A young man applied for a role on the Dartmouth Trips Directorate and was rejected. The Directorate is 15-4 women to men. So he wrote an opinion piece to the Campus paper (The Dartmouth), offering his opinion about the leadership’s response to his rejection and to their priorities.
This year, the Trips directors’ obsession with diversity verges on the inane. Described as “majority female” in The Dartmouth, this year’s directorate, excluding Pierson and Rodriguez-Caspeta, is nearly 80 percent female. Yes — of the 19-person Trips directorate, there are merely four males on the staff.
Who didn’t know that equality is subjective?
The letter makes points about the balance of the Trips Directorate’s leadership (and mathematics probability), ending with the author, white male Ryan Spector, predicting the future.
Upon publication of this column, I can assure you that I will be called bitter. That is correct. I can assure you that my white, male phenotype will be criticized — whether publicly or internally — as the malevolent force motivating this response. That is not correct. It is, however, evidence of the degree to which Trips is attached to identity, rather than reason.
What he did not see (or at least not commit to words) was that The Dartmouth would also be inundated with venom for thinking it was acceptable to print Ryan’s remarks. Why? Because the words make the campus climate unsafe.
Joseph Asch (Dartblog) shares some of the responses to The Dartmouth in total, which I’ll excerpt here.
From Epsilon Kappa Theta.
As an organization that carries the weight of Dartmouth College in their name, we demand that they reevaluate their criteria for the publication of opinion editorials so that they prioritize the safety of Dartmouth students by refusing to publish content that endangers the lives and dismisses the labor of those actively working to make this college a more diverse and inclusive institution.
A second letter adds,
Opinions that perpetuate violence and systematic oppression do not deserve a public platform. Instead, we urge The Dartmouth to retract the article and issue an apology to those whom the article has harmed.
These are students at Dartmouth College, who, as Asch notes,
Freedom of the press seems of little value to these students, and the vehemence of their critique will undoubtedly cause the Op-Ed editors at The D — Parker Richards ‘18, Ioana Solomon ‘19 and Ziqin Yuan ‘18 — to hesitate in deciding to run similar pieces in the future.
Which is viewpoint discrimination but in opposition to what appears to be actual discrimination, a 15-4 imbalance on the Directorate.
But imagine if you will a 2018 Dartmouth Tripps Directorate run by two white men that is 80% male and a young woman, denied acceptance, wrote a similar letter to the editors at The Dartmouth?
Speaking truth to power? National Media coverage? Justice? Pussyhat parade? Riots?
God help us if The Dartmouth didn’t publish it all as demanded by the SJWs of Mr. Spectors report.
And it isn’t just Dartmouth, as we consider a supplement to one of the above links, Joseph Ashc adds,
It’s frightening that so many young people seem to be making their way through Dartmouth believing the following fallacies: 1) That language equals violence; 2) That it’s never OK to criticize a person of color or a gay person, no matter how warranted; 3) That the USA, so rich and so full of opportunities, especially for Ivy League graduates, is nothing but a massive system of oppression leaving only victims in its wake.
Are these kids not getting any guidance from their professors and parents?
As for the issue of Trips leaders, all the directors have to do is release the demographics of the applicant pool to settle this matter once and for all.
As it stands now, it certainly looks like many Dartmouth undergrads believe not in meritocracy but in revenge. In their insistence on the primacy of group membership and not the individual, they have much in common with Maoists. They are heading down a dangerous path.
As far as I can tell, the behavior is the product of years of “education” via other examples of institutional discrimination. Majority liberal educators. Majority Liberal media. Majority liberal entertainment. And more often than not, disinterested or overwhelmed parents who are products of the same system.
They, too, are in denial about the cut of their collectivist jib, equally triggered by the thought of speech that dares to question any ideological imbalance or the power it affords their message.
Kudos to The Dartmouth editors for publishing it, and as of this writing and as far as I can tell, not apologizing for it, retracting it, or anything other than being willing to publish dissenters.
That’s how it’s supposed to work.
Update: fixes two typos.
-“Who didn’t know that equality is subjective” – had ‘quality’ when it should have been “equality.”
-In the sentence on viewpoint discrimination, the female to male imbalance was written as 18-4 when it should be 15-4.
