It seems as if there is no end to the damages of identity politics and victim mentality. As if shouting down anyone who you happen to disagree with as being a racist Nazi wasn’t enough, leftist students are now using these buzzwords to protest anything and everything that inconveniences them. Their latest target – exams.
At UC Berkeley, a small group of minority students interrupted an exam to march forward to the front of the classroom and demand that the professor cancel the exam and instead give them a take-home essay and extra time to prepare for it at that. Their reasoning for this demand was that since minority students are supposedly facing so much violence and oppression they could not be expected to perform well on an in-class exam. Hence, forcing them to be held to the same standards as the privileged white people in the class is a horribly racist form of oppression itself.
One student said that, “Our well-beings are being put on the line because of our emotional, mental, and physical stress that [Berkeley] is compounding with what is already going on in our everyday lives.”
Another protester stated, “The content of this class and the way it is being taught is not satisfactory. And even if it is … we feel that we haven’t had the opportunity to interact with the text and information. We demand that you make and [hold space] to [study] the voices of students of color.”
When one student spoke up and said he was just trying to take his test, he was quickly shouted down by a protestor saying, “We’re trying to live our lives … white boy with privilege.”
After almost five minutes of this nonsense, the professor was finally given an opportunity to respond. Though he was noticeably candid in his response – though who can blame him in an age where professors are fired for hurting students’ feelings – he did not cave to their demands, saying at one point, “You may disagree with it — and I respect your opinion for disagreeing with it; I respect you getting up here and stating your disagreements — but with that, we are going to go ahead with the exam, not despite the demonstrations, but to show that all of us, as part of a community, are capable of doing what a university does absent that kind of interference. Otherwise, anytime 25, 50, or 1,000 people want to stop this dead, it becomes their possibility, and we’ve demonstrated that that’s what will happen.”
Undeterred, the student protestors still refused to take the exam and walked out of the classroom. It’s unclear as of now whether these students were given a zero or if other accommodations were made. One student did say that they intended to take their complaints to the university’s Department of Ethnic Studies.
Such is the current disarray of modern higher education. Rather than being sharpened by challenges and opposing viewpoints, students now protest anything and everything that challenges them in the slightest as being unfair, racist, and oppressive. To make matters infinitely worst, most universities have rolled over and allowed them to get away with this. There are rarely ever repercussions for such behavior, and more often than not, such behavior is followed by a letter from the administration backing and supporting the protesting students.
This type of atmosphere is entirely unsustainable. The type of students who are refusing to take exams and calling them racist would receive more preparation to succeed in the real world at a daycare center than they are currently receiving at their university.
Meanwhile, the students who really are trying to further their education — which is still the majority, though the numbers dwindle every day — are having their studies interrupted and held back by this constant barrage of pointless protests and PC culture. How can these students expect to succeed in an environment where they can’t even take a test without it being interrupted by protests and can’t even voice an opinion that strays from leftist ideals in the slightest without being verbally and, sometimes physically, attacked?
The political tides in America may be changing for the better, but the political tides at our top universities are worse than they have ever been. If you have a child nearing college age, you may want to consider sending them either to a trade school or a private university. The current environment in public universities that were once considered the pinnacle of higher education has now become dangerously detrimental.
~ Liberty Planet
