Bacon's Rebellion

Democracy Thrives in Sunlight

More PC Drivel from ___&___ University

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by

James A. Bacon
in ,


by James A. Bacon

Triggered by the slave-owning past of George Washington and Robert E. Lee, a group of Washington & Lee University law students are clamoring for the option of being awarded diplomas stripped of the portraits of the university’s namesakes, reports the Washington Post.

I guess you could say that I’m triggered by the fact that they’re triggered. My reaction: Get over it. If some W&L grads are so bent out of shape by the university’s historical association with former slave owners, regardless of their other accomplishments, maybe they should have thought of that before they enrolled.

Here’s my solution: whiteout.

With just a few dabs, your Washington & Lee diploma could look like this:

Of course, that still leaves the names “Washington” and “Lee.” If you find the portraits offensive, it follows that you’ll find the names offensive. But whiteout solves that problem, too. With just a little extra effort, your diploma could look like this:

That’s got a nice post-modernist ring to it — & University.

If that remedy doesn’t appeal to you, try this: Stop whining, you damn crybabies.

When you graduate from law school, you will find the legal world to be far more cold and indifferent to your exquisite sensibilities than college administrators are. You’ll find that your lawyer peers and judges don’t get triggered as easily as you, and you’ll find that they push back a lot harder. The working world of business and politics is not a nursery school where teachers give you hugs and kiss your boo-boos.

Admittedly, the legal profession may change as snowflake sensibilities seep out of academia into the culture at large. But in that case, you will find your sensibilities bumping up against the sensibilities of others just as easily triggered as you. That will be quite a world won’t it? He (or she) whose feelings are most easily bruised wins.

You also run the risk of backlash. A lot of us are getting sick and tired of your crybullying. One of two things is likely to happen, I’m not sure which. One possibility is that those on the right-of-center side of the culture wars will adopt the same tactics, working themselves into fits of indignation and outrage at every perceived and/or manufactured slight. You support the murder of unborn children? You eugenist! You racist! You Nazi! I demand — demand — that every supporter of abortion be hounded out of their position in academia, politics, and even C-level positions in the business world!!!

The other risk is that those on the right-of-center side will come to understand that your snowflake sensibilities are really an exercise of power, that sensibilities continually evolve to become ever more exquisite and ever more refined, and, as a result, there is never any appeasing the Left. Your sensibilities matter, mine don’t. Your values prevail, mine are trashed. You win, I lose.

At some point, we stop caring one whit about your sensibilities. And you’ll lose whatever power of moral persuasion you once had.

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Comments

28 responses to “More PC Drivel from ___&___ University”

  1. Reed Fawell 3rd Avatar
    Reed Fawell 3rd

    Look at me! Look at me? I’m a moron law graduate from Washington and Lee University. Look at me? Look at me?

  2. TooManyTaxes Avatar
    TooManyTaxes

    So why did they enroll at W&L University in the first place? There are plenty of other good law schools around the country. What will they do the first time a judge or client tells them they don’t like their argument or work product?

  3. Steve Haner Avatar
    Steve Haner

    A plan from the start, I’m sure, patiently executed. I remain deeply offended by my W&M diploma written in the dead language of those evil slavery practicing Roman imperialists.

  4. musingsfromjanus Avatar
    musingsfromjanus

    The fault is with the faculty and administration which don’t just tolerate this nonsense but promote it themselves.
    We expect students to be stupid. That’s why we send them to college. But not to get stupider.

  5. Peter Galuszka Avatar
    Peter Galuszka

    I just spent Thanksgiving in Hanover County at my daughter’s house. They still have a Lee Davis High School and the NAACP is suing to have it renamed. Good for them! It’s about time. As for W&L, I guess if it’s a private school it’s their call. Not surprising.

  6. LarrytheG Avatar
    LarrytheG

    As the younger generation and culture advances, they make changes according to their values and traditions and the older culture traditions fade away and the current trend is to push back against what they perceive to be a racist culture that was purposely permanently embedded in Govt and Private institutions – like statues, memorials, school names, road names, etc.

    And some of them believe that all vesitges have to be removed especially if we want black and other people of color to believe that society is more equal and no longer racist.

