Seeming to give credence to Bertrand Russell’s observation that “The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts,” yet another campus engulfed in race hysteria has set its sights on administrators and faculty who purportedly have not exhibited sufficient contrition for their racism according to the current moral arbitrators of race awareness.
In this case, black students and a particularly race-agitated faculty member at the University of Rhode Island (URI) created something they named The Diversity Think Tank, whose audacious role, it seems, is to “reject a worldview of white supremacy that has reigned unchallenged for 128 years at the University of Rhode Island and with ONE voice speak this Declaration of Diversity to embrace racial equity and to renounce the evils of racism and renounce the evils of white supremacy deeply embedded in our systemically racist university.”
As has happened on many campuses since the death last May of George Floyd under the knee of a white policeman, minority students and faculty at URI used the event to mobilize aggressive and bold anti-racist initiatives on their respective campuses, sensing that the time was ripe for publishing demands and extracting concessions from cowering administrators threatened by the prospect of being labeled racist themselves and insufficiently aware of the systemic, rampant racism that purportedly is engulfing campuses everywhere and causing great harm and “violence” to minority students.
Even though a university campus is the least likely place where students or faculty confront actual racism, from the moment they step foot on campus, minority students are tutored on how, even at some of the most elite educational institutions in the world, they are oppressed, intimidated by bigotry, hindered by systemic and structural racism, and even subject to unconscious, invisible, and latent racism. As if to confirm that universities remain petri dishes of racism, virtually every university, including URI, has set up ever-expanding j bureaucracies of inclusion, diversity, and equity dedicated solely to ferreting out any incidence of racism, bigotry, or bias and helping minority students to see themselves as perpetual victims of both real and imagined racism.
But, apparently, URI’s own efforts to confront and eliminate racism has been insufficient according to ardent members of The Diversity Think Tank. In November, the think tank published a 21-page “Declaration of Diversity,” signed by six student “trustees” and the very vocal and critical Professor Louis Fosuin his role as the think tank’s Executive Director, in which they claimed, “that there is a deliberate and racist dehumanizing exclusion of highly qualified African-Americans/Blacks, Latinos/Hispanics and Native Americans from positions of senior leadership and other positions throughout the university, including: Administrative Staff, Deans, Department Chairs, Faculty, Functional Staff and Students.” Moreover, despite URI’s diligence in promoting diversity and inclusion, the results have been insufficient, since the “all-White leadership at the University of Rhode Island has not hired a single person descended from enslaved Africans, nor any other African-American or Indigenous person into a senior leadership position (President, Vice President, Provost, Vice Provost) since our university was founded in 1892 . . . .”
Far from being racist enclaves of white supremacy, places where minority candidates for students, faculty, and administrators are regularly excluded from the institution’s community, URI, like every major university, actively and aggressively seeks to recruit minorities to fill student and faculty slots, a campaign made evident by the enormous resources allocated for creating diversity offices which facilitate admissions for black students with loosened admission standards, coddle them once admitted, and try to create a campus climate in which black students are recognized, supported, and advanced in ways not shared by their white and Asian peers. Nevertheless, the race-obsessed Diversity Think Tank had not seen enough black faces on campus, and certainly not in the upper echelons of the university’s administration. The cause of this absence of black faces, according to these students? Not the paucity of qualified candidates, of course, but systemic and endemic racism in which white administrators have deliberately sought to exclude people of color from positions of authority.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident,” the declaration reads, pompously echoing the Declaration of Independence, “that no university could possibly maintain an all-White senior leadership for 128 years without implicitly and deliberately colluding and conspiring to exclude African-Americans, Latinos and Native Americans from senior leadership positions. Furthermore, we are witness to a near complete absence of Americans descended from enslaved Africans in any significant positions with...
