This October 27 article in the Washington Post, “Professors like me can’t stay silent about this extremist movement on campuses,” is doubly surprising. First, it’s in the Washington Post, and mainstream media tend to shy away from reporting about the craziness of identity politics and student entitlement on American campuses. The second surprise is that it’s written by Lucia Martinez Valdivia, who is an assistant Professor of English and Humanities at Reed College in Oregon—the very college whose students she criticizes in her piece. I fear she’ll go the way of Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying.

Reed College is like a high-class Evergreen State: it’s free-form (no grades are given), located in the Pacific Northwest, and full of radicals. The difference is in the academic rigor: while Evergreen State has an acceptance rate of 97%, so that it takes nearly anyone who applies and is breathing, Reed (a private school) accepts only 39% of applicants. Further, unlike Evergreen State, Reed has a long history of producing accomplished students. As Wikipedia notes,

Reed is known for its academic rigor, mandatory freshman humanities program, senior thesis, and unusually high proportion of graduates who go on to earn doctorates and other postgraduate degrees. The college has many prominent alumni, including over a hundred Fulbright Scholars, 67 Watson Fellows, 3 Winston Churchill Scholars, and 32 Rhodes Scholars—the second-highest number of any liberal arts college. Reed is ranked number four in the U.S. of all colleges for the percentage of its graduates who go on to earn a PhD.

But never mind about that, for Reed is located in the epicenter of Student Entitlement (and of Antifa): Portland, Oregon. And Dr. Valvida has written a plaintive piece for the Post about what she faced at Reed when she tried to teach a required freshman (first-year) humanities course centered on the Mediterranean. The entitled students tried to shut the class down on the grounds that it “centered whiteness” and “perpetuated white supremacy” (never mind that Valvida describes herself as an “untenured, gay, mixed-race woman with PTSD”).  Have a gander:

At Reed College in Oregon, where I work, a group of students began protesting the required first-year humanities course a year ago. Three times a week, students sat in the lecture space holding signs — many too obscene to be printed here — condemning the course and its faculty as white supremacists, as anti-black, as not open to dialogue and criticism, on the grounds that we continue to teach, among many other things, Aristotle and Plato.

In the interest of supporting dissent and the free exchange of ideas, the faculty and administration allowed this. Those who felt able to do so lectured surrounded by those signs for the better part of a year. I lectured, but dealt with physical anxiety — lack of sleep, nausea, loss of appetite, inability to focus — in the weeks leading up to my lecture. Instead of walking around or standing at the lectern, as I typically do, I sat as I tried to teach students how to read the poetry of Sappho. Inadvertently, I spoke more quietly, more timidly.

Then came the first lecture of 2017, which the students shut down (see a longer description at Inside Higher Education (IHE):

. . . . We introduced ourselves and took our seats. But as we were about to begin, the protesters seized our microphones, stood in front of us and shut down the lecture.

The Humanities professors present then just walked out. Here’s a short video of the disruption. As the group of humanities professors sit down, the whiners come forward. The faculty then walks out, and good for them!

Remember that the course, Humanities 110, concentrates on the Ancient Mediterranean, which according to Authoritarian Leftists was both mixed race and multicutural (I’m not going to enter that debate). Nevertheless, it was stopped because, after all, the Epic of Gilgamesh led directly to Hitler. (What Professor Valvida was going to say is posted here.) The next lecture, on that Epic of Gilgamesh—from Mesopotamia—was also shut down.

Valvida’s post goes on to call for students to listen and “say yes to the text”, by which she means “read in good faith and try to understand the texts’ distance their strangeness, from our historical moment.” She calls for empathy and for students trying to “understand positions that aren’t ours and the points of view of people who aren’t us.”

Sadly, that’s going to fall on deaf ears at Reed. While the faculty may be on Valvida’s side, the students will demonize her from now on. In other words, she’s toast. And the students, of course, will be deprived of the chance to learn anything that they don’t see as ideologically compatible. Of course the students deserve to be (and will be) exposed to a huge variety of viewpoints at Reed, in courses and elsewhere. But no group of students has the right to determine what they are taught. Their feedback is welcome, but not their disruption. Can you imagine what would ensue if the students, as they seem to want, designed the curriculum?

Videos like the above are only going to make parents less likely to send their children to Reed, and that’s a damn shame because it’s a good school.  But if the College doesn’t stop this, they’ll eventually get what they deserve.

I wonder how many students in the audience were like, “WTF? I came here to learn something!” Judging by the applause at the end, not as many as I’d hoped.