Oh, it’s so hard to keep the dictates of diversity straight! A person can be trying to do the right thing, and yet fail.

For example, yoga:

Student leaders have pulled the mat out from 60 University of Ottawa students, ending a free on-campus yoga class over fears the teachings could be seen as a form of “cultural appropriation.”

And then there are minority students (or the new catchword, “marginalized” students) who feel traumatized by being forced to listen to the bleatings of a white culture and tradition that disempowers them. One of them is Nissy Aya, a panelist participating in a “teach-in and speak-out” called “Race, Ethnicity and University Life”:

“I was accepted as the class of 2014,” Nissy Aya, CC ’16, said. “I will not receive a degree until 2016, if that is any marker of how hard it has been for me to get through this institution.”… In addition to a lack of substantive support beyond “quick fixes” from the administration, Aya said that the the Core Curriculum further silences students of color by requiring students to read texts that ignore the existence of marginalized people and their histories. “It’s traumatizing to sit in Core classes,” Aya said. “We are looking at history through the lens of these powerful, white men. I have no power or agency as a black woman, so where do I fit in?”

A significant portion of Aya’s generation seems to be moving in the direction of supporting the practice of limiting speech that offends minorities: they support such efforts 40% to 58%, which while not a majority is still a much greater incidence of those wanting to limit such speech that any previous generation has demonstrated:

We asked whether people believe that citizens should be able to make public statements that are offensive to minority groups, or whether the government should be able to prevent people from saying these things. Four-in-ten Millennials say the government should be able to prevent people publicly making statements that are offensive to minority groups, while 58% said such speech is OK. Even though a larger share of Millennials favor allowing offensive speech against minorities, the 40% who oppose it is striking given that only around a quarter of Gen Xers (27%) and Boomers (24%) and roughly one-in-ten Silents (12%) say the government should be able to prevent such speech.

I wonder how the polls would have gone if they had asked whether citizens should be able to make public statements that are offensive to majority groups; I doubt the response would have been anywhere near as high. My guess is that it’s only certain designated minority groups who have the right to be offended. My next question would be: what about when whites become a minority group, which is supposedly due to happen in a few years? Will they then be able to achieve minority group status (a different thing from merely being in the minority)? I think I know the answer: of course not.

Meanwhile, I’ve been reading a book by E. D. Hirsch entitled Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. Written in 1987 (the same year as Allan Bloom’s book The Closing of the American Mind), it warns that, in the name of multiculturalism, American education had already failed to teach students the heritage and culture basic to Western civilization and being Americans. Here, Hirsch is quoting a passage written by Benjamin J. Stein, who describes his experience with teenage students in a series of Los Angeles focus groups that he ran in the high schools there. It’s from an essay entitled “The Cheerful Ignorance of the Young in LA” that appeared in the WaPo in 1983 [emphasis mine]:

I have no yet found one single student in Los Angeles, in either college or high school, who could tell me the years when World War II was fought [same for WWI and the Civil War]… A few have known how many senators California has, but none have known how many Nevada or Oregon has… Only two could even approximately identify Thomas Jefferson…None could name even one of the first ten amendments to the Constitution or connect them to the Bill of Rights… On and on it went. On and on it goes…The kids I saw (and there may be lots of others who are different) are not mentally prepared to continue the society because they basically do not understand the society well enough to value it.

Let me repeat: that was written in 1983. The rot was already well established. By my calculations, these high school students are the parents of today’s students, or in some cases even the grandparents of today’s younger students. Not only are way too many of today’s students not getting a basic grounding in these things from their schools, but they’re probably not getting it from way too many of their parents, either. No wonder so many of them are willing to throw away freedom of speech in the name of protecting minorities’ feelings—they don’t een know what freedom of speech is or what it means, or why we have it in the first place.