    This is just one area of change. Other areas involve sexual orientation and sexual identity, the rights of women and the treatment of immigrants.

    If you find yourself in the minority – and many are as we get older -just remember your own generation and how it challenged the preceding one when you were young.

    I too am a little taken aback by the scope and extent of some of the advocated changes but I have no doubt, what-so-ever that many symbols of racism/jim crow, etc, statues, memorials, school and road names, etc are on that proverbial generational choppin block!

    1. TooManyTaxes Avatar
      TooManyTaxes

      Larry, how does society know that some of the people pushing back did not have African ancestors who captured enemies in Africa and sold them to white people, who, in turn, brought them to the New World as slaves? The idea that whites anchored ships off west African, walked ashore and simply grabbed black Africans without any resistance is absurd.

      How do we know that some of the people pushing back did not have Native American or black ancestors who owned slaves in the United States? How a about the multiracial people among us who had white slaveowner relatives? If some Americans are guilty by ancestry, shouldn’t all Americans be guilty by ancestry?

      If truth is motivating the young people, shouldn’t be the real truth and not the s&*t the MSM and academia use for truth.

      1. LarrytheG Avatar
        LarrytheG

        TMT – I don’t think they think in terms of what happened as opposed to it being wrong and that modern day memorials to those practices are wrong. It’s readily apparent that racism as an instituition was a reality as were the jim crow actions that included memorializing white supremacy. Thats what they pushing back on – institutional racism – regardless of who did it.

        1. TooManyTaxes Avatar
          TooManyTaxes

          Well shouldn’t the snowflakes think in terms of what actually happened instead of what they think happened? Can’t we strive as a society to go beyond the level of knowledge and understanding that is deeper that what is possessed and spouted by academia and the MSM? Shouldn’t we all work to move beyond generalizations and superficial understanding? Will these babies ever grow up?

          Acbar, why did the little darlings go to Washington & Lee in the first place? I can see refusing to attend a school that one believes has a racist past. But if you attend a school with a past you don’t like, live with it. You made a choice. I can see working against racism. I can see looking at the entire set of facts, be it about a historical event or person of history. Good and bad; halos and devils horns. Heck, Barack Obama’s mother was descended (Barack too) from Mareen the Emigrant Duvall and descendants who owned slaves. Should all the schools name after him be shut down because his DNA is not “perfect”?

          Let’s get a list of the affected graduates and make sure we don’t hire them. Clearly, they lack the emotional development to function in the real world.

  7. Acbar Avatar
    Acbar

    I am struck by three things here:
    1. The request to have diplomas issued without the pictures of these benefactors who were also slave-owners was endorsed, according to what I’ve read, by over half the student body.
    2. There is no limit to the logic here. Slavery was a colony-wide phenomenon until around the time of the Revolution, later exclusively a Southern phenomenon. Both Indians and blacks were enslaved. Purging every historical figure who engaged in or tolerated the practice would leave us bereft of our national identity. Purging especially those who also did the most to help shape our Nation seems less like purification than nihilism — the antithesis of getting a liberal arts education.
    3. Joining these two thoughts: we are creating an “educated” generation that rejects what history and political science have to teach us about democracy — how hard fought-for it was, how fragile it is to keep.
    Happy 399th Thanksgiving, everyone!

  8. Izzo Avatar
    Izzo

    The Commonwealth of Virginia had laws that permitted slavery. “Virginia” should be struck from the name of all state institutions. James Madison and George Mason will have to go as well. I’ll have to research Mary Washington. We may have to refer to all higher education institutions in Virginia by their locations only. (Unless of course those locations have any association with slavery, in which case they will need to be renamed as well.)

  9. LarrytheG Avatar
    LarrytheG

    I do not justify all of it – but I do try to understand it – and my perception is that this is about the institutionalization of slavery – in Govt, and in society and private institutions.

    If we go one step further here – and the idea is that “everyone” was a slave owner and/or “everyone” engaged in racism so getting rid of references to them is essentially getting rid of history.

    It’s not that. These folks are not saying we should wipe up all historical references to folks like Lee. What they are saying is that they should not be held up as great leaders – memorialized and pointed to as the soul of the US. They were leaders, they engaged in racism – as well as contributing to the country. But they are not deserving of special recognition as individuals whose principals we should emulate.

