(March 22) Another week, another example of colleges succumbing to a sick fetish for racializing and penalizing things that actually aren’t racist. The good news is that some faculty are fighting back. It’s time for university boards to fight back, too.
The blog Legal Insurrection has a full account of the hullabaloo at the University of San Diego law school. Thomas Smith, a professor there for 29 years, wrote in a March 10 blog post that anyone who doubts the coronavirus escaped from a lab in Wuhan should “at least consider that you are an idiot who is swallowing whole a lot of Chinese cock swaddle.” He did so after posting several paragraphs from a Wall Street Journal article about the Chinese government’s interference with a delegation from the World Health Organization.
Right on cue, several student groups went bananas by accusing Smith of contributing to an atmosphere that helped foment “the nearly 4000 hate incidents reported against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the United States over the last year.” A petition signed by the outgoing and incoming student bar association presidents demanded Smith’s resignation or his firing by the university, and a representative of the “Asian and Pacific Islander student association” called the blog post “racist.” Further on cue, a cowardly dean named Robert Schapiro announced that because Smith used “offensive language in reference to people from China” that “demeans a particular national group,” he had convened an inquiry “to review whether university or law school policies have been violated.”
He did this even though Smith had posted an “update” to his blog post reemphasizing that he was “referring to the Chinese government,” not to Chinese people in general as an “ethnic group.”
The totalitarian campus race hustlers, though, insisted on their victimhood status…..
[The rest of this column is right here.]