Dear Michael,
Hats off to your effort to put the Beta house off-limits to the entire student body: You’ve managed to fill the shoes of your predecessor and fellow progressive, Big Foot Bennet. His departure was as little lamented as yours now looks to be. Even the Argus blushed at the sight of your naked power play. What’s with you, Michael? Okay, you admire Obama, but holding your boot to the throat of the student body? You say that you’re troubled by the Betas’ “ambiguous” status. Move to Cuba or North Korea – you’ll find no troubling ambiguity THERE.
This from the Feb. 11 Argus:
“On Monday, President Roth released a summary of the Sexual Violence Task Force report, compiled by a group of students, faculty members, administrators, and representatives from Public Safety and the Middletown Police Department. The committee’s recommendations include the creation of a new position at the Office of Behavioral Health Services (OBHS), increased training in sexual violence response protocol for students, faculty and staff, and the appointment of a team to investigate the possibility of creating a Women’s/Gender Center at Davison Health Center…. The Sexual Violence Task Force was compiled last spring by Vice President for Diversity and Strategic Partnerships Sonja Manjon and Vice President for Student Affairs Michael Whaley, and convened in its entirety four times over the course of the fall semester. Four subcommittees were also formed, which focused on staffing and resources, education and prevention, policy, reporting and adjudication, and community resources and collaboration….”
Michael, I can’t go on – I’d have an attack of the giggles.
Your giggler merits a catchy acronym: FAFUG: Financial Aid For Underutilized Gonzos. As for financial aid for students in need, they’ll have to go to the back of the line. And as for “the little people” you fired last year, their firing gave you the funds to hire the gang of gonzos that bang your gong. Astaire could do his thing, but at the two-step you’re the king.
Could FAFUG be a local echo of sylphid Napolitano’s muscle-bound Department of Homeland Security? The latter hasn’t solved the problem it was given the task of solving (link to the Ford Hood shooter), as it’s been too busy solving another: the problem of turning self-reliant, independent-minded citizens into subservient subjects of her suzerain, King Hussein.
So much for jackbooted Janet’s not-so comic commissariat’s aims. Allow me to venture a wild stab at yours: to turn a heterogeneous student body into a soft and easily handled, homogeneous lump. The Betas, holding their ground (“Don’t tread on me!”), are fighting their lumping. There’s little doubt they’ll have to be cattle-prodded into the Michael Roth Corral and taught to be good little choir boys in the Michael Roth Chorale.
Michael, you’d have us believe that you seek to make the campus a “safe space” for women – you who’d trashed the august prestige of your office by signing on to a course entitled “Pornocopia.” For you to fail to see the connection between that all-too typical talisman of life on this hypersexualized campus, and the creation of a very UNSAFE space for Wesleyan women, you’d have to be an even bigger fool than you think I think you are.
Where is your street cred on this issue? Cite just one example of Alma Mater’s overworked underbelly to which you haven’t turned a blind eye (the “safe space” afforded to merchants of sex toys); a deaf ear (the “green” student’s body’s purple prose); or a tongue tied (a lapidary plug for cunnilingus – no, that isn’t an Irish airline).
To change all that you’d need a novel script; the one you’ve been using is rooted in the “transgressing” of bourgeois bounds. The line designed to bring down the house (the house that Adam Smith built): “Epatez la bourgeoisie!” English translation: “Hit ’em below the belt!” – all’s fair in the culture wars.
As for the wars’ “collateral damage” – Joanna Bourain and anonymous others – you can lay it at the feet of your designated scapegoats: today the brothers of Beta, tomorrow the brothers of DKE, PsiU, and Alpha Delt; the knuckle-dragging athletes (both male and female, presumably); and lastly those notorious perps of sexual violence on High, sorority girls. Your rationale: a positive statistical correlation between the size of a social grouping and the frequency of sexual violence: larger groupings of people have more “SV.” Ya think? Larger groupings of people have more VD. More common colds. And cold hard cash. And cabbage-heads. And kings. Honestly, Michael.
I expect the designated scapegoats will soon be signing their names to a blanket refusal to enroll in Chairman Michael’s mandated “special-education initiatives” crafted exclusively for them. Rebellious wretches! Like the rebel who signed a writ on the Fourth of July in 1776, the ink-stained wretch declaring: “We must indeed all hang together, or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.”
But why let “Lightning” Ben have the last word? John Stossel (P ’07) could make you a prime-time “stah,” Michael. His lede could read: “The students of Wesleyan University, channeling students in Cairo and elsewhere rebelling against the despotic rule of their autocrat…”
Benjamin is a member of the class of 1957.
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