I am happy that Grinnell selected an outstanding scientist and leader. The fact that you didn’t even mention his impressive credentials underscores your obsession with all things gay.

And you accuse me of having hobby horses. Ha!

5% black?
6% Hispanic?

Are you kidding?

This place is about as divserse as an Aryan Nation convention in Idaho.

Do they serve Wonder Bread in the cafeteria?

Ohhhhh, that makes it so much better to know that 50.1% of students can deny the choice to be ROTC for other students. So, under your defense, 50.1% of students could ban black students or gay students and you would claim that was the “students’ choice”. Apparently the logic and rhetoric program at Grinnell could use a little help.

And to answer your question. No I have not served in uniform. Nor am I black, and nor am I gay. But I, unlike you, would not deny ROTC for others, nor would I deny black people, nor gay people. But apparently you believe all of that is just fine as long as 50.1% of students think that is aok.

Yes, evidently “it matters” to you since it is your hobby horse.

Brewski–

Relax. The lack of access to ROTC isn’t discriminatory. There are fewer colleges in the nation by far that have access to Creative Writing programs than ROTC, yet you don’t see me whining about it.

You know full well that the student body banning a race or sexual preference is a totally different issue than dropping an elective program. Take a chill pill.

–Dwight

Glenden,
The most embarrassing thing for you about your argument is how dishonest it is from start to finish.
Grinnell didn’t ban ROTC like deciding it wasn’t going to have an accounting department. It banned the ROTC since it didn’t like them. It was a pure simple political statement that we don’t like those people and we don’t want there here. It is not like not having an accounting department or a pre-law program.

All you need to do is say “yes, I don’t like the ROTC and I don’t want them here and I believe that the power of majority gets to trample on the existence of the minority.”

Say it.

Well, thanks for that compliment brew, but don’t know how deserved it is. And thank you for evading the questions.

All you got is name calling and a hard-on for Glenden.

BTW, you just called the men and women of the “group-think” military acadamies dangerous and ugly.

I have to thank Glenden though. He has helped me narrow down my list of colleges for my daughter, even though she has 14 years before she has to worry about it. But for now I can cross Grinnell off the list. The point here is than a choice of college has 2 components. One the classroom education and the second is the out of classroom experience. I am sure Grinnell’s classroom education is outstanding, but that doesn’t distinguish itself from other places since there are other places where you can get an outstanding classroom education. Where Grinnell falls painfully short is the out of classroom experience. Glenden has described a wonder-bread lilly white school where people of different points of view are not welcome. In fact they are actively banished. I’d rather send her to UC Berkeley, which is famous for its lefty culture but still has on-campus ROTC. It is also much more diverse in terms of race and class than a private college in Iowa can ever be. By the way, UC Berkeley does not have accounting or creative writing majors.

I wish you the best in getting your kid to a good school.

I hope it’s a quality experience that doesn’t leave her wanting to rip the solar panels off the Whitehouse or excuse torture. That is all.

Off to shursh…on a quest for tolerance. My ability to tolerate the obnoxious has just about bottomed out. Must recharge.

Everything is connected – live long enough and you’ll see.

I don’t want you or any of your fellow self-appointed thought police to like the ROTC. For all I care you can despise them with every fiber of your sould and wear an “ROTC=Babykiller” t-shirt to class every day.

I don’t like avowed communists too much, and I will tell them so. I don’t like Latino activists who rally for El Reconquista of Alta California. I don’t like self appointed black activists who want all white people to write a check to all black peopele for reparations for past generations.

Nevertheless I am quite willing to have all of these nutcase groups on campus with their offices and study centers and symposia that no one pays any attention to. I am willing to let them exist. That does not mean I have to like them. Quoting my criticisms of them is zero evidence of my lack of tolerance.

You on the other hand don’t even allow the idea that the ROTC has the right to exist. You support the political ban on them. You use the power of the majority and the institution to kick them off campus. You are the one with the large wardrobe of brown shirts.

What is my practiced intolerance? Who have I banned? What don’t you get?

Brewski–

I find it contradictory that you are taking colleges off your daughter’s list by deciding which colleges don’t allow enough freedom. Ponder on that one.

You have to recognize, of course, that you’ve created a set of values for yourself and that you are being tolerant only within that framework. You believe military service is vital to our nation; I believe that cultural enrichment is equally so. I believe that survival is useful only if our lives possess some meaning, so I adulate the militarist and the artist equally.

Regardless, you seem to be assuming that Grinnell bans military personnel from going to college there. Is there evidence for this? My point is that ROTC is an elective program, not a race, and that one need not be in an ROTC program to be in the military or vice versa. ROTC training is one field of education which Grinnell doesn’t wish to participate in.

So you are willing in a thought experiment to allow communists et al to exist, but you haven’t considered that maybe the college doesn’t want to pay for their activities. Maybe it doesn’t want to burden itself with supporting communism classes and feminist bra-burning workshops and everything else associated with these groups. Who are you to tell them that they must budget for ideas that are antithetical to their academic vision? Your credibility lies solely in the fact that you value military.

Well, so do I. I’m just not going to force every college out there to have every elective program that I value on their schedule.

