Here’s another bit of wisdom from the Columbia Spectator, this time on the repulsive noose incidents. Here’s the first sentence of the op-ed. See if anything strikes you as odd.
In the past weeks’ furor about nooses and graffiti, which dramatize age-old concerns about our Eurocentric curriculum, paternalistic gentrification efforts, and feelings of marginalization from students and faculty, Columbia has had to defend and confront its legacy of diversity and inclusion more so now than ever before.
The furor dramatizes “age-old concerns about our Eurocentric curriculum”? Really? As there’s so much lynching in there? Eurocentrists did hang Tess of the D’Urbervilles, didn’t they? One comment at the Spectator site wonders:
What other ills does Eurocentric curriculum, now an ‘age-old’ concern, cause? Police beatings? Teen age pregnancies? Baldness? Yeast infections?
The author winds the piece up with a sustained call for a robust ethnic studies department, which “would do wonders to elevate and enhance dialogue, understanding, and scholarship when it comes to power and privilege.” Ethnic studies departments as universal palliatives. It might prove tempting to dismiss this as mere student op-ed puerility, but her sentiments possess broad and considerable weight in the modern university. To determined critics, any and every instance of individual racial wrongdoing is proof of the core depravity of western society. Just ask the Group of 88.
