By Jack Fowler
Thursday, March 11, 2021
At a time when the doctrine of woke holds that
“silence is complicity” and when the gospel according to Kendi decrees all
matters must be judged as functions of pigmentation, the to-do at Assumption
University, a Catholic institution located in Worcester, Mass., merits our
attention and concern — even perhaps our anger.
To many, what has happened may be little more than a
commonplace occurrence, a thing of frequency to be tolerated and accepted. What
can be so bad about this contretemps?
What gives? This gives: The leaders of the Student
Government Association at Assumption are excited! They’ve
concocted a pledge. And in all the formality and authority and moral
superiority that a student government association can muster, they have
distributed it to their fellow students, who in turn are expected to take the
pledge in order to combat racism at this sub-zero hotbed of bigotry.
What follows is an email sent last week (unbeknownst to
the school’s administration) to Assumption students announcing the pledge,
resources, a snitch protocol, and more. And yes, in case you were wondering —
there’s even a hashtag!
Class of 2023 Announcements – SGA’s
#NotAtAssumption Anti-Racism Campaign has gone live!
Dear Hounds,
Can you believe next week will mark
12 months since our entire world was turned upside down as COVID made its way
to Massachusetts? It has been a long year for everyone. While we at SGA miss
seeing all of you on campus, we are so appreciative of your ability to adapt to
new challenges this year and stay connected to each other in new ways.
Social media has become a primary
sound piece for the SGA and others to communicate with each other. Recently,
you may have seen on the Student Government social media, the #NotAtAssumption
Anti-Racism Campaign has gone live! We are so excited to announce this
campaign, and begin working to educate ourselves and create an environment at
Assumption where Students of Color feel supported and comfortable on and
off-campus. This Campaign began as an idea from the Student Engagement Committee
earlier in the fall semester and is now ready for all students to join! The
first portion of #NotAtAssumption is a pledge that is available in this email,
as well as the Student Government social media, and your team sites page on the
portal. Below is the pledge:
·
I pledge to actively be an anti-racist student
at Assumption University.
·
I pledge to educate myself on my own implicit
biases.
·
I pledge to think critically about institutional
racism and to fight back against microaggressions on campus.
·
I pledge to see my peers as equals, no matter
their ethnicity or background.
·
I pledge to speak up and report racist behavior
if I encounter it, on-campus or online.
·
I pledge to become a part of the solution to end
racism at Assumption University.
This form is also filled with
resources concerning what implicit bias is, police brutality, redlining, etc.
There is also a link to where you can report incidents of racism on campus.
After you sign the pledge, it becomes your job to uphold those values, and hold
yourself accountable to be an actively anti-racist Assumption student. The
second part of this campaign will come in the form of many exciting things like
books of the month, events to speak about what we are learning, and more.
It is all our jobs to create an
environment where students of color are proud to be Assumption students. We
hope you will join us and #TakeThePledge!
It all jibes so well with
Assumption’s Mission
Statement:
Catholic Principles and Strong
Academics
Assumption University, a Catholic
institution sponsored by the Augustinians of the Assumption and rooted in the
Catholic intellectual tradition, strives to form graduates known for critical
intelligence, thoughtful citizenship and compassionate service. We pursue these
ambitious goals through a curriculum grounded in the liberal arts and extending
to the domain of professional studies. Enlivened by the Catholic affirmation of
the harmony of faith and reason, we aim, by the pursuit of the truth, to
transform the minds and hearts of students. Assumption favors diversity and
ecumenically welcomes all who share its goals.
An Education Built on Solid
Reason and Faith
Your Assumption University
education will prepare you to compete for the best jobs and career tracks, but
there’s more to it than that — you will be instilled with something far more
lasting and life-changing than simple professional training.
You’ll develop habits and skills of
good judgment — and develop the confidence that you can hold and defend a sound
argument based upon your own comprehension, examination and evaluation of facts
and context.
In other words, you’ll grow
comfortable making sense of a world increasingly filled with ambiguity,
distortions and diverse points of view.
As you grow as a student and as a
professional, you will benefit from 2,000 years of the Catholic intellectual
tradition and explore the teachings of scientists, artists, writers and
philosophers who have engaged in a search for truth across all time and all
disciplines.
One way to look at the pledge affair is this:
Hard-working parents are forking over some $60,000 a year to afford their
darlings a liberal Catholic education, a thing consciously undermined by
virtue-signaling student leaders who promote the Leftist, decidedly un-Catholic
boilerplate that swamps the time and attention of the institution. Maybe this
should be conceded to the students: They live in a monoculture. And this: They
have likely never been exposed to clear or alternative thinking on these
matters, including the thoughtful and forceful positions by African-American
thinkers and writers such as Shelby Steele, Glenn Loury, Robert Woodson, and Thomas
Sowell, among others. One wonders if Assumption’s SGA leaders have ever heard of
these important public intellectuals.