    Just to be open here – there actually WERE leaders we WOULD hold as nobel and rightgeous in historical context but the point here is to move on – and to NOT hold them up as unflawed leaders we should hold in high historical context.

    It was the folks who said slavery was wrong back then and worked against it as an institution that we might hold up today as worthy of remembering.

    Again – I don’t necessarily agree with all of it but I try to understand where it is coming from and to be honest -today, right now, we also have a bunch of folks still advocating for white supremacy as well as the symbols that white supremacy created in our institutions that they intended to be permanent and embedded in our culture, our road/schools names, our parks, etc that might be driving some of this “cleansing”.

  10. LarrytheG Avatar
    LarrytheG

    I do not think we are trying to “erase” history. There is no movement to remove books or change historical narratives.

    But there are efforts to NOT hold such figures in high esteem, to NOT have them idolized as great leaders.

    People can disagree and obviously do…but the thing here… do we just condemn it out of hand and reject it and separate ourselves totally from those that have that view?
    The younger generation does NOT hold in high esteem the folks the older generation does. They see them as leaders of that time who did not stand up against racism nor condemn it – while there were others who did – eventually did make progess against it in spite of many of the leaders of that ers.

    Those leaders are not condemned… but they are also not esteemed as leaders because they did not act to change it.

    That’s a harsh assessment, perhaps not warranted but it is, in fact, where some of them are. Don’t make the mistake that all of them are – it’s still an issue where there is not 100% agreement.

  11. John Harvie Avatar
    John Harvie

    I like Jim’s idea the best except do the “whiteout” for them at the time of printing the diplomas to save their having to go to Staples.

    They ARE getting stupider and the scary thing is they will “walk among us” and enact our future laws and ordinances when they get elected to some legislative body.

    Izzo’s (I assume tongue in cheek post) may not miss the mark by much.

  12. Acbar Avatar
    Acbar

    I agree with you, Larry, that we are seeing an anti-institutional bias here. The institutions of the day supported slavery, therefore those who believed in and supported those institutions also must be tainted even if they did not support, perhaps even vigorously opposed aspects of, slavery. This is worse than “guilt by association” — it’s condemnation of the entire framework of institutions that surround us — government included — for reflecting the majority’s misguided views.

    But you add, “It was the folks who said slavery was wrong back then and worked against it as an institution that we might hold up today as worthy of remembering.” Well, yes. Such people were rarely the leaders in the South before the Civil War, however, as that was simply not the majority view. People elected to leadership should be judged by how much they moved the status quo in the direction of the goals we value in education, in health, in political freedom, in legal and social equality; but not every elected official can tackle every failing of society simultaneously. Some such leaders took us backwards; they deserve our scorn. But some simply chose battles according to opportunity and, even if they were successful on those fronts they neglected others. Would it have been better to speak out against every wrong and lose the ability to lead?

    Occasionally there is a leader who takes on what is popular for what is morally right and has the means or the opportunity to win. The rest of Politics is, or ought to be, about compromise.

  13. Reed Fawell 3rd Avatar
    Reed Fawell 3rd

    Had the slaves in British North America been freed in 17th and 18th century, what would have happened to them?

    What happened to the slaves who never arrived in North American British Colonies?

    What happened to the slaves who never left Africa?

    1. Reed Fawell 3rd Avatar
      Reed Fawell 3rd

      To answer the three questions I earlier posited above, all via the National Association of Scholars.

      “Was it Good Fortune to be Enslaved by the British Empire?

      By Bruce Gilley

      1619 was a year of terrible cruelty in the world. In Europe, the French king imprisoned his mother in a rural chateau and had her tortured in conditions described as no better than in the Bastille. The horrific Thirty Years’ War began in Central Europe: before it ended, it would take eight million lives and reduce the population of parts of Germany and France by over half. The bubonic plague was sweeping India and millions were dying from famine in Ming China, both places ruled by decadent god-kings that saw mass deaths as a natural part of the cosmic order. In the Americas, the governor of Bermuda was replaced after having a man hanged for stealing a piece of cheese.

