No no, it's German for "The Jews, The."
Instapundit has the terrible, awful, shameful story.
On the day after September 11, Micki Weinberg walked to the UC Berkeley campus still in shock. At the entrance to campus, facing Telegraph Avenue, huge sheets of blank paper were spread out as an impromptu memorial on which students, faculty, and other passersby were invited to write comments. Glad to have found such a forum, Weinberg scanned the inscriptions. Then he saw one, large and clear, that stopped him dead in his tracks:
"It's the Jews, stupid."The slender Weinberg, a year younger than most freshmen, had only just arrived at Cal from Beverly Hills, where he had been president of his high school's Shalom Club. As a young teenager, he had savored heady stories of how Mario Savio and his comrades in the Free Speech Movement danced the hora and sang "Hava Nagila" at sit-ins and peace rallies forty years ago. The son of left-wing, Jewish intellectuals, Weinberg viewed himself as one too, having spent the summer before his senior year of high school in Myanmar, cataloguing the archives of Rangoon's disintegrating and depopulated Jewish synagogue. "That's why I came to Berkeley -- because of its strong romantic aura of the Free Speech Movement and Mario Savio," he recalls. "Then I got here and discovered that that light seems to have been extinguished. You have this vitriol. You feel it everywhere. Berkeley is now the epicenter of real hatred."
Almost three years later, Weinberg graduates this month as a student whose days at Cal were marked by what he calls "pinnacles of horror," in the pinched tone of a man betrayed. He remembers pro-Palestinian protesters insisting that Israeli border crossings are as bad as Nazi death camps. He remembers the glass front door of Berkeley's Hillel building -- where he attends Friday night services -- shattered by a cinderblock, with the message FUCK JEWS scrawled nearby. He remembers the spray-painted swastikas discovered one Monday morning last September on the walls of four lecture rooms in LeConte Hall accompanied by the chilling bilingual message, "Die, Juden. "
Just when you think things can't get worse, they do. What the hell has happened to the radical left? And when will they figure out that they're cutting a hideous figure?
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J,
J,
Today you and I spend many of our waking hours at respectable institutions of higher learning; before, we spent a few years actually learning in them. Why do the incidents Weinberg describes surprise you?
A university is supposed to be a place where the free exchange of ideas is not merely tolerated, but encouraged. And if you have a decent teacher, expected. In practice, don't bother to air your ideas or plan on publicly sharing them unless you have the right ones. Otherwise, you are a racist, misogynist, or homophobe at best; a defendant in a lawsuit at worst.
The ultimate problem I think lies with spineless administrators, the campus leaders who are paid to lead. And raise money. TONS of money. In the bizarro world of campus newspeak, only white people are capable of racist thought and action, for example, or "Palestinian" terrorists in Gaza are heroes at the student union but the Jewish undergrads at the next table are filth.
College presidents and their minions support free speech, but only the proper kind. What you end up with is student groups on campus that behave like "made men", who can do anything, say anything, and stir up as much shit as they choose without real sanction.
All of which is really a shame, because alot of this foolishness gets in the way of kids who actually want to learn or achieve something in school.
The radical left, like the
The radical left, like the radical right, have always been loonies and it is always thus at the fringes of thought. The radical left once embraced Stalinism as a force for good and capitalism as a force of evil. The radical right has had their their own butt stupid heroes and villians. Nothing's changed.
PC is only the latest silliness to be embraced by the leftist loonies and the campus may be its only true bastion. In general society it has been widely ridiculed since day one. Hell, a former and a current governor of Maryland just said what most clear-thinking people already know, this stuff is "bunk" and "crap."
So, um, you folks what work on campuses: where are the kids with the guts to stand up against rank hatred and illogical dogma? No, I don't mean the Young Republicans or the Future Business Leaders of America. I mean the kids of the solid middle, the American lumpenproles. Why aren't they pissed? And if they are, how come I haven't heard of it? Personally I'd be mad if I paid that damn much money for an education only to be taught a PC catechism.
I worked at UC Berkeley in
I worked at UC Berkeley in 1996, around the time of Prop 215. The people of the state were trying to remove affirmative action from the UC admissions system (9 research university oriented schools). During the same period California was debating English-only laws. I was horrified that there was movement to do so.
This unspeakable act of graffiti is disgusting, but it's only a signal of a growing trend towards a growing conservative populace. Or else it's the active of a few disenchanted individuals at a 'let it all hang out' university. I'm sure it's a sign of both. Whatever it is, it has to be stopped. I think open debate is good. I think free speech is important, but I don't think threatening speech is covered under the First Amendment. (Specifically referring to the phrase "die Juden", how it sickens me to retype that)
As much as I have wonderfully intelligent friends who are graduates of such a fine institution, I think there are a lot of stupid kids who go there and the new admissions policy has just made it worse. I think Berekely's intellectual life has gone to hell in a handbasket since former Chancellor Chang Tien-Lin resigned over the change in UC admissions policy. (stupid board of regents and esp. Wade Connor(?))
GP,
GP,
I think it would be very illuminating for us campus workers to consult and produce a joint post on your questions. The answers are more complicated than an off-the-cuff response format.
But to take a stab at a short answer, addressing the question of the campus "solid middle": I think they ignore them. That was my experience as an undergrad, and most people I knew as an undergrad, and most of what I see around me now. Most students don't care what righties or lefties do, they want to do their best as often as they can and get out of here, and whatever their political leanings most don't care enough to commit time and effort to either side.
There is also a high hypocrisy quotient, in that during their time on campus vocal students are all "fight the power" and "free [insert criminal here]!", but attend college in the first place ostensibly to land high paying jobs later. I can't tell you, GP, how many of this school's alums were in the "no justice no peace" crowd as students and are partners in top law firms and financial institutions today.
I know how much they make, because it's my job to know. I know how much they give here, sometimes how much a spouse gives to other institutions, private foundations, insider stock holdings, and a general sketch of charitable and political activities and giving. And I see it every day, day in and day out, and not too many are giving up their million $$ homes in Greenwich to fight injustice. Fight the power! Um, until it's my turn to get a fat payday.
PC had been widely ridiculed, and is silly, which didn't stop it from becoming the law of the land. Peep "The Shadow University" for a screeching primer.
As for campus classroom indoctrination, peep: [url=http://www.NoIndoctrination.org/view.shtml]http://www.NoIndoctrination…]
Thanks, GL. Very interesting
Thanks, GL. Very interesting stuff. Despite a fair amount of reading from the website I still have my doubts but have added new ones.
It's old news (to me) that Marxist ideologues inhabit academia. It is news that expounding politics trumps teaching content and ideas. I come from a family of academics and well understand academic freedom. But polemics from the lectern isn't engendering a free exchange of ideas. It is also a waste of a classroom and a place on the university's catalog. Likewise, any student who goes through the trouble of attending college with a predestined and unchangeable worldview is wasting his or her time and the time of the whole institution. Go register as a lobbyist already.
Isn't the whole point of the exercise to (a) learn how to think critically, (b) learn how others think and more importantly how they have thought and the evolution of human thought, and (c) to get a clue that adults can honestly arrive at different conclusions and that this is entirely OK?
Can someone please tell why a college education is given such profound relevance in our society? And why the institution exists as more than a self-perpetuating elitest club for brats of the upper classes? I'd like to believe it does (again see all the profs in the fambly) but I have Big Doubts.