In two New York Times columns, John McWhorter took aim at the University of Wisconsin, first for removing a really big rock because somebody once called it a racial slur 100 years ago, and second for removing the name of Frederic March, a “treasured alum,” because he was briefly part of a campus club which shared a bad name with an national group with which it had no association.
McWhorter’s basic position is that these were both empty, pointless gestures based on the most tenuous of connections that reflect the misguided lost cause of the woke. It’s neither about the removal of a rock or the changing of a name, expense of removal and offense to the memory of a distinguished alumnus aside. It’s about the misguided inferential leaps and the feigned claims of suffering manufactured by children seeking things to be outraged about. When real problems run dry, they move on to the trivial, and ultimately the non-existent.
Chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Rebecca Blank, wrote a Letter to the Editor to respond, which would be entirely understandable and appropriate since she’s the putative adult at the college and these two empty gestures happened on her watch. But she notably felt compelled to include that she wasn’t writing for herself, as if she owned these moves, but “in collaboration with student leaders from the Wisconsin Black Student Union and Union Council to tell you what actually occurred.”
Whether this was to diffuse blame or to pander to the students, as if kids who will be there for a hot minute get to reinvent a university according to the latest fashion trend in hemlines is unclear. What is clear is that nothing she has to say related to “what actually occurred,” as opposed to the chaos theory inferential leaps crafted to create an evil rock and a name on a building that made students pretend to cry.
Like campuses across the country, we are wrestling with named places and objects that have imperfect and racist histories, while also striving to create an environment that makes students, faculty and staff feel that they belong.
Excuse 1: Others are doing stupid crap so we are too.
Who and what are given prominence on campus carry meaning and reflect what values we wish to endorse. These are choices. We sought to question whether those choices — if revisited today — reflect our values.
Excuse 2: Nothing in the past, no fact, tradition, honor, reality, matters if there is anything inconsistent with the “values” of the moment, values being defined as anything that can be pointed at and someone goes “ugh” or “I feel unsafe.”
There are some things in our country’s history that are so toxic that you can never erase the stain, let alone merit a named space in our student union. Membership in a group with a name like that of the K.K.K. is one of them.
Excuse 3: If it sounds like something bad, it is bad, and it is so bad that it’s as bad as the thing it sounds like because sounds are “so toxic that you can never erase the stain.”
For a student, even an academic, to believe that this reflects what “actually happened” as opposed to flights of delusional connections that only the most fertile imaginations can take seriously, is one thing. But Blank is the Chancellor of the University. She is supposed to be there after the kids graduate. She is the guardian of the University against transitory childish beliefs and actions. She’s the person who is paid to say no when the kids stamp their feet.
A rock that was associated with a vile racial slur in the 1920s was also removed from our main campus, at the request of the Wisconsin Black Student Union and other groups. We came to this conclusion after more than a year of consultation and discussion, sparked by the death of George Floyd.
The rock didn’t kill George Floyd. The rock didn’t hurt anyone. The rock is just a rock. A big rock. A cool rock. But just a rock. That some racist characterized it with a racist slur isn’t the rock’s fault. It’s a rock. Condemn the racist and racial slur used one time in an obscure writing that likely required some serious effort to unearth because that’s who committed the offense. Write about the rock in glowing racial terms if you feel the need to rehabilitate the rock as a non-racist rock, even though rocks can’t be racist because they’re rocks. But what sort of idiot blames the rock?
In 2018, the university removed the name of Fredric March, the actor and an alumnus, from a student performance space at the request of students, and after months of discussion about the subject among our student leaders. It did so after the terrible events of Charlottesville and historical research showing incontrovertibly that March was a member of a campus group called the Ku Klux Klan, though the group was not affiliated in any way with the national Knights of the K.K.K.
While it is good that March went on to become a fighter for civil rights and equality, the fact remains that while a student here he aligned himself with a student group that echoed the K.K.K. name.
Frederic March wasn’t at Charlottesville for two reasons. First, because he was a dedicated “fighter for civil rights and equality” and second because he died in 1975. On the one side, you have not only one of our greatest actor who graduated from the university, who was dedicated to the wonderful cause of equality. On the other side, he was a member of a campus club with the same name, but not at all connected, to a notorious violent racist organization.
Typical rhetoric was statements like this from one Madison student: “I cannot believe that my friends and I have been performing in a space named after someone who would have considered all of us to be lesser beings.” She added, “I find it so ironic that we are sharing our intersectional stories in a theater that honors a racist.”
Except the chancellor commissioned a report which concluded that the only “connection” was the name, and that otherwise the two were entirely separate and unrelated. An adult might have viewed this as a teachable moment about making unwarranted and baseless inferential leaps. Or perhaps explained that even if March’s membership in a college club was wrong, he overcame that by the rest of his life as a fighter for civil rights. Maybe even argued that if the name offended students, blame the name and not the person, because March didn’t choose the similar name and never put on a white hood, as he now existed in the students’ passionate mind’s eye.
Blank, however, did none of these things. Instead, she rubbed the tummies of the outraged matriculants of the moment and begged them not to torch her office for being complicit in rock racism by not enabling the dismantling of the rock. In a way, Blank did tell us what “actually happened.” The adult responsible failed to explain to the insipid children how their tenuous connections are silly and why they don’t really hurt anyone. Instead, Blank wrote a letter to the NYT
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When I get 100 applications for a job I need some way to quickly cut them down to a manageable number.
These deans make it easier for me.
My “Do not hire graduates from this university” list gets longer each day.
I find it useful to discard resume’s and applications where the applicant has taken the liberty to list his or her preferred pronouns.
