Thursday, February 27, 2014

An ‘aspirational goal’ for Bowdoin College?

“I am Polar Bear, hear me roar…..Boola, Boola” and all that other fun stuff associated with the lazy, hazy, boozy-woozy days of college. When students do their best to remind the town that they’re nothing without the gown.

In these precious few formative years they focus on having a good time, knowing full well that they’ve got their whole lives ahead of them to ‘change the world’ and ‘make it a better place.’ 

Well, maybe not, exactly.  Side’s daughter, ever vigilant for cultural breakthroughs, sent us this link:  Dartmouth students set the bar even higher.  Here are the opening paragraphs of the ‘essay’ at that link:

According to that source link, a bunch of students who refer to themselves as "Concerned Asian, Black, Latin@, Native, Undocumented, Queer, and Differently-Abled students" wrote a letter to administrators at Dartmouth to threaten "physical action" if the administrators do not respond to their list of demands.

What do these weirdos want?  I'll tell you.  They want to "eradicate systems of oppression as they affect marginalized communities on the campus."  The systems include "racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, and ableism" and they are "forms of institutional violence."

And when do they want it?  NOW.

And how do they want it?  Oh, that's where it gets really good.  For starters, they want to see a "redistributing" of power and resources in a way that is "radically equitable."

Not just equitable, mind you, but RADICALLY equitable. They're mad, you see, because they think "Dartmouth epitomizes power being isolated to rich, white males" so they are demanding that Dartmouth create "its own Freedom Budget to transform itself into a safe, inclusive, and supportive environment for us all."

Freedom Budget?  What's that, you might ask?  Well, here's a little taste.  And for the full text of the letter, be sure to click on the source link provided in the opening sentence of this post.

We hope you’ll read the whole piece to get a feel for what having a good time at college means these days.  Whether you are a ‘rich white male’ or otherwise.  And we fully expect that our posting this material should incite a similar uprising at Bowdoin, since we know they follow our blog religiously, in the figurative sense of course. 

We don’t think the student body will take to kindly to being outpaced and outdone by those inferior Ivy Leaguers in Hanover.  Maybe they can even reach out to their fellow elites at Colby and Bates to turn this into a larger movement, to put a fine point on things.

Given our penchant for such subject matter, we may just have to sculpt a statue of a dead horse to erect outside Other Side offices.  Whether you realize it or not, one of the tenets of our media outlet (or ‘tenants’ for some pundits [or ‘pundants’ for some others]) is that ‘there is no such thing as a horse that’s too dead to beat.

                  

We understand it’s pretty easy to do.  You just get a really big block of granite, and chip away all the parts that don’t look like a dead horse.  How hard could that be?

Engineer that we are, we suppose we could fail at the task, and on the outside chance that could happen, we always have the resident artistic talents at Polar Bear College to call upon.

Dead horses, dead branches, what’s the difference when you come right down to it?

No comments:

Post a Comment