      My own Scottish forebears were being rounded up by the Scottish king for duties in New Scotland (Nova Scotia). The king preferred to settle this new colony with ne’er-do-wells, criminals, and “Brownists”—Protestant followers of Robert Browne, the same radicals who would people the Mayflower in 1620. Most died in the 1620s from freezing, starvation, or scurvy. The expedition leader described the latter condition in a 1629 letter as “a nasty and lazy disease with swelling of feet, legs, and thighs, with shoots the colour of the rainbow, with sores falling off the hair, a canine appetite, even til death much discontent.” Further down the North American coast, “20. and odd Negroes” were put ashore at Jamestown, slaves stolen from a Portuguese ship which had loaded them at Angola in southwest Africa.

      For all such groups – Bohemian rebels, Bastille prisoners, Chinese and Indian serfs, Caribbean settlers, Scottish malcontents, and African slaves – life was nasty, brutish, and short around the year 1619. The Reformation was only a century old and had yet to achieve its moral revolution in the world. The Industrial Revolution, through which capitalism generated unprecedented human welfare, was over a century away. None of us would choose to have belonged to any of these groups: canapés and an honest Grenache at Versailles for me, please. But if one were forced to make a choice, a plausible argument could be made for the good fortune of the “20. and odd Negroes”, not just compared to the other unfortunates but also compared to the millions of slaves of African and Arab owners that they left behind.

      The Jamestown 20-odd were likely part of the plunder from a war a year earlier between the dominant Ndongo kingdom in Angola and a Portuguese-led alliance of African rivals, dissidents, and mercenaries. While slaves were always part of war plunder in Africa, most slaves in Africa were a result of market transactions not war. The Jesuit chronicler Pero Rodrigues wrote in 1594 that the number of “slaves taken in war are nothing compared to those bought at feiras [markets], at these feiras the kings and lords and all Ethiopia [i.e. east Africa] sell slaves.” Those who ended up in Jamestown were headed for the Caribbean and would otherwise have ended up in east Africa or the Middle East.

      The Spanish and Portuguese believed they were doing African slaves a favor by rescuing them from cruel local tyrannies, and that they would fare better as slaves under Christian masters, their souls saved. Hence the hasty baptism of slaves about to be shipped from Angola, including probably those who ended up in Jamestown in 1619. The glimmer of a push for equality and emancipation from the ethical resources of Western civilization was already present on those beaches.

      None of this made their enslavement “right.” But then little of what happened to the wretched of the earth in that era was right by contemporary standards. There is a historical bait and switch when contemporary critics charge European colonialists with all sorts of modern crimes: stealing land, owning slaves, shooting lions. These charges appeal to norms and expectations that emerged later from Western civilization itself, and only from Western civilization. Stealing land, owning slaves, and slaying wildlife were, after all, the national sports of pre-European contact African, Arab, and native American cultures.

      In the event, the life chances of those enslaved under the British empire improved markedly compared to what they would have been in Africa even as freemen, and certainly compared to other slave colonies in the Americas. Within a flourishing capitalist system, the value put on slaves meant that slave owners had every interest in keeping them healthy. That is why black slaves in the United States were healthier than British marines or French or Italian peasants. It is also why U.S. slave population expanded more rapidly than elsewhere through natural increase.

      The Jamestown 20-odd were dropped into a particularly idealistic part of the West, where Protestant notions of emancipation and the equality of all men would develop faster than elsewhere. As time passed, the moral revolution against slavery that began in Britain would sweep the United States. From 1619 until the British abolition of the slave trade in 1807, the moral revolution was building. Slave traders were increasingly held accountable for the humane treatment of their slaves and their legal rights. Where else would there have been such a protracted legal process as at Newport, Rhode Island in 1791 for a captain accused of throwing a slave woman overboard because her smallpox threatened to kill everyone on his ship? The case went on for five years before a lengthy opinion acquitted him on the grounds of emergency measures. All this for a single slave woman. Nowhere else in the world was human life treated as so precious.