It didn’t take long for the university’s leadership to
respond to the pledge. This statement has been provided to National
Review:
Our student leaders have the
academic freedom to advance their views, which they did in a sincere effort to
make Assumption more welcoming to all students. All members of the Assumption
community have a corresponding academic freedom to disagree with them. To
emphasize those points, when the Administration learned of this pledge after it
was launched, we worked with the Student Government Association to clarify that
the pledge, which was written by students for other students, is voluntary and
that names of signatories will not be displayed online. We also worked with the
students involved to ensure that resources being shared as part of the pledge
will include a genuine diversity of views. We conversed with the students
privately, as befits our central educational obligation to them.
As a community committed to
diversity in every sense, Assumption unequivocally condemns racism. We will not
tolerate it on our campus or in our community. We also unreservedly defend
academic freedom. Academic freedom, which is essential to our mission of
Catholic liberal education, includes the freedom to explore ideas inside or
outside the classroom without fear of censorship or reprisal. We share a mutual
confidence that ideas articulated both freely and civilly aid the pursuit of
truth, goodness and beauty that is the animating purpose of Catholic liberal
education.
Hoo boy. Some thoughts:
1) What’s the harm — the pledge is voluntary, no? There
could be plenty of harm, if you accept (can you not?) that “silence is
complicity” rules the public square, especially the academic quadrangle.
Consider the student who sees this pledge for the folderol it is and refuses to
sign, either in dramatic fashion or by simply ignoring it. How soon will this
come back to bite him in the keister? We don’t see your name on the
list (not displayed online — big whoop, as the kids used
to aptly say) will be evidence of the omission sin, which by current Leftist
standards is mortal, not venial (none seem to be). The collection of names of a
confined set of people means the absence of names too, and therein lies the
threat that should be obvious to all who had heard tell of stories of
transgressions from decades past revisiting the present: This is calculated to
intimidate, to be deployed at some future point by social-media Stalinists to
point out to prospective employers that Johnny refused to condemn
racism, so if you hire him, you’re a racist company blah blah. . . .
It is all too predictable that harassment and even persecution will be
realities.
2) Imagine if Assumption formally asked (not even
required) students to take some pledge related to the tenets of Roman
Catholicism or claiming some superiority of the Church’s catechism. Well, go
ahead and imagine, because it would never happen, nor should it. Nor should any
pledge, especially those contrived not by the institution’s stewards, but by
the students — the ones in need of in loco parentis — whose
attendance is an admission that there’s more education required before entry
into the mean old world of adulthood.
3) The pledge as stated by the Assumption SGA pretends to
be an exercise in anti-racism, but it is quite the opposite, along with being
anti-Christian and anti-American. Why couldn’t the university’s response have
made that point? This pledge is a thing that seeks power through race advocacy,
calculation, and bullying — isn’t that baldly at odds with the spiritual
mission of the university? And why reduce this to a matter of a difference of
opinion or competing exercises in academic freedom? Doesn’t the ideology
motivating the pledge neglect the reality of man being a sinner, worthy of
forgiveness — and even salvation! — outside of factors such as skin color or
party affiliation or the circumstances of birth? Wasn’t this worthy of being
addressed in the rebuttal?
4) What we have here is more evidence that Ibram X. Kendi
has tossed Martin Luther King Jr. onto history’s ash heap. It is racist, Kendi
affirms, to judge people by the content of their character rather than the
color their skin. So much for the admirable “dream” shared by King and the best
of the American political tradition.
5) Who will doubt that a majority of the faculty will
swiftly hold the university’s response as racist? (Having just read
Solzhenitsyn’s great work, the author is reminded of this story: The first
person who stopped clapping for Stalin received a vacation in the Gulag.)
6) All things being relative, the university’s is a
strong response — relatively. We give some credit to them, if only
for this: Imagine how the administration of, say, Oberlin College would have
handled such a matter. This statement phrase alone — “ . . . ideas articulated
both freely and civilly aid the pursuit of truth” — elsewhere would have
prompted immediate petitions for the firing of the school president.
Yes, it relatively has its place in this Pledge Affair.
But so does the truth. And the truth of what actually underlies this pledge,
how it is an affront to the school’s Catholic principles, how it is an affront
to America’s traditions of tolerance, how it is itself imbued in racialism, how
it is the beginning of the slouch towards totalitarianism. All of that deserves
to be mentioned, at the least, and articulated if not condemned, even if that
calls for courage — at best.
Again, Solzhenitsyn and The Gulag Archipelago:
We all have an obligation to live not by lies. That applies even to SGA members
and college administrators.
The old National Review College Guide championed
Assumption (then merely a college) as one of “America’s top liberal-arts
schools.” That was in the early ’90s, back in the last millennium. It might as
well have been a millennium ago, given what has transpired in academia, and in
our culture, these last three short and upheaving decades.
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