The administration owes it to the Columbia community to promote tolerance and not a radical agenda, mutual respect and not racial empowerment, assimilation and community and not institutionalized favoritism. Over the last few weeks, however, we have heard the opposite rhetoric emanating from a new campus group. Its name is Stop Hate on Columbia's Campus, and its agenda is extremist.
I think it only fair that I present the first of my favorite SHOCC demands: "[w]e demand institutionalized, mandatory, full-day training on issues of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, power, and privilege for all incoming students, faculty, and public safety; and that the training focus on anti-oppression, rather than sensitivity and diversity."
Consider for a moment the implications of the first demand-mandatory "anti-oppression" training for all students and faculty. SHOCC predicates this horribly offensive claim on disingenuous logic. The only reason the students and faculty of Columbia would need anti-oppression training is if they are engaged in acts of oppression. Anyone who would charge one of the most liberal, progressive, and diverse universities with rampant "oppression" is a joke. With one blind sweep of the hand, they cast you, me (and Foner, too!) as their persecutors.
I'm appalled that the administration has already yielded to SHOCC's demands. The Office of Multicultural Affairs recently announced a "four-phase" solution to all our woes. This is the same office with the infamous posters that read, "Fighting Intolerence," "heterosexualism," and "ableism." Admittedly, you have no idea what they mean, but remember, you're guilty by association, and don't you dare question it. The first victims ... err, participants, in this new policy will be rising first-years. Unlike the OMA and 99 percent of the policy's supporters, however, I spent some three hours at Days on Campus observing a large group of rising freshmen that had materialized near my table. As diverse as the cover of the Columbia admissions catalog, they went on chatting and laughing, expressing collective elation and concerns over the forthcoming Columbia experience. These kids could have cared less about racial and ethnic differences, classism, or gender inequality-they were just excited to make friends. Four months from now, the administration will stuff those same students into crowded rooms for their mandatory re-education boot camp. Regardless of their apathy toward differences, they will "learn" how "white privilege" both intentionally and subconsciously serves as a tool of oppression and exploitation. Rather than promoting community, the administration, at the behest of these radicals, will further emphasize that which divides us. It is a regressive policy that promotes victimization, nothing more.
Still, SHOCC presses on for a more comprehensive program; it will never be enough. The second of my favorite SHOCC demands reads as follows: "We demand changes in Columbia's Core Curriculum and Barnard's requirements, including syllabus revision and mandatory workshops for faculty and preceptors to make current texts more inclusive. Courses must be diversified, with a less Western, Eurocentric focus."
The target as of late has been the Core, Columbia's take on the glorious Western canon. We are increasingly told that our society must diverge from our past to denigrate our intellectual and cultural lineage under the auspices of multiculturalism. SHOCC would have Columbia teach Western civilization not as the focus of our studies but as merely "another civilization." In doing so, the group denies the centrality of Western civilization in defining the contemporary world.
"What could happen?" you ask. "Just look to Contemporary Civilization," I reply. With greater ambiguity of purpose, multiculturalists and extremists have already corrupted CC and the texts that have sustained the Columbia canon for well over 75 years, uniting generations of students in the process. For SHOCC, my having to read texts like Radicalesbians and Black Feminist Statement in place of Alexander Hamilton and John Jay's Federalist Papers is not enough; they want, and will always demand, more. Given the opportunity, this movement will completely restructure the Core, promoting sham diversity in place of merit and historical importance.
Some 10 years ago, a similar group of ideologues launched a hunger strike in support of an ethnic studies center. Today, SHOCC "demands more resources for [those] Centers, Institutes and Departments" despite the fact that as of 2004, there were, in total, 18 majors in those five departments. Clearly, we must not question the commitment of SHOCC to either specious radicalism or direct action to justify and achieve their goals.
To be fair, there is one demand with which I agree: the need for Public Safety to announce instances of hate crimes. The Columbia community will always see ignorance and stupidity for what they are-despite dubious claims of a "hate epidemic." We cannot, however, allow groups like SHOCC to influence these decisions. On SHOCC's Web site, the group details the "2004 Racist Incidents," including the Conservative Club's affirmative action bake sale (run, incidentally, by an Asian and a Jew) for "[determining] price of goods based on sex, gender, and perceived level of 'oppression.'" By SHOCC standards, free speech and protest are intolerable when they disagree and articulate different sets of values and beliefs.
On this issue, I am in the campus majority. Friends and peers, covering the opposing entire spectrum, from the far left to the center, have voiced their objections far louder than I. We, like the concerned alumni of Columbia College, demand that President Lee Bollinger's administration not give in to these radical demands.
Chris Kulawik is a Columbia College sophomore.
Chris Shrugged runs alternate Wednesdays.