      The moral awakening against slavery took place in Europe, not in Africa, and certainly not in the Islamic world. Throughout Africa, the British used antislavery treaties as the basis of their influence. A full 10 percent of British naval resources were assigned to anti-slaving duties in the Atlantic and Indian oceans in the 1840s. Brazil and then the U.S. joined in the abolition of slavery, and then in the latter half of the 19th century the abolition spread to Africa. When the British expanded their influence to northern Nigeria, it was experienced as a liberation from native tyranny. “The Europeans don’t like oppression but they found a lot of tyranny and oppression here, people being beaten and killed and sold into slavery,” recalled a woman of the Habe ethnic group of the British advent in 1900. She had grown up in the slave-based Sokoto Caliphate, a creation of the Fulani ethnic group which had defeated and subjugated rival tribes in a series of wars between 1804 and 1808. “We Habe wanted them to come, it was the Fulani who did not like it,” she recalled (her story was published in 1954 as Baba of Karo). “In the old days if the chief liked the look of your daughter he would take her and put her in his house; you could do nothing about it. Now they don’t do that.”

      The greater the moral awakening in the West, the more it came in for criticism. In 1892, the British had persuaded the king of Benin to sign a pledge to eliminate human sacrifice and slave trading. He did not comply and in 1897, when British troops conquered the world’s worst tyrant, the King of Benin, they witnessed an African scene that was one of the accounts used by Conrad for his Heart of Darkness: “Huge pits, forty to fifty feet deep, were found filled with human bodies…everywhere sacrificial trees on which were the corpses of the latest human victims, everywhere, on each path, were newly sacrificed corpses,” a British officer recalled. “On the principal sacrificial tree, facing the main gate of the kings compound, there were two crucified bodies, at the foot of the tree seventeen newly decapitated bodies, and forty-three more in various stages of decomposition.”

      The officer’s account, The Benin Massacre, and another first-hand account, Benin: The City of Blood, were published to wide attention in Britain shortly before Conrad began work on Heart of Darkness in late 1898. But Conrad knew that no one would read a novel about the King of Benin. Scolding passions were reserved for the West. Instead, he made a white trader the center of horrors, successfully stirring the outrage of generations of English professors. The same literary strategy has been used by progressives ever since, especially by the American journalist Adam Hochschild in his bestselling 1998 book King Leopold’s Ghost about the Belgian king’s private estates in pre-colonial Congo. The king’s estate was not a Belgian colony; indeed, that was the problem. And the abuses paled in comparison to those of the nearby African slave lord Tippu Tip. If anything, Leopold’s presence, and then Belgian colonization in 1908, was far better than the likely alternatives. Yet at last count there were only three books on Tippu Tip, but somewhere between 30 and 50 on King Leopold II’s Congo Free State, none of them flattering.

      Some critics discount the British and American efforts to abolish slavery on the grounds of their earlier involvement, arguing, in essence, that it should be compared to burning a fellow’s house down and then volunteering to rebuild it. That is a false analogy because it assumes an intentional and acknowledged wrong is committed in the first place. Slavery was not of that sort – the moral revolution came after, not before. A better analogy would be a slum lord who, having witnessed and indeed caused many people to lose their homes on wholly legal grounds, becomes a major advocate and funder of affordable housing programs and legal reforms to make evictions more difficult and raise standards for low-income housing. The growth of a new moral outlook brings about the change. Is this not to be praised?

      Today, being black in America is one of the best outcomes for a black person globally. If not, more black Americans would own passports and would, over time, have migrated to other places, such as Guyana, Liberia, Haiti, or Sierra Leone. To be black in America is, historically speaking, to have hit the jackpot. For those who came ashore at Jamestown and in the centuries that followed, being enslaved under the British empire was about as good as it got. If your fate was to be African, then being enslaved under the British empire gave you and your descendants a better shot at a decent life than they would have had even without being enslaved.

      There is a third unutterable: to be enslaved within the British empire was to be an agent of moral change because of the inconsistency of slavery with liberal values. Black abolitionists and slaves knew this, which is why they participated so manfully in the American Revolution and the Civil War. With the British empire on the side of anti-slavery, more good was done for the global elimination of the slave trade than would ever have happened had the British themselves not become involved in the trade. In historical perspective, the only thing worse for black lives in general than British and American slavery would have been its absence.

      One wonders then why the projects surrounding 1619 – an invitation to history – have become such a boorish rejection of history. Instead of insight and empowerment, 1619 has become an exercise in Soviet-style historiography. In this version, rather than all history leading to the workers’ paradise, all history leads to eternal and indelible black victimization. It is fake history, propaganda, and utter nonsense. I suspect those involved in it – like Soviet historiographers – know it.

