My son earned two degrees at the University of Arizona and also worked as a residence hall assistant while a student. Moreover, a former provost of the university was a client of my management consultancy.
That’s a way of saying that I know something about the good, bad and ugly at the school.
An example of the bad and ugly can be found in the Arizona Daily Star news story at this link (behind a paywall).
The story is about the euphemistically-named “cultural and resource centers” on campus. A more honest name would be “exclusion centers,” or better yet, “segregation centers.”
They are also copycat centers, because they are based on a sophomoric and specious notion that was adopted across academe years ago for selected racial/ethnic groups—the number of which was expanded more recently to include sexual orientation and gender.
The notion is that certain so-called minority groups need paternalism and protection, in a parent-child kind of relationship, in which professors with tenure and administrators with cushy jobs are the benevolent and caring parents, who protect the children from being the helpless victims of White privilege and power, of a racist and sexist society, of the inequalities of capitalism, of the ruling patriarchy, and of the Great Books of Western philosophy and literature, which are seen as synonymous with colonialism and slavery.
As this condescending thinking goes, not only do the chosen “minorities” need paternalism and protection, but they need to form their own segregated support groups, consisting of their own kind, or more accurately, stereotypes of their own kind, in a mockery of true diversity and multiculturalism.
The University of Arizona established seven of these centers: Native American Student Affairs, Asian Pacific American Student Affairs, African American Student Affairs, the Guerrero Student Center, LGBTQ Student Affairs, the Women & Gender Resource Center, and the Disability Cultural Center.
Questions:
My wonderful daughter-in-law is of Filipino and European ancestry. Which center would be appropriate for her if she were to attend the university?
My working-class brother-in-law and his wife, who are of European ancestry, adopted an orphaned girl from China. Because she was of Vietnamese ancestry and had a physical impairment, she was shunned by the Han majority. Which center would be appropriate for her?
The preceding in-laws have another daughter by blood who is White and married to a Black. Which center would be appropriate for the children of this interracial couple?
My wife’s niece is of European ancestry and has two children from her first husband, an East Indian. Which center would be appropriate for the children?
If my wife and I were to host a family reunion of these extended family members, should we sort their accommodations by race and ethnicity?
With my Italian ancestry, which center would be appropriate for me? Do I use the old characterization of Italians as inferior people of color or the contemporary characterization of them as privileged Whites?
Other questions:
Why don’t Armenians who survived the Turkish genocide get their own center? Aren’t they minorities? Aren’t they disadvantaged?
How about the scores of other ethnocultural groups that are in the minority, suffered greatly in history, did not come from privilege, and are of various skin colors, including white? Shouldn’t each of them get its own center?
Given the history of bloodshed between Muslims and Hindus, do Pakistanis and East Indians want to be in the same center together?
Given what the Japanese did to Koreans, Filipinos and the Chinese in the Second World War, do the non-Japanese trust the Japanese enough to be in the same center with them?
Questions like these are verboten on campus for two reasons. First, the centers didn’t come about through scholarship, intellectualism, reason, healthy debate, or knowledge of history, anthropology, the social sciences, and the humanities. They are the product of a political agenda.
Second, those who embrace the underlying fallacies, sophistries and tropes see themselves as enlightened progressives and see anyone who questions their platitudes and inanities as a reactionary or worse.
Wow, has that silencing ever backfired! In a case of illiberalism begetting illiberalism, the silencing of diverse opinions has helped to put Donald Trump in the Oval Office. Now, as described in the aforementioned Arizona Daily Star story, the University of Arizona, responding to pressure by Trump of questionable constitutionality, is consolidating the seven cultural and resource centers into a single multicultural center.
The story didn’t say what is going to happen to the 80 people who currently staff the seven centers.
Maybe they should go back to college to get a true liberal education, in the classical meaning of “liberal,” and to learn how liberalism, humanism and pluralism sprang from Western civilization. Unfortunately, the University of Arizona doesn’t seem to teach that.
Mr. Cantoni resides in Tucson and can be reached at [email protected].