Monday, November 09, 2015

CONSERVATIVES HOWL AS STUDENTS DO TO UNIVERSITY PRESIDENT WHAT CONSERVATIVES DID TO JOHN BOEHNER

Black football players and other students have forced the resignation of Tim Wolfe, the president of the University of Missouri system. The students complained about insensitivity to racism; conservative critics have countered that the students are "cowardly liberal lazy douchebags" (Leon H. Wolf at RedState) and charged that the students "declared at University of Missouri that white people must be fired for being white" (the Daily Wire's Ben Shapiro); the school's College Republicans compared the protesters to Islamist terrorists:



I'd compare them to House Republicans.

What did these students do to Tim Wolfe? They did exactly what the conservative movement did to Boehner: they applied pressure until he realized that his position was untenable and his only hope of heading off a possibly unquenchable rebellion was to resign. The defenestration of Boehner was, as I recall, hailed by conservatives as a great moment for American liberty, even though he'd been duly elected by both the voters of his district and the very House Republicans who went on to toss him out the window. But the forced resignation of Wolfe is fascism in a way that the campaign against Boehner wasn't because, well, it just is.

Oh, and did you know that sports are now a cesspit of liberalism? Ben Shapiro says so, so it must be true:
[University] athletic programs are becoming tools for leftist social engineering. That’s true generally of sports, both professionally and in the amateur world: the left sees a popular institution it can mobilize against the right, and does so routinely. That’s why ESPN has become a propaganda network for issues ranging from transgenderism to Black Lives Matter.

But now the left’s reach has extended downward to college programs. That’s how a bunch of non-tuition-paying college football players just forced the president of the University of Missouri to step down over unsubstantiated charges of institutional racism, and why a white coach earning $3.1 million in taxpayer money could join these players in their quest against “white privilege.” The university could have revoked athletic scholarships or fired the coach. Their only job, after all, is to play football. But then we wouldn’t get to see the big BYU game on Saturday.

College athletics were never meant to override the central purpose of the universities: education. Then again, leftism overrode that central purpose long ago.
Um, Ben? College athletics overrode education at a lot of universities a long time ago. Haven't you ever seen Horse Feathers, with Groucho Marx as a college president named Quincy Adams Wagstaff?
Wagstaff: ... Where would this college be without football? Have we got a stadium?
The Professors: Yes.
Wagstaff: Have we got a college?
The Professors: Yes.
Wagstaff: Well, we can't support both. Tomorrow we start tearing down the college.
The Professors: But Professor. Where will the students sleep?
Wagstaff: Where they always sleep. In the classroom.

****

UPDATE: Here's a co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots calling for the removal of Mitch McConnell from his job as Senate Majority Leader.



But she's not a young black male, so it's cool.



(UPDATE: Leon Wolf link fixed.)

2 comments:

Feud Turgidson said...

If I understand this correctly, there's a few key ingredients to this recurring elsewhere & maybe going sufficiently nationwide to have even a chance at effecting policies aimed at social change or justice:

(1) Public schools: This doesn't look like it's got any chance whatsoever at a private college or in a largely privately-endowed university setting. AOT the effect requires some minimum percent or number, which I don't know we yet have enough science to inform us on, of non-athletic scholarship athletes on the fuhbow and other large member squads, and thru the school's entire intercollegiate athletics profile. Missou seems near optimal in these regards.

I've considered whether state schools with multi-location campuses provide immunity - but it breaks down at the outset because U Missouri itself is one of, albeit the largest, in a multi-location campus scheme. California's way more locations and spread seems to offer a better analogy: multi-location public schools provide as much if not more of a boost to this kind and level of protest than the divided campus arrangement provides any sustainable immunity.

(2) Some iconic development or event that links one or more of the campuses to in-state communities in pervasive widespread structural crisis and/or social upheaval: In Missouri, that's Ferguson. Folks who haven't realized this: Ferguson isn't an isolated case or one-off environment even in Missouri.

(3) A state governing apparatus so tone deaf it goes in the same direction as private endowment schools in putting in charge establishment corporate balance-sheet-obsessed profit-loss-oriented managers. How to frog, those who installed Tim Wolfe in a position arguably more powerful than anyone except maybe the Columbia campus' head fuhbow coach, must have watched Glengarry Glen Ross & thought Blake the hero.

I'm getting more convinced that the Occupy Movement didn't die or disappear or go underground or its leaders and organizers sell out or any of those glib rationalizations. Rather, I'm thinking its a like how big ocean waves even some tsunamis start, with amplifying waves from coincident large social phenomena. France experienced lots and lots of san culotte even a couple of sans toute uprisings of various size at various remove from Paris over the half-millenium preceding its revolution.

IMO unless and until all those waves come together at once and prove self-sustaining, say around the response to some catastrophic relatively sudden event from climate change (bigger even that sustained drought in Texas and now in almost all central California), this thing in Missouri is going to die down and smolder.

Palli said...

As courageous, energetic and focused the students are, the factor that parlayed all their hardwork into success removing Pres. Wolf was the perfect timing. The University of Missouri would have had to pay $1M dollars to Brigham Young University if Saturday's football game was forfeited.