To: Multiple recipients
Subject: that rascist and biggited Shakespeer
Dec 1995 10:19:45 +0000
>Those of you out of town may not know that Cornell is in the grips of yet >another racial crisis, this time over program housing. The demonstrations >don't seem to be stopping. Yesterday, there were graffiti on the walk >between Goldwin Smith and McGraw that read: "Shakespeare is admired by most, >but not by me. He was a rascist motherfucker" (sic). Apparently someone >needs to give our graffiti artists spelling lessons, or am I just being too >damned Eurocentric on that one?Give them a little rope and they hang themselves. Just call me an oppressive blue-eyed ice-person. Of course, the students' ignorance doesn't speak well for Cornell's admission standards or its challenging curriculum. The ivies get a little itchy when the secret of their low expectations and grade inflation punctures their carefully maintained mystique. (Remember Yale's embarrassment when it took them a year to weed out an idiot from podunk community college who had successfully gotten in on a faked transfer application? The newspapers amusedly reported that he was getting B grades in his econ classes--"so he must've been a smart guy"--not realizing that a B is punitively low these days and that this moron had survived a semester despite an inability to string an English sentence together.)
My father, when he was here last weekend, was asking me whether I knew why Cornell has been so racially polarized for so long. He was long gone from Ithaca by the time of the armed takover of Willard Straight, but I guess he follows the Cornell news from afar, and a lot more attentively than I do. I couldn't think of an adequate explanation--though "there's nothing better to do up there" comes to mind. If a university fails to teach students the lessons of history and the difficult skill of critical thinking, then trendy, vocal, radicalized groupthink from both sides of a polarized the student body is probably what they can expect. Empiricism went right out the window from the start of the housing controversies; instead of, say, actually examining the social dynamic at similar universities which already have a policy of random freshman housing, everyone at Cornell preferred to spout his own more or less uninformed opinion of the matter: "I think THIS would happen if we had random housing, and it'd be bad!" "Nuh-uh, I think THIS would happen, and it'd be good!" "Yeah, you wanna take it outside, you rascist?" "Who you calling rashist, boy?" I might add that our beloved faculty hardly sets a good example of civility and enlightened good manners. But as always, I have to place most of the blame for the ruin of civilization squarely on the frat system, to which I could, if given enough time, trace all the evils of the world.
What, by the way, does Shakespeare have to do with housing budgets? [....]
I just had a horrible thought: given that I'm teaching a FWS on persecution by Europeans next year, do you think I might attract the kind of student who considers my insistence on the Queen's English to be Eurocentric and oppressive? [....]
I often wonder why I got associated with the putrescent corpse of what was once an educational system. It frustrates and angers me every day, and I feel like a shipwreck victim trying to bail out a sinking raft with a bent teaspoon while most of the other passengers lie around sunning themselves or crawl around poking holes in the floor with a fork. OK, rant over.
jo
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Copyright © 1996, 1997 Jo Miller djm8@cornell.edu(NO_SPAM)