Pomona College Students Demand ‘Action’ Against Conservative Journalists
Declare that truth is ‘white supremacy’ and Heather Mac Donald is a fascist.
After Heather Mac Donald was recently shut down by a mob of students who support Black Lives Matter at Claremont McKenna, the president of Pomona College, which is part of the consortium of Claremont colleges, defended her and the importance of free speech. That didn’t sit well with some students.
The Claremont Independent reports:
Students Demand Administrators ‘Take Action’ Against Conservative Journalists
In an open letter to outgoing Pomona College President David Oxtoby, a group of students from the Claremont Colleges assail the president for affirming Pomona’s commitment to free speech and demand that all five colleges “take action” against the conservative journalists on the staff of the Claremont Independent.
The letter, written by three self-identified Black students at Pomona College, is a response to an April 7 email from President Oxtoby in which he reiterated the college’s commitment to “the exercise of free speech and academic freedom” in the aftermath of protests that shut down a scheduled appearance by an invited speaker, scholar and Black Lives Matter critic Heather Mac Donald, on April 6.
“Protest has a legitimate and celebrated place on college campuses,” Oxtoby wrote. “What we cannot support is the act of preventing others from engaging with an invited speaker. Our mission is founded upon the discovery of truth, the collaborative development of knowledge and the betterment of society.”
In their open letter, the students sharply disagree.
“Free speech, a right many freedom movements have fought for, has recently become a tool appropriated by hegemonic institutions. It has not just empowered students from marginalized backgrounds to voice their qualms and criticize aspects of the institution, but it has given those who seek to perpetuate systems of domination a platform to project their bigotry,” they write.
“Thus, if ‘our mission is founded upon the discovery of truth,’” the students continue, citing Oxtoby’s letter, “how does free speech uphold that value?”
The students also characterize truth as a “myth” and a white supremacist concept.
Here are some excerpts from the letter:
Dear David Oxtoby,
We, few of the Black students here at Pomona College and the Claremont Colleges, would like to address several of the points made in your ‘Academic Freedom and Free Speech’ email sent out to the entire student body on April 7, 2017 in response to a student protest against Heather Mac Donald’s talk at Claremont McKenna College’s (CMC) Athenaeum. We believe that given your position as President of this institution your voice holds significant weight in campus discourse. That power comes with immense responsibility, especially when you could dictate campus culture, climate, and the alleged mission of this institution…
The idea that we must subject ourselves routinely to the hate speech of fascists who want for us not to exist plays on the same Eurocentric constructs that believed Black people to be impervious to pain and apathetic to the brutal and violent conditions of white supremacy.
The idea that the search for this truth involves entertaining Heather Mac Donald’s hate speech is illogical. If engaged, Heather Mac Donald would not be debating on mere difference of opinion, but the right of Black people to exist. Heather Mac Donald is a fascist, a white supremacist, a warhawk, a transphobe, a queerphobe, a classist, and ignorant of interlocking systems of domination that produce the lethal conditions under which oppressed peoples are forced to live.
The entire letter is embedded below:
Pomona Student Petition Against Conservative Journalists by Legal Insurrection on Scribd
This is similar to what recently happened at Wellesley.
The left can’t fight free speech so they’re simply trying to end it.
Hat tip to the Simple Justice blog.
Featured image via YouTube.
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Comments
Larger issue, why does a letter from 3 students generate any kind of interest at all, much less national publicity?
Because they’re so nuts that they make for click-bait headlines.
Come ON. [Free Speech] has given those who seek to perpetuate systems of domination a platform to project their bigotry,”
…
“Thus, if ‘our mission is founded upon the discovery of truth,’” the students continue, citing Oxtoby’s letter, “how does free speech uphold that value?”
Questioning how your equal ability to bring your point of view to the table with those your are opposing doesn’t advance the discovery of truth shows a lack of self-awareness that a mental vegetable would be hard-pressed to compete with.
