A reality based independent journal of observation & analysis, serving the Flathead Valley & Montana since 2006. © James Conner.
Today is a day of action for underpaid working people. In Missoula, the action is at the Missoula County Courthouse at 1500–1600. Join them if you can. This is occurring all over the nation, but maybe not in the Flathead. How many will join the action is anyone’s guess. I suspect most of the underpaid will be working because they can’t afford to take off time to join the festivities.
Intolerance at Missouri and Yale. The University of Missouri’s president and chancellor resigned yesterday following protests incited by some racist incidents on campus. There was a hunger strike — hunger strikes are death threats, with the strikers threatening to off themselves to extort concessions — and the black players on the football team said they wouldn’t play until the university’s president resigned. They got their way, scoring a touchdown by refusing to take the field. Ultimately, it appears that powerful alums feared the dispute was hurting, or would hurt, fundraising. Jeopardizing fundraising is a capital offense for a college president. Failing to stare down mutineers and caving into to hunger striking blackmailers is not. The last college presidents with backbones might have been S.I. Hayakawa and Robert Hutchins.
Especially reprehensible was a mob of self-righteous student thugs shoving a photographer away from a public space he had every right to visit and photograph. Even a member of the university’s communications faculty joined the assault on the photographer. Her speciality, it appears, is communicating intolerance.
At Yale, the situation was worse. Prior to Halloween, a day notorious for questionable judgment and taste, an administrator at Yale blasted out an email beseeching students not to wear politically incorrect costumes. That was stupid. What followed was unjust. A faculty member and wife of a residence master — Conor Friedersdorf at The Atlantic has the details — responded with her own email suggesting that the administrator’s message was at variance with the open discussion of ideas and differing points of view that a university ought to encourage. That triggered a protest from students, many of them women and some of them black. Several delivered face-to-face vile and foul-mouthed tirades at the residence master. They didn’t want to debate ideas. They just wanted to talk about their pain. It was Yale’s job, they said, to make sure they neither saw or heard evil. One even said the ruckus was really “…about a mismatch between the Yale we find in admissions brochures and the Yale we experience every day.”
Now there’s a lawsuit for an enterprising trial lawyer: “His college admissions brochure lied, and he needs compensation for his pain, suffering, disillusionment, and not entirely pleasant encounter with the real world.” Yale’s defense would be: “What kind of fool believes an admissions brochure? We don’t admit fools.”
Both of these incidents will move some voters into the Republican column on Election Day, 2016.