Final frontier for campus thought police: Alumni reunions

The takeover of elite higher education institutions is nearly complete, with the vast diversity bureaucracies able to intimidate students and faculty into compliance with speech codes, and undergo thought reform, so that they never, for example, unthinkingly use the personal pronouns “she” and “her” just because a person obviously has two X-chromosomes.  But academia is known as an “ivory tower” because it is a separate universe from the society and economy that supports it. Only by monopolizing speech control on campus can the unwilling minds being force-indoctrinated into speech and thought entirely new in the history of civilization.

But there is danger for the progressive panjandrums ruling campus speech and thought:  what about alumni – especially alumni whose campus experience pre-dates the takeover of academia by the thought controllers? They have the potential to break the monopoly and introduce dangerous ideas. So, they must be controlled when they return to campus for reunions.

The result is something like this memorandum distributed by Cornell University to alumni telling them to follow their speech code when visiting (hat tip: Robert Shibley, Instapundit):

Aside from being patronizingly insulting, there is one major problem with this. The entire reason that campuses hold reunions of elderly alumni is to shill for donations, especially in the wills of the soon-to-expire former students. Telling them that they are ignorant, crude, thoughtless barbarians is not a good approach to wheedling a mention in the last will and testament of an alumnus.

This is not a purely academic concern (pardon me the pun) for me. Next month I am attending my 50^th reunion at Kenyon College, which, alas, has fallen to the forces of political correctness just like every other elite (the ones US News and World Report defines as “highly selective” – which is what makes it worthwhile for parents to bribe their children’s way in) college and university. If they try anything this stupid, they will hear from me and probably from my classmate Richard Baehr, co-founder of American Thinker, as well as, I suspect, a number of other alumni in our class with whom I have remained in touch these many decades.  (In fact, they will hear from me anyway, but using other ammunition).

I intend to write about my experiences and my assessment of the changes in campus life over five decades, so you probably will see some commentary.  

The takeover of elite higher education institutions is nearly complete, with the vast diversity bureaucracies able to intimidate students and faculty into compliance with speech codes, and undergo thought reform, so that they never, for example, unthinkingly use the personal pronouns “she” and “her” just because a person obviously has two X-chromosomes.  But academia is known as an “ivory tower” because it is a separate universe from the society and economy that supports it. Only by monopolizing speech control on campus can the unwilling minds being force-indoctrinated into speech and thought entirely new in the history of civilization.

But there is danger for the progressive panjandrums ruling campus speech and thought:  what about alumni – especially alumni whose campus experience pre-dates the takeover of academia by the thought controllers? They have the potential to break the monopoly and introduce dangerous ideas. So, they must be controlled when they return to campus for reunions.

The result is something like this memorandum distributed by Cornell University to alumni telling them to follow their speech code when visiting (hat tip: Robert Shibley, Instapundit):

Aside from being patronizingly insulting, there is one major problem with this. The entire reason that campuses hold reunions of elderly alumni is to shill for donations, especially in the wills of the soon-to-expire former students. Telling them that they are ignorant, crude, thoughtless barbarians is not a good approach to wheedling a mention in the last will and testament of an alumnus.

This is not a purely academic concern (pardon me the pun) for me. Next month I am attending my 50^th reunion at Kenyon College, which, alas, has fallen to the forces of political correctness just like every other elite (the ones US News and World Report defines as “highly selective” – which is what makes it worthwhile for parents to bribe their children’s way in) college and university. If they try anything this stupid, they will hear from me and probably from my classmate Richard Baehr, co-founder of American Thinker, as well as, I suspect, a number of other alumni in our class with whom I have remained in touch these many decades.  (In fact, they will hear from me anyway, but using other ammunition).

I intend to write about my experiences and my assessment of the changes in campus life over five decades, so you probably will see some commentary.