Thursday, September 01, 2005

Inside the Mind of the Rutgers Professor, Part VI: Equality

Equality

The decline of the Rutgers man (“man” being used to denote male or female human). There is no such thing as a “Rutgers Man” anymore. There is no such thing as a renaissance man. Rutgers does not produce gentlemen as well as scholars, does not shape students anymore, at least not in the way it should. While professors play the role of brainwashers, the administration promotes a form of sensitive homogeneity, using academic methods like “creative ambiguity,” where both sides strongly disagree but come to mutual agreement. The administration’s focus is primarily on skin color, ethnicity and non-western religions. The colorblind demands of the civil rights movement have mutated into the color consciousness of today. Since professors believe that all civilization and culture come directly from race and we are all created equal, the Rutgers anthropologist believes all civilizations and cultures are created equal. The Professor has become so obsessed with race, he will often ignore an argument, instead making ad hominem attacks on the basis of the arguer’s race or social status only. Professor James Livingston of the Rutgers History Department, a self-described “Marxist, Socialist, Feminist and Pragmatic Postmodernist,” made such attacks against the editors of The Centurion last fall, accusing the paper of “White Hysteria.” (Professor James Livingston is a white man who makes around 100,000 dollars a year).

Statewide Affirmative Action mandates demanding quotas on race have produced a segregated campus. Livingston College for blacks and Hispanics. Rutgers College for whites. White students are contemptuous of black students and athletes with lower admissions standards and doubt their merits, even though they deny doing so. Attempts to level the playing field bring standards down. English Professor William Dowling has spoken of the decline of academic standards and demanded the university return to its traditional, historical roots. Dr. Dowling has also published a list of works that are considered the great English Classics. In an August 25, 2003 article in Sports Illustrated, he pointed to a football player named Nate Robinson who was accepted into Rutgers with a combined SAT score of 800.

The University wanted none of it.

The “Academic Oversight Committee” demonized Dowling in a Targum column later in September, where they accused Dowling of calling football players “morons.” One student, then Rutgers College sophomore John Little, resorted to an ad hominem attack and accused Dowling of being a “racist.” His April 24th, 2001 quote (for Dowling’s 2003 article was not the first in which he questioned the University’s acquisition of sports players) about Dowling embodies much of the Marxist philosophy: “Professor Dowling only recognizes one style of learning. One leftover from the days when only the wealthy could attend college. Not all students can achieve academically in a typical classroom setting, thus making athletics, drama or art a valuable tool in the teaching process. The lessons that these activities teach students are numerous and every bit as valuable as anything is that can by learned in the classroom.”

The white Rutgers students, faculty and Administration feel uncomfortable talking about campus segregation between the colleges. They do not like it because it does not fit in their prevailing view that all the races get along and their university has become fully integrated, when in fact is has not.

What results is a barrage of aesthetic “diversity” reassurance and sensitivity training. There are dozens of caucuses, programs and councils to beat the importance of skin color and multicultural sensitivity into the segregated students minds. Diversityweb.rutgers.edu says all Rutgers students needs to be welcomed, valued and respected,” but the administration’s plans to emphasize distinct “cultures” (races) only promotes hostility between them. Heck, there is even an Institute for Executive Leadership and Diversity (http://diversity.rutgers.edu) at Rutgers University. At an “Algeria” award conference for Rutgers College student organizations on May 3rd, 2005, more than half of the awards were for cultural organizations, lauding skin color and little else. The Centurion was peculiarly absent from the “Excellence in Student Media” award ceremony.

NJO: Originally printed in the September 2005 issue of The Centurion.

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