Thursday, April 9, 2009

Why my kids aren't going to Ivy League schools

Well, there's the ridiculous tuition to start with, but even if I had $50 Grand a year to throw into the tuition pot, I would consider it money ill-spent, thanks to wonderful little stories like this:

In its latest exhibition of anti-Americanism, the faculty at Brown University voted to rename the “Columbus Day” “Fall Weekend.” Rather lacking in poetry, “Fall Weekend,” but from the perspective of the tenured elite that anodyne moniker has the advantage of ideological neutrality. “Fall Weekend” does not commemorate a European explorer. It therefore does not honor the memory of the settlement and cultivation of the American continent and, by implication, withholds approbation of the ultimate fruit of that settling and cultivation: the founding of the United States. As Fox News reported, the Brown faculty acted in response to the clamoring of students, hundreds of whom had petitioned the university “to stop observing Columbus Day, saying Christopher Columbus’s violent treatment of Native Americans he encountered was inconsistent with Brown’s values.”

The story comes to us courtesy of author Roger Kimball, who goes on to note:

Whatever barbarities European explorers visited upon the indigenous populations of the Americas pale in comparison with the barbarities the natives visited upon others. Moreover, the European settlers have this large achievement in the credit column of their moral reckoning: they brought civilization, spiritual as well as material, to the various backward populations they subdued. They also joined together to create a society that grew into the richest, mightiest, and freest country in the history of the world. I mean the United States of America. No, it is not perfect. But it remains, as Lincoln put it, “the last best hope of earth.” Recognizing that, of course, is really what is “inconsistent with Brown’s values.”

Couldn't have said it any better myself.

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