I would like to show you part of an open letter, written by three self-identified Black students at Pomona College in Claremont, California and co-signed by 24 others, which addresses outgoing President David Oxtoby’s email of April 7th.
First a little background: President Oxtoby’s email was issued the day after Heather Mac Donald’s talk there was violently shut down by some of the school’s academic brownshirts, on the grounds that free speech defines as their speech and no one else’s. To this point, President Oxtoby wrote, in part, that…
“Protest has a legitimate and celebrated place on college campuses. What we cannot support is the act of preventing others from engaging with an invited speaker. Our mission is founded upon the discovery of truth, the collaborative development of knowledge and the betterment of society.”
That’s pretty basic, wouldn’t you say?
Well here is one paragraph from the above-mentioned open letter:
Free speech, a right many freedom movements have fought for, has recently become a tool appropriated by hegemonic institutions. It has not just empowered students from marginalized backgrounds to voice their qualms and criticize aspects of the institution, but it has given those who seek to perpetuate systems of domination a platform to project their bigotry. Thus, if “our mission is founded upon the discovery of truth,” how does free speech uphold that value? The notion of discourse, when it comes to discussions about experiences and identities, deters the ‘Columbusing’ of established realities and truths (coded as ‘intellectual inquiry’) that the institution promotes. Pomona cannot have its cake and eat it, too. Either you support students of marginalized identities, particularly Black students, or leave us to protect and organize for our communities without the impositions of your patronization, without your binary respectability politics, and without your monolithic perceptions of protest and organizing. In addition, non-Black individuals do not have the right to prescribe how Black people respond to anti-Blackness.
Think of your reaction to what you just read. Consider its level of logic. Its clarity.
Now please use the link I’ve provided and read the rest. See if you don’t agree that it may be the single most coherent paragraph of the entire letter.
Oh God.
Tuition, room and board at Pomona is about $65,000 a year. If this is at all indicative of how it molds students, I pity anyone who is shelling that $65,000 out.
Isn’t that the same kind of thinking that led to the dark ages.