So somehow, poor choices in ones youthful associations erase the amazingly excellent work one will do in the future?
If these students hold themselves to the same standard, I suppose living in the basement on Mom’s couch is the only tenable future plan.
As to the UoW…
” I am prepared to brand you for what you are…a strutting egoist, with a Napoleonic power complex, and an out and out traitor…”
But it wasn’t even a poor choice. It just sounded like one.
The org was still named after the first Klan and inspired by The Birth of the Nation. March’s subsequent history as a civil rights activist should outweigh that, but it’s not as if the student group name was entirely innocent.
That’s neither what the report found nor a sound grasp of the social dynamics of the era. And no, I have no interest in your hijacking the comments to spew your nonsense. We’re all well aware that you are the embodiment of too much education and no wisdom.
Yeah, I got that. But as we know, for the intellectually neutered, ‘sounds like’, and ‘looks like’ are plenty close enough for the punishment to commence.
And you know, that god damn rock does kinda look like a racist.
Yes. Make a youthful choice to go to Wisconsin, excel as a student, and then find that no one will look at a resume.
As a kinda joke about not hiring anyone out of UW-Madison, it’s pointed. But let’s not take the joke too far.
How long till they roll out Madame La Guillotine?
I recall, prior to the stage of my career when I spent most of my time providing advice on how to leverage digital to dignified offices at vaunted institutions, a more innocent version of myself, who mistakenly believed higher education was somehow different from other types of businesses.
It seems, in hindsight, a rather banal epiphany, that the economic interests of an educational institution may sometimes overlap with the interests of even the most caviling little cash cows wandering the quad.
Some view students as the consumers of education. They are part of the reason higher education is now a worthless, very expensive, shithole.
You view students as consumers of education every time you mock them for studying social sciences instead of engineering. How stupid of them to not be smart consumers who ensure they will get a return on their investment of time and money. You treat education like a commodity to be bought and sold just like everyone else except you want the consumers to make better choices and/or the schools to sell better products.
Treating students as consumers like that leads to a “customer is always right” mentality which leads to fucking rocks getting moved around while people are homeless and starving. You played your part in making higher education a worthless, very expensive shithole by accepting the idea that education is merely a commodity. So, stop being reductive when discussing education please?
While I consider education a distinct category from a consumer transaction, even your argument falls short of my considering students consumers of education. It’s an investment, not a purchase of good or services, where they are investing in their future.
So if a student decides to “associate” the campus administration building with “a vile racist slur,” it has to go too? Or is that only if a student (or someone else) can be shown to have made that “association” a hundred years in the past? These people are nuts.
Interesting how chaos theory associations work out. This could offer an explanation for Blank’s playing the patsy to the kids lest they shift their gaze upon the uni itself for enabling the rock.
The rock was called a slur, so the rock had to go. The building was named after a slurrer so the building can stay. Plus buildings can accommodate tuition-paying students. Rocks, not so much.
It’s as clear as slurry.
Welcome to Madison, where protestors tore down the statue of an abolitionist because it represented “a false sense of racial equality in a community with some of the largest racial gaps in educational, health and criminal justice outcomes”.
Eyes off the prize plz.
It’s everywhere.
Down here they’re trying to stop UT’s band from playing “The Eyes of Texas”. Not that it has racist lyrics – they’re pretty banal. It’s that the song was sung at minstrel shows back in the day and those minstrel shows MAY have included people in blackface. Emphasis on the may. So far the school has gone so far as to create a second band that doesn’t play the song to give people a choice, but otherwise it’s telling them to pound sand. Not good enough for the students, who have filed a lawsuit to stop the playing of the song at school functions.
Ultimately there are thousands of universities, many of which are in Texas, who don’t play the racially neutral song. Transfer if you find the school so insulting.
This is off topic I know but back in the day I had operations on a property adjacent to a private hunting ranch owned by a bunch of rich guys from Dallas. They called their place the Koon Kreek Klub. I found the audacity to be remarkable.
I was watching ‘Tropic Thunder’ on Amazon Prime the other night, and noticed that ‘Blackface’ was amongst the many content warnings displayed whenever one pauses or resumes the movie. I had to show the household, and amazingly, the content warning actually improved my experience of the movie.
I see that “smoking” is regularly noted in the content warning, which means it’s all my parents’ fault.
The ironic thing is that the most well known blackface performer has to be Al Jolson.
So he should be deleted from history, right? But Jolson was also a ferocious advocate of racial equality in entertainment, back in a day when there was a lot of risk in taking that position. Jolson didn’t care – he used his considerable influence to help as many black performers as he could. So what do we do with Al? T
History and the people in it are complex and nuanced and complicated. This college student cancellation stuff takes the cartoon view of history and is based on feelings rather than knowledge. Thinking is too hard, feeling is easy.
Is there a college called Jolson anywhere? Is so, we would find out whether the name would survive scrutiny.
“Life of Brian” has two blackface scenes. Watch it while you can.
Who’s going to break the bad news to Matt Gertz?
The list of things “so toxic” is both long and constantly subject to change. It’s also only visible when needed as an excuse.
“She is supposed to be there after the kids graduate.”
I couldn’t find data on “chancellor,” but the average tenure of a university president is 6.5 years, as they hop up the ladder of prestige and pay, so right now they aren’t there much longer than the kids.
That might be part of the problem.
Sounds like someone should publicize the ACLU defending the nazi march back in the day. Make a note that it supported an extremely racist organization.
Maybe we can get them canceled, or at least get all the young kids ruining it out.