At San Diego State University: “Ozzie Monge, a campus lecturer, and the Native American Student Alliance contend the university’s Aztec brand has been shaped by “white supremacy, racism, bigotry, and ignorance.” They accuse the institution and those who celebrate and observe the Aztec identity of “cultural appropriation,” “inherent racism” and “intellectual dishonesty” and call for, among other things, the immediate retirement of the Aztec Warrior and the phasing out of “all symbols, signage, and references” using the term “Aztec.” ”
Why this asshat and a small band of students think they should upend decades of loyalty branding is absurd as well.
Heather Mac Donald answered this piece of illiterate nonsense in an article in City Journal. She mocks the “writers” of this stupid demand letter by repeatedly referring to the writers by their own chosen descriptor, “We, few of the Black students.”
https://www.city-journal.org/html/we-few-we-miserable-few-15145.html
“Larger issue, why does a letter from 3 students generate any kind of interest at all, much less national publicity?”
Probably because this is the kind of insect threat that college administrators will gleefully surrender to.
It’s fascinating to us who have something formerly called integrity and self-respect to watch others publicly grovel and debase themselves. The problem isn’t the students taking over the asylum, it’s the administrators giving it away.
“Don’t give up the ship! Fight her till she sinks.”
I’m guessing this is not the motto of at Claremont McKenna.
I would like to see a logical and semantical reduction of this letter. I can’t make sense out of it — actually, I cannot force myself to read it!
I can’t understand it either. Near as I can tell the faculty and staff of Claremont McKenna are bound and determined to surrender to something and beg for their lives.
And three black kids will have to do. It seems to be a thing on college campi today.
Kids today, what can I say.
It seems to me that the problem with Claremont College is that people who are supposedly being educated at their institution are unable to coherently express their grievances.
The fact the many colleges cave into the demands of a few deranged, ignorant and foolish students is simply a sign of the times.
History will think we were all nuts because so few opposing ideas are presented in the MSM.
Fine, have it your way. Free speech is no longer a core value of this university. So you’re hereby expelled. You are estopped from suing on the grounds of free speech, because on the day you demanded its suspension you forfeited its protection.
“Thus, if ‘our mission is founded upon the discovery of truth,’” the students continue, citing Oxtoby’s letter, “how does free speech uphold that value?”
There’s an easy answer to that question. Just as the dark enables us to know the light, so too does falsity enable us to know the truth. If they believe they speak the truth, the best way to highlight the fact would be to allow speakers of falsehoods to have their say, and to let people judge for themselves which is true and which is false. That should be a no-brainer if their “truth” is as shining as they seem to think it is. The fact the left is unwilling to expose their ideas to comparison with contending ideas says volumes about how little faith they have in their own pronouncements.
It is past time that these SJWs who are so intent at shutting down free speech by performing character assassinations, creating lies out of whole cloth, organizing efforts to shut down speeches by nonstop heckling, and so forth, are they themselves accused of fomenting hate speech. These accusations need to be loud and endless for if this is not done, then the landslide of idiocy and lies will only increase in volume and stupidity.
In the 60s the campus radicals demanded a voice.
Now they teach the new campus radicals that everyone else must shut up… or else!
Here ya go.
http://www.marcuse.org/herbert/pubs/60spubs/65repressivetolerance.htm
Nihil sub sole novum.
Proof that Liberalism is a mental disorder.
They seem to be trying so very hard to pull off the PoMo shtick, the one that asserts that speech can never reflect truth for there is no truth anyway, there is only the Nietzschean Will to Power (and therefor truth claims are never about truth, only about power).
But they’re not very good at it, are they?
(Then again, who is? When even the tenured radicals write unreadable, opaque prose that repetitively asserts much of what these students seem to be trying say, how can one reasonably expect their students to do much better?)
[…] which is defined as anything you say that we don’t like, must be banned, starting on campuses. As fellow social justice warriors have observed, “Free speech, a right many freedom movements have fought for, has recently become a tool […]