Dumber by the Day

Lee Duigon

I’m ashamed I ever went to college. It wasn’t as bad, back then, as it is now; but it was bad enough. It took me a long time to grow out of it.

The chief additions to the looniversity menu, since those days, are all conspicuously present in the latest carryings-on at Notre Dame—which is supposed to be a Catholic university, but who would ever guess it?

A group of Far Left fat-heads calling themselves “End the Hate at Notre Dame” want to rework the whole curriculum to weed out books written by white men—in their words, to “eliminate the violence of only privileging white scholarship”.

“Violence”? The only violence here is that thing they’re doing to the English language. (Can I still say “English,” or is that some kind of “hate” or “violence,” too?)

They hadn’t yet mastered this art when I was in college—the art of jumbling words around until their meaning is erased and all that remains is whatever the “progressive” wants it to mean at any given moment. An hour later it might mean something else entirely. No dictionary can help us navigate these murky waters. It’s so hard to translate pure babble.

As academic nonentities are using it today, “violence” is *any* unspecified action, speech, or thought that differs from theirs. So assigning some wilting dandelion of a “student” to read, say, a play by William Shakespeare—well, that would be “violence.” Taboo! Written by a white male! Forbidden! The fact that Shakespeare’s plays are among the immortal artistic treasures of the human race, and the common property of all, cuts no ice with “End the Hate at Notre Dame.” That’s because they hate white people—only of course their hate isn’t “hate” at all, but “justice.”

And another perfectly good word goes down with a Far Left arrow in its back. (Can I still say “arrow”? This self-censorship is tricky business.)

See, what they offer us here is, in their words, for what very little that’s worth, is “an initiative for organizing civil action against racist, sexist, trans-exclusionary, and queer-phobic structures at Notre Dame.” Can you decipher that? Would you even want to? Everything they read from now on has got to have “trans” characters in it?

If they jumble the language any worse than this, ordinary verbal communication will become impossible—to say nothing of the difficulty of finding a decent physics textbook written by non-English-speaking Laotians who are here illegally. But trashing the language is a four-star dish on today’s college menu, served up with a hearty side order of anti-white hysteria.

That’s what you’re getting for your tuition dollars.

Finally, they also wish to “Decolonize America.” What’s that supposed to mean? Everybody has to go back to wherever their ancestors came from? Yeah, that’ll work.

The more money we pour into our colleges and looniversities, the more of this bilge we’ll get. This is what we’re paying for.

These “demands” are so irrational, so bizarre, so asinine, that it’s difficult to imagine what we’re supposed to get by giving in to them. Cultural poverty? A mass shutdown of coherent thought? Societal collapse? How is any of this supposed to do us any good? And why are we still buying this? Why don’t we cut off the money supply and put a long-overdue stop to this?

“Higher education”—making America dumber by the day.

It really has to stop.

I have discussed this and other topics throughout the week on my blog, http://leeduigon.com/ . Stop in for a visit; a single click will take you there. My articles can also be found at www.chalcedon.edu/ .

E-Mail Lee Duigon: leeduigon@verizon.net