The Trap of Minority Studies Programs

[Valin]

Minding The Campus:

Dr. John M Ellis

6/6/12

 

When Naomi Schaefer Riley was fired by the Chronicle of Higher Education for her trenchant remarks on Black Studies programs, most of those who criticized the firing saw in it a display of the campus left's intolerance. Fair enough, but this episode also has a much broader meaning.

 

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When we compare this story with what is happening to minority students today, we see a tragedy. Just as Pinocchio went off to school with high hopes, only to be waylaid by J. Worthington Foulfellow, minority students are met on the way to campus by hard-left radicals who claim to have the interests of the newcomers at heart but in reality prey on them to advance their own selfish interests. Of course, what black students need is the same solid traditional education that had raised Irish, Italians, and Jews to full equality. But that would not serve the campus radicals' purpose. Disaffected radicals wanted to swell the ranks of the disaffected, not the ranks of the cheerfully upward mobile. Genuine progress for minority students would mean their joining and thus strengthening the mainstream of American society--the mainstream that campus radicals loathe.

 

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This background is the key to the fury that Naomi Schaefer Riley¹s criticisms of Black Studies dissertations unleashed. Radical leftists have achieved considerable influence on campus in part because they were able to add substantial numbers of incoming minorities to their numbers. They need those students in self-destructive Black Studies courses that keep them resentful and under-educated. But that is only possible if they can maintain the illusion that they help and support black students, rather than exploiting them. Ms Schaefer Riley was a threat to that illusion, and that is why she was attacked so vehemently.

 

Black Studies does have one thing right: black students are indeed oppressed. What they have wrong is who is doing the oppressing. People of good-will on both sides of the political aisle should join together to insist that black students be given the same chance that other groups got to join the mainstream. This latest version of the plantation ought to be abolished.

 

 

John M Ellis is Professor Emeritus of German Literature at UC Santa Cruz, and President of the California Association of Scholars.

[Draggingtree]

What Black Caucus members said about Juneteenth

 

By Heber Taylor

The Daily News

Published June 12, 2012

It was deeply moving to hear members to the Texas Legislative Black Caucus talk about Juneteenth.

 

The members are in Galveston for a retreat. They’re talking about the upcoming legislative session. But at lunch Monday, they were at Old Central, the first high school in Texas for African-Americans.

 

The state representatives and senators listened as Dr. Dwight Watson, associate professor of history at Texas State University, talked about that moment in history when slaves in Texas finally heard the federal authorities proclaim they were free.

 

It was, Watson said, a priceless moment that Galveston gave to the history of Texas and the U.S. — a moment that proclaimed that the rights originally promised in the Constitution are there for all those who will exercise them and fight for them.

 

Some of the stories the legislators told in Read More

http://galvestondailynews.com/story/321286