Today in the College Apocalypse

This news today from the University of Tulsa, by way of Yascha Mounk:

I’m sure lumping things under a “Humanities and Social Justice” banner will do the trick. But perhaps we should applaud this as truth-in-advertising—social “science” is dropping its pretensions as a science, and admitting that it’s an advocacy program.

Then there’s this from the Library Journal:

Surely, I thought, this has to be another hoax from the brilliant Lindsay, Pluckrose, and Beghosian team, but no, I checked the underlying link, and it apparently “library science” is now yet another politicized field of study:

If you look at any United States library’s collection, especially those in higher education institutions, most of the collections (books, journals, archival papers, other media, etc.) are written by white dudes writing about white ideas, white things, or ideas, people, and things they stole from POC and then claimed as white property with all of the “rights to use and enjoyment of” that Harris describes in her article. When most of our collections filled with this so-called “knowledge,” it continues to validate only white voices and perspectives and erases the voices of people of color. . .

I didn’t realize that Shakespeare ripped off his corpus of work from a person of color somewhere, nor did I know that, for example, Martin Luther King Jr’s family wasn’t able to take advantage of the protections of copyrights. (Just try to use a King video, image, or a quotation beyond fair use, and see how fast you get a letter from the King estate). And last I checked, I had no problem finding Frederick Douglass or Toni Morrison in a library. But I digress. I also like this:

As others have written (Fobazi Ettarh, Todd Honma, Gina Schlessman-Tarango, etc.), libraries and librarians have a long history of keeping People of Color out.

Yes, this part is true. Those people are called “Democrats.” If you haven’t yet taken in this week’s Power Line podcast, you can hear Bill Allen talk about how as a teenager he couldn’t get into the local public library in rural Florida back when Democrats ran the place. But the librarian would bring him books and he’d read on the steps outside.

I’m starting to rethink my criticism of the protesters at Columbia in 1969 who sacked Low Library. Maybe they were on to something.

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