When sending your child to college you have two things to worry about. One is that they will say the wrong thing and fall prey to the new Red Guards. Another is that they will join the new Red Guards.
The Red Guards were a movement in China encouraged by and fanatically loyal to Chairman Mao. Their self-proclaimed goal was to “make the whole universe red” by destroying the Four Olds: old customs, old culture, old habits and old ideas.
To that end they destroyed old monuments such as the shrine at the birthplace of Confucius, attacked fellow-students students from the “wrong” class, and delighted in physically humiliating professors.
A Chinese friend I helped defect after Tien an Min Square told me his father, a distinguished professor, was made to wear a dunce cap while being carried about in a chair and jeered by a mob of students.
Do I sound bitter? Paranoid? Like I’m engaging in exaggerated hyperbole for dramatic effect?
I assure you I am not. What I am is quietly furious.
We have all seen news items from college campuses that eerily echo those events of 1966-67 in faraway China. But this time one struck close to home.
A professor of journalism known to me was made to publicly apologize for a remark made in a class required for graduation.
I’m not going to identify him or the school, not yet. For one, I don’t have his permission. In fact I haven’t spoken to him in years
For another, I don’t have the juice. Let’s face it, I’m not a high-powered member of the commentariat. I’m a guy who writes for people like me living in rural America trying to make ends meet and raise their kids in a crazy world.
I’m not in a position to bring an army of indignant citizens to his aid, and I don’t want to make things worse.
From what I can gather, in an exchange with a student the professor said saying “OK Boomer” was something like calling someone by that slur we must call the N-word.
I confess it doesn’t strike me that way. Possibly because I only recently became aware of the “OK Boomer” thing. And perhaps because I find it difficult to take those that use it seriously.
However in this case a few students, all of them white according to the news, lodged a complaint. No doubt they were traumatized and felt unsafe by having been exposed to that terrible word.
I would suggest that if they’re traumatized by hearing a word with the nasty connotations of that one, then they’re going to have a heck of a tough time as journalists covering the police and fire beats. But I digress.
The prof, a brilliant and gifted teacher, has been made to apologize in public and will take the new right-think course, which they are talking about making mandatory for all.
A sub (also known to me, good man) will come in and teach the class for the rest of the semester.
He’d better watch his step now the students have gotten a taste of power.
And I can’t get the news photo I’ve seen out of my head. The look on his face…
I taught in Yugoslavia during the last years of the Milosevic regime. I’ve lectured in Belarus, “the last communist state in Europe,” and I said what I damned well pleased.
And I’m telling you, the only places I ever felt I really had to watch my mouth were Saudi Arabia – and American universities.