it is just that I am interested in understanding how *ideas have consequences*.
Another thing that just occurred to me: When are we, as a country, going to get fed up with this moral preening from our “betters?” It’s disgusting, and as you’ve so clearly demonstrated, totally without foundation or merit.
When will be our “Have you no shame?” moment on this subject?
I wish someone would do it to the president and administration of the college I went to. It was a great place run by responsible adults we could admire, now it’s run by spineless dweebs.
The collective “Have you no shame?” moment in the US was the election of President Trump. Unfortunately for all involved, the response from our “betters” has been . . . CHALLENGE ACCEPTED!!!
–Dwayne
Not sure how an election can qualify, and frankly, the record has clearly indicated he was the best choice among the two worst candidates in my memory. What that says about Clinton is really, really bad, alas.
Too bad Northam isn’t a lefty tenured faculty member. He’d be patted on the back and the media would be told his views do not represent those of the school but the school stands by the time honored principles of academic freedom, blah, blah blah. Yuck.
I hope Northam continues to refuse to resign and forces the Dems to try to impeach him. I’d love the read the articles of impeachment to find out exactly what they’d say his is guilty of doing. I think he’s decided to call their bluff. They have nothing. This whole social justice thing is on the verge of being exposed as a charade. They’d have to convict him of a thought crime.
I have the Ultimate Argument to be used against Williams & Mary. Actually, it is to be used against everyone of European ancestry now in the Americas. It is from an article in today’s Times.
Further evidence that your existence is a blemish on God’s creation. Have you nothing to say in defense? (I thought not!)
Who can defend against the opprobrium of God? 🙂
Almost like we need someone to plead our case before God, right? We ourselves cannot defend against the condemnation, so need redemption in order to stand.
I read that somewhere…
But if humans are bad, and vegetation reclaiming land and cooling are good, wouldn’t that make the European settlers the agents of God’s wrath rather than evil, evil invaders? Perhaps the Natives, possessing the quality “diverse”, had more carbon credits, so it wasn’t a good trade. If only they’d show their math, we’d all be able to see how much sense they make.
Also, this is the most far-fetched human/climate narrative I’ve heard yet. The people who believe this will clearly believe it regardless of how objectively ridiculous it becomes. It really isn’t far fetched to think the narrative will very soon be “kill whitey to cool the planet” (granting that it’s pretty much already that, hidden behind a thin, transparent veil).
When conservatives hear what progressives would like to do, we believe them. Given the power, they, like all socialists and communists before them, would kill their opposition just for existing. They turn on their allies in their thirst for power.
Change my mind
Pshaw! Obviously that’s not how the French Revolutionaries, Spanish Communist movement, Leninists, Maoists, Nazis, Pol Pot, or Che Guevara behaved, so your logic has a number of gaping holes! We’re far from being confident enough to say that every attempt will inevitably end in murderous, fraudulent failure and misery!
You missed the /snark tag, there…
#MindNotChanged
I prefer not to hold my audience’s hand. That’s what people say they like about Inception, anyway.
Benjamin writes:
I cannot figure out what to think about *climate change science*. But I do notice that it sounds convincing. I mean that in the sense that it is a good story.
The psychological dimension seems obvious to me though. I read somewhere that the sense of it is that: Man’s activities have so infuriated Creation that the atmospheric gods have become extremely angry!
The olden metaphysics, the olden description of the world, was that of The Great Chain of Being:
I am interested by what I see as the hysteria of our present, which seems to me (I have been too influenced by CG Jung perhaps) to explain that people project their hysterical passion onto the events surrounding them. It could be related to Millennial apprehensions as well.
Tillyard in a Nutshell
I wonder if Shakespeare has the logic and mechanism right but the timescale wrong. Killing one king and replacing him with a single person is unnatural, but killing every king and replacing him with the whole liberal populace is grand-scale mania. A clown car has nothing on that throne. If the globe is warming, and the climatologists are too busy eating each other to make a firm case for it, by Shakespearean logic we can only be surprised it took this long!
My Plato bells are definitely ringing with this one. I’m going to be thinking about this all day, now.