There are many ways to ruin a holiday and some involve reading. On Christmas morning I read George Will’s “Washington Post” column on higher education. Mr. Will thinks colleges and universities have become bloated compounds of political correctness, enforcing “pc values” on forlorn students and faculty. He blames this able-bodied, white man’s gotterdamerung on diversity, equity and inclusion offices and argues that diversity awareness stands in opposition to the good, fair minded curricula of a bygone age. One wonders when that was? Was it at Harvard when they were teaching Theodore Roosevelt the “white man’s burden” or when they were treating Helen Keller as a specious curiosity to be regarded on sufferance? Perhaps it was when the gays stayed in their closets and no people of color ever troubled the washrooms or the imagination? Will and his conservative ilk claim that the untidy democratization of the agora has ruined their guest towels. As a disabled man who’s struggled to get an education, who knows that the history of the marginalized can’t be understood without scholarship, I charge Will with having an ugly design: to stamp out inquiry with greater intolerance than anyone who seeks to embrace multiculturalism.
Planet of the Blind 