      A significant portion of black America rejects this fake history. Housing secretary Ben Carson’s 20-minute talk on the dust-up over Baltimore in July is a passionate a statement of black freedom and responsibility as there has been. But for too many, a catwalk of supermodels parading the latest fashion in eternal black victimization – from Malcolm X to Ta-Nehisi Coates – continues to set the style.

      The social and psychological crisis of black America is inextricably linked to the absence of historical memory, quite a feat for a group whose radical luminaries espouse attention to history. Distortionary tales of white guilt and black virtue have become a recreational drug for white liberals as well, suggesting that as time goes by historical understanding becomes ever more degraded. The fate of too many of those who followed the Jamestown 20-odd was to be caught in a web of self-pity, apples tied to the branch rather than being allowed to fall freely as Frederick Douglass warned. Perhaps I would have preferred scurvy in Nova Scotia after all.” End Quote

      For more see:
      https://www.nas.org/blogs/dicta/was-it-good-fortune-of-being-enslaved-by-the-british-empire

  14. LarrytheG Avatar
    LarrytheG

    re: who stood up against slavery and who did not and whether we should hold them in high esteem today.

    Obviously, the older generation thinks the folks they have traditionally held in high esteem but did not actively oppose slavery are not to be condemned because many others in that era also did not opposed. The younger generation just thinks those that went along with it are not deserving of being held in historical context as “esteemed” leaders.

    At some point – enough people stood up against slavery to cause it to change and those people are considered to NOT have gone along with the others in that era.

    It’s not about slavery in other countries – it’s about slavery in this country that was explicitly formed on the principles of “all men are created equal” – other countries did not necessarily make that claim.

    Again – I’m not aligning myself with a particular viewpoint – but I DO THINK it is my responsibility to recognize the other viewpoints and to accept that if enough of the younger generation feel that way – that we will see changes.

    They key issue is who though slavery was wrong and who actively worked against it – and who did not – and their place in memorialized history as leaders. The younger generation is not going to accept that they just went along with others of that era. They want those who stood up even if it went against the traditions of that time.

  15. LarrytheG Avatar
    LarrytheG

    re: ” The institutions of the day supported slavery, therefore those who believed in and supported those institutions also must be tainted even if they did not support, perhaps even vigorously opposed aspects of, slavery. ”

    Well, slavery DID change and DID get repealed by forces opposed to it. The folks who opposed it and defeated it are NOT “guilty by association” at all – however, they were not identified and highlighted as leaders for that accomplishment – 50, 100 years later the folks who supported racism or did not stand with those opposed are the ones whose memorials, names on schools, roads and diplomas have survived over the years and still exist today while very few who fought against slavery are equivalently recognized and revered as leaders of that time.

    What schools, roads, monuments, memorials are around us for us to know and recognize for their roles – compared to all the monuments/memorials that are still around that commemerate those who owned slaves, did not publicly oppose it, etc?

    So right now, today, we have many remaining physical reminders of leaders who did not oppose racism and slavery while those who did – and prvailed against it are virtually anonymous in terms of monuments, memorials, school and road names, etc.

    And yet we vigorously oppose the removal of those things because we say it is “history”. If that’s true – then where is the history of those who opposed racism and slavery?

    And it’s actually even MORE than slavery. Consider the current controversy in Charlottesville over the memorialization of historic figures like Lewis and Clark that show Sacajawea as a servile servent rather than an important historic figure in her own right:

    Charlottesville votes to remove another statue, and more controversy follows

    When the Charlottesville City Council voted this month to remove a prominent statue depicting Meriwether Lewis, William Clark and Sacagawea from the city’s downtown core, it marked the third time in three years the city acted to banish a long-standing statue it determined to be divisive, a vestige of racism or culturally insensitive.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/charlottesville-votes-to-remove-another-statue-and-more-controversy-follows/2019/11/29/fe6a53fe-0fda-11ea-bf62-eadd5d11f559_story.html

    The question at hand is the “history” that we now have – an accurate and fair history ? The older generation tends to think so, many in the younger generations openly question it, disagree with it when it seems to denigrate non-white historical figures.

