Dear Doug,
I’ve always admired your chutzpah, and never more than now. Mere weeks after John Leo’s US NEWS column pried the lid off that can of worms mislabeled ‘diversity,’ you proceeded to dust off the china, polish the silver, and serve up another heaping helping of same. I speak of a letter you recently mailed to the staff, the letter in which you “strongly encourage” each and all to attend a mandatory diversity workshop. (The iron fist in the velvet glove is so you, Doug.)
Why wasn’t your letter sent to the faculty? Did you reckon the dons, who aren’t compelled to answer your summons, would simply ignore it? Imagine that: Not even your PC professors would choose to have that can of worms crammed down their throats. If the CEO of IBM or General Motors had dragooned his employees to mount his pet political hobby horse and applaud the ride, I’ve little doubt you’d be decrying “the chilling effects” on their freedom of conscience and expression. See my point? If you don’t, it could be there’s a log in your eye.
It isn’t enough that during Freshman Disorientation Week the new arrivals are made to feel like a bunch of squirming five-year-olds as they’re force-fed that insult to grown-up intelligence fetchingly labeled ‘diversity training.’ Credit the term’s inventors: they disinterred The Golden Rule, re-worded it into Wesleyan-speak (“Don’t ‘other’ the other”), then sold it as a Copernican revelation. Now it’s your pleasure to have it imparted, like it or not, to every member of the staff, including the chaplains.
Doug, you have no shame. I guess you don’t share my recollection of Sunday’s chapel services back in the days of Old Methodist Wes: anodyne sermons and Luther’s hymns. You didn’t have to sing along; you didn’t even have to attend. But that was then, and mandatory diversity training is very now. Not just mandatory, but skin-deep. Too bad you can’t see deeper. Were T.S. Eliot still alive, he could well be penning The Shallow Men. Whatever became of educators celebrated for penetrating vision? It seems they’ve been succeeded by a breed imbued with an overbearing tenor in concert with un-corralled conceit; a breed that takes umbrage when harsh derision greets its hobby horse – the nag must have a nice and easy derider. But, Doug, why date yourself? The easy derider is sooooooo Sixties.
What’s that you say? Your work is piling up and now you need to get down to ukases? Far be it from me to keep you from decreeing your sundry ukases and I-have-spokens. After all, those items are your stewpot’s meat and potatoes. However, I need to ask you, finally, whether diversity training’s consciousness-raising techniques in any way pique your interest in Mao’s M.O. His friendly persuasions, as you know, comprised a great leap forward in consciousness-raising – not to slight the lapidary labors of Comrade Stalin, a former divinity student devoted to hearing confessions. Mao and Stalin – a couple of liberals in a hurry. Doug, if you don’t slow down, you’re going to catch your staff misquoting Shakespeare: “A thug by any other name…”
-Martin Benjamin
Leave a Reply