“Mom, Dad…about those slaves you owned…..”

Universities foster and elevate victimhood

In today’s zany world, it had to happen. Intending-to-produce-“snowflake“-guilt courses such as the Problem of Whiteness within the African Cultural Studies program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and White Privilege along with courses in Black Lives Matter. As colleges offer monetary scholarship inducements at Sam Houston State University in Texas lunacy has reached its zenith.

Now we read that Students at Western Kentucky University voted in favor of a resolution seeking to provide free tuition to black students as reparations for slavery. The Student Government Association passed this resolution Wednesday by a vote of 19-10, according to this report in the Lexington Herald-Leader. Their parents and other Kentucky taxpayers will be footing the bill for what the coddled students regard as free.

The Civil War ended over a hundred and fifty years ago. President Abraham Lincoln, a Republican, halted slavery with the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. Today, any American with a determination to succeed can work, study, achieve and aided by a wide variety of academic scholarships, complete their education. 

Yet people out-hustle themselves to claim greater victim status. There are countless books on the topic, detailing every conceivable affront.  The very concept of victimization now carries with it an odd measure of prestige. Academia has fostered a nation of victims who revel in their new-found status and exhibit an ambivalence about growing up.

Writing for PJ Media, David Solway’s “snowflake” description is as good as they come:

“Anyone who has followed academic issues since the anti-intellectual 1960s knows that the university is in serious trouble, catering to a professoriate that has bought into the travesty of “social justice” a coercive ideology obsessed with “victim groups.”

The university’s ancestral mission of pursuing truth has been replaced by a species of social engineering and leftist indoctrination. At the same time, it views its mandate as establishing a “safe space” for a student clientele that spends far too much of its time and energy “wringing its hands over pronouns, gluten and microaggressions” (link to Jon Brown at American Thinker) rather than devoting itself to the rigors of study and the acquisition of honest merit. These impoverished souls have come to be known as “snowflakes,” justifiably.”

The victim mentality is a cultural phenomena that looks to blame others for perceived shortcomings. For too many, the long acclaimed sense of personal responsibility has given way to desiring a mantle of inevitable weakness.  Universities stand as a testament to that foolish philosophy.

Recently the students at Notre Dame University protested Vice President Pence, a former Indiana governor and native son, as their commencement speaker, saying his appearance on campus “made them feel unsafe.”

Conservative Ann Coulter has been disinvited to speak at left-wing Berkeley University, where repression of First Amendment freedoms take center stage.

Here are but a few of our recent posts under the heading “academia”

April 17, 2017: Clemson Univ. teaches expecting promptness is racist.

April 10, 2017: Skewed news & rethinking the desirability of a college education

April 1, 2017: NAU educrat docks student’s grade for use of “Mankind”

Dec. 24, 2016: Tucker Carlson eviscerates overindulged, liberal college student