Let them wither on the vine
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Macalester co-eds occupy Weyerhaeuser hall to demand free, biodegradable menstrual cups
Our schools are churning out intolerant, bitter conformists. Here are excerpts from a brilliant, lengthy article using one small liberal arts college as an illustration of what we’ve let happen to our schools:
How bad are America’s colleges? This bad.
By Katherine Kersten
Macalester College in St. Paul, with its classic Georgian build ings and leafy quad, is one of the nation’s elite liberal arts colleges. The total cost of a Macalester education is more than $70,000 a year, according to U.S. News & World Report. The college promises students an education that will expand their horizons, cultivate “intellectual breadth and depth” and “logical thinking,” and ensure tolerance for “many perspectives.”
But a stroll through the campus, and a scroll through the course catalog, reveal a starkly different reality. Flyers on bulletin boards, extra-curricular activities, student clubs, course descriptions—all reflect a cardboard cut-out world of hackneyed, ideologically charged platitudes. Tolerance, though often invoked, seems in strikingly short supply.
We’ve come to expect this sort of thing at American institutions of higher education, of course. But after decades, it remains puzzling why the most privileged generation in American history should be so cramped and one-dimensional in its thinking, and so hostile to the priceless heritage its forebears have bequeathed. Macalester provides a fascinating perspective on the answer to this question. Though its students may fancy themselves free-thinkers, most appear in thrall to a new lockstep orthodoxy that, while generally traced to the 1960s, has links to movements in America’s past that would likely appall and astonish them.
The ideology that undergirds life at Macalester is grounded in a simplistic, but fervently held, article of faith: Life is a power struggle between oppressors and their victims.
[snip]
Macalester abolished compulsory chapel decades ago. But today, it’s back—in a perverse and twisted form—in classrooms, public events, publications and student activities. Presumably, Macalester students, most of whom seem to know little of history and religion, don’t realize they are being indoctrinated into what amounts to a militant new secular faith.
This faith is enshrined in the college’s curriculum and controls terms of discourse and frames of reference. It has its own dogma, rituals, saints and heretics. Intolerance is its very essence. Its adherents are convinced they possess a Higher Truth and are zealously committed to imposing their vision of virtue on others. This new religion lacks one thing: It has no God. But “the left has grown comfortable in practicing theology without benefit of God,” according to Lance Morrow of the Washington, D.C.-based Ethics and Public Policy Center.
Macalester students would probably indignantly reject a comparison of their new faith with that of our nation’s earliest religious zealots: the Puritans. Yet the parallels are striking, as a number of thinkers have noted. “Puritanism in its negative sense is now less common among the Protestant faithful than among Progressives, who carry on the Puritan tradition unconsciously,” wrote English journalist A.N. Wilson. Commentator John Zmirak put it succinctly: “Woke is the new saved.”
A core tenet of Puritan theology is “innate depravity”—the doctrine that human beings are inherently wicked as a result of original sin. Innate depravity has been “reborn in the 21st century and adapted to the Left’s insistence on the innate depravity of the ruling class: the wickedness of the patriarchy, of white privilege and supremacy and of the nation’s entire past,” according to Morrow. Recall the Mac Weekly’s words in consigning Edward Duffield Neill to perdition: “His sins were legion, and they were unforgivable.”
Puritan theology divided human beings into two groups: Saved and Damned, saints and sinners, sheep and goats.The “Elect” were redeemed through a predestined grace. Macalester’s secular religion also divides human beings into two groups: oppressors and victims. Its “Saved” are the sinless victims of white supremacy and the patriarchal power structure. Its “Damned” are oppressors—first and foremost straight, white males—along with members of other groups who victimize those below them in the “intersection - along with members of other groups who victimize those below them in the “intersectional” hierarchy of power.
