Dorm Segregation in 2016: The UConn Con

[Valin]

National Review:

Black separatism in higher education is a kind of racialism that was outlawed decades ago.

Roger Clegg & Michael Meyers

August 26, 2016

 

Segregation is back. These past few weeks have seen controversy over black-student housing ads for roommates directed to “people of color” only, and over colleges and a law school that created separate class sections restricted for black students.

 

What is going on? It appears, alas, that public universities have formally reintroduced and made fashionable racial segregation, in the guise of creating safe spaces for “their” minority students — to endorse, fund, and foster black separatism in higher education. And that’s what the University of Connecticut has instituted with its plans to open a dormitory on its Storrs campus, where black male students will be clustered and separated from their peers of other skin colors.

 

But the last thing that campuses should be doing these days is encouraging racial isolation and stereotyping, along with a sense of grievance and a victim mentality. All that is certain to make race relations at our universities worse, not better.

 

The claim, according to University of Connecticut officials and documents obtained by us through a freedom-of-information request, is that this housing segregation will help address the lower graduation rates of its black-male students — lower as compared with male students of other colors and with women. But the social science here is iffy and laden with the paternalism, doubletalk, and the soft bigotry of low expectations whereby black men are burdened and labeled as being “at risk.”

 

(Snip)

 

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Go UConn!!