Harvard administrators are crimson-faced over a misguided effort to get students ready for the holidays by handing out pointers to help them debate tuition-paying grownups who don’t know a micro-aggression from mistletoe.I don't think it caused confusion at all. What it caused was a view into the programming of students at Harvard, a view they'd rather us plebs not see at all.
The venerable school’s Office for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion and the Freshman Dean’s Office printed up and handed out laminated placemats described as "[guides] for holiday discussions on race and justice with loved ones." The table-setting talking points are designed to help SAT-crushing Ivy Leaguers put pesky parents, aunts and uncles in their place on such subjects as race, diversity and even the Syrian refugee crisis.
“Why are black students complaining? Shouldn’t they be happy to be in college?” reads one question anticipated on the “Holiday Placemat for Social Justice.” The proper response, according to the Cambridge braintrust, is to respond by saying, “When I hear students expressing their experiences on campus I don’t hear complaining"...
On Wednesday, Stephen Lassoed, dean of student life, and Thomas Dingman, dean of freshmen, apologized for the placemats.
“We write to acknowledge that the placemat distributed in some of your dining halls this week failed to account for the many viewpoints that exist on our campus on some of the most complex issues we confront as a community and society today,” they said in a letter to students. "Our goal was to provide a framework for you to engage in conversations with peers and family members as you return home for the winter break, however, it was not effectively presented and it ultimately caused confusion in our community.”
Education, politics, and anything else that catches my attention.
Thursday, December 17, 2015
Pajama Boy Redux
Remember pajama boy, the onesie-clad twenty-something who urged his fellow lefties to spew Obamacare talking points over Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner a few years ago? Well, he's being replaced by Harvard students:
I wish I had the graphics chops to convert the placemat into a playmat along the lines of Twister, because SJW's are constantly bending over backwards and twisting themselves in knots to be perfectly, perfectly politically correct, and trying to get everyone else to bend over as well.
ReplyDeleteThe Harvard GOP club created a parody of the original placemats.
ReplyDeleteYour take on the apology is right on, too...they never would have apologized at all if nobody had complained about them. What's galling to me is their claim that these texts were meant to create a framework for discussion-- not at all! They were merely a recitation of sacred creeds of the SJW crowd.