"Tim Wolfe, the president of the University of Missouri—known as Mizzou—resigned early today, brought down by…well, it’s kind of hard to say.
A helpful timeline of the case indicates that it started with two cases in which black students at Mizzou said they had racial epithets shouted at them, and one in which a swastika was scrawled on the wall of a bathroom in a university building. In all three of these cases, nobody knows who did it or why. But they were taken as proof of “systemic racism” at the university, and protesters howled for Wolfe’s resignation. Throughout the case, Wolfe issued condemnations of racism, acknowledgements of the justice of the protester’s cause, and apologies for not seeming to take them seriously enough—which, as we should know by now, are all the signs that he’s doomed and will eventually be forced to resign.
Wolfe was targeted, as one protest group put it, because he was “‘not completely’ aware of systemic racism, sexism, and patriarchy on campus.” I love the “not completely.” It reminds me of the old rule about totalitarian revolutions: first, you go after the counter-revolutionaries, then you go after the insufficiently enthusiastic. So Wolfe had to be removed for failing to show immediate and total compliance toward their political agenda.
This reaction makes sense only as a raw power play, as student agitators demonstrating that they can get rid of anybody they want to, that they run this place.
The Mizzou case, along with others like it, raises a question about whether our institutions of higher learning even deserve to exist—not because they are really “systemically racist,” which no one actually believes, but because of their inability to assert any kind of rational response to the student agitators. If administrators don’t have the nerve to re-assert the actual educational purpose of the institution, this makes a pretty good case that it’s time to burn the universities to the ground (metaphorically speaking, of course) and start over from scratch...."
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A helpful timeline of the case indicates that it started with two cases in which black students at Mizzou said they had racial epithets shouted at them, and one in which a swastika was scrawled on the wall of a bathroom in a university building. In all three of these cases, nobody knows who did it or why. But they were taken as proof of “systemic racism” at the university, and protesters howled for Wolfe’s resignation. Throughout the case, Wolfe issued condemnations of racism, acknowledgements of the justice of the protester’s cause, and apologies for not seeming to take them seriously enough—which, as we should know by now, are all the signs that he’s doomed and will eventually be forced to resign.
Wolfe was targeted, as one protest group put it, because he was “‘not completely’ aware of systemic racism, sexism, and patriarchy on campus.” I love the “not completely.” It reminds me of the old rule about totalitarian revolutions: first, you go after the counter-revolutionaries, then you go after the insufficiently enthusiastic. So Wolfe had to be removed for failing to show immediate and total compliance toward their political agenda.
This reaction makes sense only as a raw power play, as student agitators demonstrating that they can get rid of anybody they want to, that they run this place.
The Mizzou case, along with others like it, raises a question about whether our institutions of higher learning even deserve to exist—not because they are really “systemically racist,” which no one actually believes, but because of their inability to assert any kind of rational response to the student agitators. If administrators don’t have the nerve to re-assert the actual educational purpose of the institution, this makes a pretty good case that it’s time to burn the universities to the ground (metaphorically speaking, of course) and start over from scratch...."
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