Relax, brewski.

–Dwight

Uh oh! Cliff and Brewski are at it! Two hypersensitive people having a fight! This doesn’t bode well for the moderates.

Dwight,
I appreciate your thoughtful discussion, but you make two factual errors.

One is that my argument is predicated on valuing the military. In fact, I go to great lengths to try to articulate that I value the existence of programs such as ROTC and GLBT even if I don’t value them.

Two is that Grinnell just happens not to have an ROTC program as a matter of budgetary priority or other finite-resource-allocation decisions. When in fact Grinnell did have an ROTC program, it brags about one of its notable ROTC alumni on its website, but kicked ROTC off campus as a political statement.

Also, Glenden’s analysis and defense are pretty weak. The way to test his argument is to replace the phrase ROTC with GLBT in his entire defense. Let’s say Westminster College in SLC had a GLBT program, then a mob of angry students demonstrated to get the program kicked off campus, then a vote of students showed that a majority of students wanted them kicked off campus. Would Glenden then be here defending that? Would he say “well, gee, a majority of students decided that so it must be ok. Or, those students are free to go study GLBT someplace else so no one’s freedom has been denied.”

The easy criticism is that GLBT and ROTC are not the same. But the point of the analogy is whether mob rule, or majority rule, should be allowed to forcefully kick a program off campus which had been welcomed there for decades and had produced honored alumni.

Glenden also makes sanitized statement such as “Grinnell students decided”, when in fact a mob stormed the ROTC offices and demanded that the program be banned.

There is also context in this discussion that Glenden had previously stated support for the idea of campus “speech codes” whereby someone could get expelled for saying something that someone else might find offensive. I hope you understand that potential danger of such an idea, not to mention to blatant unconstitutionality of it.

So the big picture of this is the frequent hypocrisy of the left as so vividly demonstrated by Glenden. The left is all for freedom of speech and freedom of expression and tolerance for groups that perhaps the majority doesn’t like. But when it comes to allowing free speech on campus, ROTC on campus, conservative speakers to even appear on campus as guests, there is an element among the left that turns into intolerant reactionaries demanding that those views and those people not be allowed. They are even willing to resort to mob tactics to enforce their point of view.

I think Glenden just said that he supports banning guest speakers on campus who he doesn’t like.

No that’s not censorship. It is just pinheaded narrowminded mob rule reactionary trendy lefty BoBo-ism.

So you would allow Cheney to speak on campus and not try to stop him from speaking? You would not stage a sit in? You would not shout him down or charge the stage? You would let him speak?

If you would then I am with you.

I am glad to hear it. As you know, some speakers have been un-invited from speaking invitations, or they have been shouted down, or the stage has been rushed by lefty students.

As sort of an aside, I was telling my wife (who is a research librarian and associate professor at a utah state university) about the selection process of the Reagan Presidential Library. There were discussions at various levels to have it on campus at various state universities in California such as UC Irvine, UCLA, etc. But in every case the students threw a cow about the idea having the Reagan Presidential Library on campus. So in every case the administrators caved in and told the library people no. So that is why that library is off by itself in the middle of nowhere in the Simi Valley.

My wife, as a librarian, thinks that was utterly insane for a university to turn down a Presidential collection and all the research that could benefit with those one of a kind documents.

So this is where campus lefties get dangerous. Forcing universities to turn down presidential collections, banning speakers, enforcing speech codes and all that crap. All because they don’t like someone and they want to fill themselves with their own self-importance by kicking someone off campus.

I don’t mind protesting and fussing. I like protesting and fussing. It is the banning, uninviting, the shouting down and the rushing the stage which I mind.

Yes I am aware of my hyperbole. It is also interesting how often some (Glenden, Cliff) misquote me. I never questioned anyone at Grinnell’s patriotism. I questioned their tolerance when they forcefully removed ROTC from campus. I suppose the unappreciated tactic is to draw attention to the ridiculous statement on which I am commenting. It is ridiculous for Glenden to ignore Grinnell’s history and make up some story about career-related fields of study. It was also pretty ridiculous for him to laud the hiring of a gay black man and never mention once the president’s commendable achievements.

I also think Glenden is a pretty interesting case study of the Internally Ironic Liberal Nascissist Elite (“IILNE”). Here is a guy who opts out of the public schools, would deny poor people that same option, goes to a Roman Catholic high school (owned and run by an anachronistic patriarchal anti-choice empire), then he goes to Grinnell (a college which is not only lilly white, but it also ranks near the bottom of the economic diversity scale, even among its own peer group, and seems to not have room for students who don’t sign the PC loyalty pledge). And now he comes on this site to share with us how great his high school was and how great his college is in these exercises of navel-worship. And yet he has the gall to tell us that price-therory is a myth, Southerners are stupid and anyone who didn’t vote for Obama must be a racist.

So yes, some of what I say is hyperbole. Some of it is supposed to get a reaction. But mostly I am holding a mirror to completely ridiculous statements.

And I stand by the description of students who charged the stage at a conservative speaker as being lefty students. They were lefty students. It’s not like the college Republicans charged the stage at a conservative speaker. The description is completely accurate.