Puritans believed those who profess false doctrine pose a danger to the larger community. They often shunned, punished or drove out dissenters who might mislead the Saved, for whom avoiding the occasion of sin was imperative. Today, “‘bigot’ and ‘hater’ are the new ‘wizard’ and ‘witch,’” as commentator Mary Eberstadt has observed. Salem, Massachusetts had its witch trials. Macalester has its “Colonial Macalester” campaign, intended to brand white male benefactors like Wallace and Olin with Hester Prynne’s red “A”of shame, and to erase Edward Duffield Neill’s polluting presence from the campus.
[snip]
At Macalester, confession and penance are every-day occurrences. At the “Naming Hate” event, for example, students were instructed to acknowledge their guilt and reject future sin, i.e., “to write and sign their own, individualized pledges to continue educating themselves and actively tackling hate in Macalester and
[snip]
Recent events at Macalester reveal this new creed in action. In October 2019, for example, the Macalester Weekly newspaper devoted an entire issue to exposing the social evil from which all others are presumed to flow: “the white supremacy endemic to Macalester and Minnesota’s past and present.”
The issue, titled “Colonial Macalester,” impugned the white male benefactors— “the men Macalester immortalized”— whose efforts and fortunes helped make the college the elite institution it is today. They included DeWitt Wallace, the founder of Reader’s Digest, businessman Franklin Olin and lumber magnate Frederick Weyerhaeuser. All, it seems, fell far short of contemporary Macalester students’ lofty moral standards: Wallace was“fiercely anti-communist,” Olin manufactured ammunition, and Weyerhaeuser’s family supported compulsory attendance at weekly chapel services.
But the man truly in the crosshairs was Macalester’s first president: the Rev. Edward Duffield Neill. Neill, a Presbyterian minister who founded the college in 1874, was one of early St. Paul’s most eminent and public-spirited citizens. Not only an outspoken abolitionist who served three U.S. Presidents, he was Minnesota’s first superintendent of public education, the first chancellor of the University of Minnesota, and a founder of the Minnesota Historical Society.
But the Mac Weekly contemptuously brushed aside Neill’s remarkable accomplishments. He was, it declared, a “white supremacist,” a “misogynist” who opposed co-education, and a “settler-colonialist who advocated the genocide of the Dakota” Indians and built Macalester on land stolen from them. His crimes demonstrated that Macalester College was morally corrupt from the outset.
The paper intoned the charge against Neill: “His sins are legion, and they are unforgivable.”
[snip]
The “Colonial Macalester” campaign is Macalester’s homegrown version of The New York Times’ notorious “1619 Project,” which asserts that “nearly everything that made America exceptional grew out of slavery.” Both exemplify the Left’s practice of what Morrow has called making “a sacrament of national self-accusation.”
The end-game is clear: If “the entire American project was depraved from the beginning—Columbus was a louse, the Constitution countenanced slavery, and Washington and Jefferson owned slaves—then the whole thing may be, without qualms, damned absolutely and dismantled at will,” in Morrow’s words. At Macalester, by pronouncing anathema on the college’s founder and benefactors, students declare their intent to wipe out the institution’s tainted heritage and construct their own utopian City on a Hill.
What has this new Puritanism wrought? This: Here’s one Anisa Dagher, a 2020 graduate of Michigan State University’s James Madison College and headed for law school, on the proposal to rename the college:
"I don't think James Madison was a great person, but I can understand why the college was named that to begin with. I can understand why some may want it to be changed and I would support that," Dagher said. "It isn't my place to decide whether or not the name is offensive because it isn't offensive toward me….
This young woman spent four years studying at a college named for James Madison who, among other accomplishments, ensured that the Bill of Rights was included in our constitution, thereby protecting Dagher’s right to express her dimwitted, ignorant opinions, including her estimation of James Madison’s place in history. The idea that our tax money will be seized by the Democrats to provide free tuition to people like her and to churn out more of the same, dismal product is disgusting.
Free tuition? Hell, we shouldn’t even be providing loans to these students.