  16. musingsfromjanus Avatar
    musingsfromjanus

    I do not believe the groups funding and driving anti-statue activists are pursuing true history. If so, they could ask for more or different descriptive material on the statues. Or they could be pursuing additional statues.

    The rather shallow apologists who are flags in the breeze for liberal orthodoxy notwithstanding, these people are about imposing an ideology.

    This movement is straight out of Leninism. Purge all references. memories, writings, pictures etc of the society you are intending to crush and eradicate. This is about removing all semblance of the Judaeo-Christian people and their values who founded this country. Statues are only one front of their war.

  17. spencer Avatar
    spencer

    I suspect the design of the diploma has changed many times over the years. I also suspect that in some versions neither man’s likeness was on it.

    The current diploma looks dated and not at all cosmopolitan. If the students, the people that actually pay for the school to exist, want it changed, change it. It’s silly to be offended by the two men. Just put your diploma in a drawer and never look at it again (like an adult). It’s even more silly though for an outsider to be offended by the design choices made by an institution for which branding is absolutely everything. When 1/2 of the student body thinks your brand is off message, you give changing it serious consideration.

    Packaging changes constantly. It’s going to be OK.

  18. TooManyTaxes Avatar
    TooManyTaxes

    The question remains: Why did these adults (they are law students with at least a bachelors degree) go to Washington & Lee University knowing that both George Washington and Robert E. Lee owned black slaves during their lives? W&L is an expensive school. It’s not like it was their only choice. It’s not like they are impressionable teenagers.

    If this is the action of half the graduating student body, I would not even consider interviewing anyone from the graduating class. They clearly lack the maturity to practice law.

    If people are offended by the School and its history, simply stop applying for admission. That sends a much stronger and adult message.

    Perhaps the only thing to save the snowflake generation is for them to go through some terribly hard times. It’s not an easy thing to wish but something needs to turn them into functioning adults.

  19. Reed Fawell 3rd Avatar
    Reed Fawell 3rd

    Drivel typical gets us more drivel.

    But erasing history, including the history of men, is always genocide, done by ignorant idiots or evil within men.

  20. spencer Avatar
    spencer

    … or better yet why don’t they just leave the country. That’s always the default argument of the right. If you don’t like something, ignore it like the Silent Majority that let children get spat on by other adults. We owe a debt of gratitude to those who stick around and change systems.

    W&L is a very highly ranked college. That’s why men and women want to go there. Their framed degrees look a little trashy to people outside of Virginia (Lee’s the problem, not Washington) and in 2019 feel a bit beneath the school.

    Again, packaging always changes. It will all be OK.

    1. Reed Fawell 3rd Avatar
      Reed Fawell 3rd

      Packaging changes nothing. It is the disguise of liars and smear merchants, a hiding place for those unable to confront the truth of history and so enhance our future with our understanding of the past, and the roll of humans and their natures in it.

      1. spencer Avatar
        spencer

        The look of the diploma is not history though. Design choices have determined the look of it through the history of the school and will continue to shape it in the future (when they won’t even be printed). The name Lee was added to the school long after it’s founding. In the interest of history, should they change it back to Washington College? Was adding “Lee” a disguise of liars and the work of smear merchants?

        The people paying for the diploma think it’s dated. If they want to change it, what business is it to us? I miss the old Kanye. I liked Dominos pizza better before the recipe change about 8 years ago. My Ohio State diploma looks dated compared to those now (30 years later). Change is hard to take but it isn’t a sign of the universe crapping on your values. It’s just change.

  21. Acbar Avatar
    Acbar

    Yours, Spencer, is a kind of ‘whiteout’ solution – and the most sensible one I’ve seen. If that would be the end of it. But next year, won’t there be demands to change the names themselves? And adopt what name(s) in their place — more old fossils who actually built the school, or more 21st century SJW heroes who represent what graduates today aspire to? Such a tough choice!

  22. Acbar Avatar
    Acbar

    Yours is a kind of ‘whiteout’ solution – and the most sensible one I’ve seen. If that were the end of it. But next year, won’t there be demands to change the names themselves? And adopt what name(s) in their place — more old fossils who actually built the school, or 21st century SJW heroes who present grads aspire to be?

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