Don't blame the kids
On the student protests at the UMass Boston Chancellor's inauguration, April 5, 2024
“Who?” is usually an easy question. “Whose fault?” is harder. “What to do about it?” is just impossible.
In 2015, The Evergreen State College (Olympia, WA) descended to what the rest of the country, including UMass Boston, had yet to reach in 2020. The first word uttered by Evergreen’s freshly appointed sixth president, George Sumner Bridges, was “equity.” Also the second and the third. Bloated admin followed. Student demands to dismantle “systemic racism” predictably mushroomed. Admin ramped up the absurd by trying to insert race into faculty reviews. In turn, students reciprocated by… wait for it… making April 12, 2017 the day when white faculty, stuff, and students are not allowed to show their pale oppressive faces on campus. When one of the professors objected, protesters
… occupied the president’s office to press their complaints of racism on campus. In one encounter, the president, George Bridges, was recorded meekly complying with a demand not to use hand gestures when he spoke because they were threatening.
— “A Campus Argument Goes Viral. Now the College Is Under Siege,” by Anemona Hartocollis, New York Times, June 16, 2017.
[E]xits to the campus library were blocked with furniture.
— Wikipedia (retrieved on April 6, 2024).
Rings a bell? Our Supreme Leaders came to power and brought their “Anti-Racist and Health-Promoting” riddle with them in 2020. Bloated admin… you guessed it… followed. The leaders knew neither measure nor bound trying to show that they and the students “are one,” all the way to the promises to be “cognizant of the inherent whiteness.” In turn, UMass Boston students reciprocated by… wait for it… protesting the Chancellor’s Inauguration. They demanded that the university “starts promoting the BIPOC women NTT faculty,” “makes ethnic studies mandatory,” stops discriminating against the Africana Studies program (who just filed a complaint with the Massachusetts commission against discrimination (MCAD) accusing the Leaders of mistreatment), puts an “immediate end to the universityʼs attempts at dismantling the power of its communityʼs initiatives,” announces “a total divestment of university funding from ‘racist entities’, and those engaging in war crimes” (gee, we wonder what they mean here - Qatar? Iran? Help us, dear readers), and lowers tuition.
Are the Evergreen kids to blame for the escalation? I do not have enough information to assess, but likely not. But what about the UMass Boston ones? “Ignorant,” “spoiled,” and “lazy” do come to mind at first. But are they? How about cherchez les adultes? The ones behind the students’ backs, brain-drilling and instigating? The adults who are in a dire need for the revolutionary cannon fodder. The adults whose revolution is about redirecting society’s gaze from the future of the Child to the present of the Queer. The adults whose revolutionary forefathers had a special affection for children, both the French and Tunisian ones. The following proverb comes to mind:
He sets the wolf to guard the sheep.
—Henry G. Bohn, A polyglot of foreign proverbs, (1857)
In times like ours, a positive outlook is bound to be indistinct from a utopian thinking. And yet… Can we all be friends, forget about “the color of their skin,” start reading books instead of obsessing about being queerer than others, and de-essentialize the blue or red? Ohh, true, I am just another adult. But I am wiser, and it shows.
“Queer” functionally means “destruction” or “to destroy”.