Out with the Old (Morality), in with the New (False Religion) at Columbia U.
Winfield Myers • November 17, 2009 • Uncategorized
In the Alice in Wonderland world of higher education, old pieties are discarded and disdained, while new orthodoxies fill the moral vacuum. To no one’s surprise, the discarded old usually consists of traditional sexual mores of some type; the new normally draws on the now-massive literature of environmentalism.
A student-written report from Columbia University further confirms this trend. “Get Ready for Gender-Neutral Housing, but Don’t Poster about It,” a headline at the Bwog, the blog of the student magazine the Blue and White, is a synopsis of new housing and posting regulations being implemented. Note the opening lines’ lingo, which is a key to the problem:
If CCSC [Columbia College Student Council] has its way, Columbia’s Housing system will be slightly less oppressive next year. The council passed a resolution supporting gender-neutral housing last night, which will remove the gender restrction on double occupancy rooms.
If we grant that the author’s use of “oppressive” is ironic (and that may be a stretch), “gender-neutral” is politically-correct speak for mixed sex. In most folks’ experience, there is little neutrality in such situations–an undergrad guy and gal now have the option of rooming together, much to the delight of the former. It takes a progressive, anti-sexist Ivy League administrator to speed along the fulfillment of every adolescent male’s ideal sexual fantasy, albeit minus the tropical island.
But don’t think this new policy ushers in a laissez-faire attitude toward on-campus living. Shedding one set of “oppressive” rules designed in no small part to keep red-blooded males from having such an easy time with young women requires replacing them with another formed around the belief that the environment is far more vulnerable than young people.
The council also passed a resolution authored by CC 2011 President Learned Foote setting up a test program encouraging student groups to use less paper when postering. From after Thanksgiving until the end of the semester, John Jay, Hartley and Wallach’s ground floors will be equipped with new bulletin boards; the boards will have pre-drawn boxes marking out poster space, and groups will be encouraged to use only one poster per board.
Wasting paper=sin against the earth; wasting virtue=cool! Sleep with anyone you please, but please, please, don’t waste paper!
Some conservatives lament the disappearance of in loco parentis or a benevolent paternalism from the post-1960s American campus. In fact, both are strong as ever, but grossly misplaced. From odious speech codes to pc in the classroom to the confused new rules at Columbia, proof abounds that today’s administrators exert as much coercive power over their charges as their predecessors. But unlike those old fogies of yesteryear, contemporary bureaucrats enforce a morality based on a gnostic conception of human nature and creation. As is often the case with academic “reforms,” the youngest and most vulnerable members of the community will be the losers.
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[...] Myers’s ironic commentary on this and other mutation of regulations on campuses concludes: Some conservatives lament the [...]
actually it doesn’t matter what Religion you may have, as long as you treat the other person right.:’;