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Future Unemployed Rally For Diversity At Dartmouth

A reader writes: This is the first time I’ve sent you (or, really, any blogger) “click-bait” articles, but this is too much.  I was a grad student at Dartmouth 10-15 yrs ago, so fortunately never had much interaction with this type of stuff (and it has certainly increased in the past few years).  Anyway, as […]

A reader writes:

This is the first time I’ve sent you (or, really, any blogger) “click-bait” articles, but this is too much.  I was a grad student at Dartmouth 10-15 yrs ago, so fortunately never had much interaction with this type of stuff (and it has certainly increased in the past few years).  Anyway, as a liberal, secular, atheist, I find most of these demands appalling.

What demands are those? Follow this link to a student-generated ransom note document called the “Freedom Budget.” Excerpt:

Departments that do not have womyn or people of color will be considered in crisis and must take urgent and immediate action to right the injustice

All male-female checkboxes should be replaced with write-in boxes to make forms, surveys and applications more inclusive for trans*, two-spirit, agender, gender-nonconforming and genderqueer folks. This should be a campus-wide policy.

It’s a long document, but you get the idea. Crazypants stuff, from some of the most privileged young people in this country.

Where did the Freedom Budget come from? Well, Dartmouth President Phil Hanlon started it. According to the preamble to the Freedom Budget, which is a list of demands addressed to Hanlon:

Just this weekend you said “the college has no greater priority than diversity and inclusion”. Since we now know that this is your top priority as President of this institution, we would like to hold you and the college accountable to this promise.

I find this both appalling and amusing — appalling for the same reason the reader who sent this in does, but amusing because these privileged radicals are calling out their college president on his empty diversity rhetoric. Any college president whose top priority is “diversity and inclusion” and not “providing a top-quality education” and “preparing our students to successfully enter the workforce” ought to be fired by the trustees. Know how much an undergraduate at Dartmouth will pay for tuition, room, board, and fees this fall? $62,000. If I’m an undergraduate taking out loans for my education, or the parents of an undergraduate footing that bill, I’m thinking that “diversity and inclusion,” especially as defined by these privileged radical students, ought to be way down the list of things the college president cares about.

Now the Freedom Budgeteers have occupied President Hanlon’s office, and won’t leave until he signs their ransom note. According to the campus newspaper:

Hanlon exited his office at 5:15 p.m., after about 45 minutes of discussion. As he stood to leave, a student asked for his thoughts on racism.

“I will say a thousand times. I am opposed to bias of any kind,” he said. “Racism, homophobia, gender-based violence — I am opposed to all of those things.”

President Hanlon finally showed up in his office this afternoon, more or less pleaded with the students to leave, and then departed. This man, plainly, is a sack of wet noodles drowning in weenie sauce. If he had any sense of professional dignity, he would tell these brats to get the hell out of his office, and order campus police to arrest them if they resist. Personally, I kind of hope they dig in for a long stay, and that they demand a university set-aside for unemployed puppeteers. It’s only right.

What kind of message does this send to the broader Dartmouth community, or future Dartmouth students? You will pay $62,000 per year to go to a school whose president gets run out of his office by a bunch of unemployment-collectors-in-training undergraduates who won’t leave until he agrees, among other things, to accommodating two-spirits and genderqueers on bureaucratic forms.

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