BY PETER BRONSON
The Cincinnati Enquirer
The campus of Miami University looks like a fold-out recruiting brochure: Dignified red-brick buildings sprout ivy like living things, rooted in the solid soil of the sensible Midwest. It's the kind of campus that looks like it would be right at home in the '60s.
But students don't burn draft cards -- they riot for draft beer. They don't have panty raids. That would be anti-feminist. Instead, female students stalk male students with "Gotcha" stickers, to "raise awareness" that women can be frightened walking alone at night.
Students don't get together to see how many can fit in a VW. These days, they get together to see how many goldfish demands they can make the administration swallow. Pep rallies have been by replaced by group grievances: civil rights, women's rights, animal rights, gay rights, beer rights, pizza rights, college mascot rights and "Mom, send more money" rights.
Last year when one black student received two threatening phone calls, students who called themselves BAM (Black Action Movement) marched on the administration building and demanded a meeting with 21 campus officials. There were anguished editorials in the student paper about "The underlying rage." The campus police chief wrote a public letter denying his officers were racists. An "Institutional Response Team" wrung its hands in weeks of discussions about the "campus climate."
Whew. When did college get so serious?
A campus has always been a refuge from reality in its own mental time zone. Maybe some colleges are still trapped in the '60s -- politically.
Maybe some of the radicals I went to college with 20 years ago are still hanging around campus, trying to relive their own student protests like over-the-hill jocks who become loudmouth Little League coaches. If middle-aged guys tried to hang around their old high school like that, they'd get arrested. Do it on campus, and they make you a professor, so you can indoctrinate students with manifestos on "activism."
One textbook used last year for Miami U. freshman English aimed to "analyze the cultural text" of the Aids quilt. Duh? Students who signed up for College Composition instead learned that English "is the language of the oppressors." They studied "Hate Crimes & Harassment at M.U.," "Living With Aids," "Discourses on Sexuality," and "How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic," complete with graphic cartoons depicting lively gay sex acts.
I heard about it from a disgusted parent. A Miami U. spokeswoman said that "text" has now been removed and replaced with "American Voices: Multicultural Literacy and Critical Thinking."
Never mind. Nobody is responsible.
This summer, a Miami U. governor's drama workshop mailed an obscene play to high school students. When a few parents complained and the governor threatened to cancel funding, Miami officials quickly promised to apologize and kill the play.
But the apology was more of an insult, insinuating that narrow-minded prudes ruined the workshop. And in defiance of Ohio Department of Education orders to remove the play, parts of it were performed anyway.
Chip Walton, the workshop director brought in from Colorado (why?), declared victory over "censorship." He called graphic sex and profanity "challenging," and said, "I sent it out and I don't think anything was wrong with sending it out."
Never mind. Nobody is responsible.
I was a radical student once -- but unlike some who graduated from protester to professor, I left and grew up. I believe students should be free to explore almost any frontiers of knowledge they choose. But too often their exorbitant tuition is ripped off by "activists" who peddle left-wing lunacy disguised as freshman composition.
The same day Mr. Walton called to justify mailing an obscene play to high school students, the Ohio Department of Education announced it would investigate a high school coach in London, Ohio, who is suspected of encouraging religion.
Coach David Daubenmire said, "I find it ironic that people find my faith in God to be a greater threat" than guns, drugs and teen pregnancy.
He's right, it is strange. Faith is stamped out like a hate crime, but obscenity and political brainwashing are no big deal. The Ohio Department of Education is not likely to investigate the Miami U. summer workshop. Miami is not sending an "Institutional Response Team" to find out how that ridiculous "composition" textbook got past the English department faculty.
So Miami, a great university, winds up looking like a Playskool campus run by those round-bottom toys called Weebles. Knock them over, and they pop up again. After all, troublesome students graduate and take their angry demands to IBM or Procter & Gamble (good luck!).
Troublemaker faculty members are tenured for life.
Peter Bronson is editorial page editor of The Enquirer. If you have questions or comments, call 768-8301, or write to 312 Elm Street, Cincinnati, Ohio 45202.
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