In the latest round of “the outraged mob’s cancel culture,” the assistant counsel for the University of North Texas, Caitlin Sewell, resigned effective immediately after she used the “n-word” during a panel on free speech.
Those crying “foul!” should be happy about that, right? Wrong. Instead of leaving it there, the Student Government Association of UNT, along with the Black Student Union at UNT and a host of other student organizations, released a series of demands upon the university in light of what happened. Their demands can be found here.
Demands 1, 2, and 3 appear designed to punish the entire UNT campus for the actions of one individual who is no longer with the university. I can tell you firsthand that students already endure hours of similar “curriculum” and “programs” during orientation and the first-year seminar. They don’t do anything positive. Instead of preparing us for college life, they lecture us and promote the glories of social justice. We don’t need any more of that.
Demand 4 advocates for restructuring the demographics of the faculty to “match the demographic representation of our student population.” There are only two ways this can be done: either replace staff who don’t have the ‘correct’ skin color as determined by the SGA; or hire more faculty that fit the SGA’s definition of a “marginalized identity.” To do the latter requires the university to raise tuition more than the projected 2 percent for next year to increase the number of faculty and staff, or they will use more of your taxpayer money to fund their virtue signaling. Either way, for the SGA, race is essentially the only metric of importance for the hiring of new staff, not qualifications or experience.
Shouldn’t people be judged on the content of their character and not by their race, as Dr. Martin Luther King once said? Not according to the SGA and their comrades. Instead, this policy will reduce the quality of education for me and my fellow students. We would be taught by potentially less-qualified instructors hired only because they fit a racial quota, instead of people who are possibly better and more-qualified educators. Not to mention that a racial quota system like the one demanded by the SGA is in direct violation of the Supreme Court decision on Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, which barred racial quotas in public institutions.
If you didn’t like the idea of your tax dollars being used for something like Demand 4, then you’re really not going to like Demand 5.
Demand 5 calls for the construction of a new building—“just like the Greek Life Center”—for a new multicultural center. For reference, the Greek Life Center at UNT cost $2.6 million but was funded by donors. There is no guarantee that this will be the case for a new multicultural center. This demand is nothing more than an attempted cash grab, and to pay for it, the university will once again have to either raise tuition, take funds from other projects, or use more of your tax dollars to build a monument for social justice warriors.
If you read through the SGA statement and apply even an ounce of logic, you will see it for what it is. An attempt to extort the university and steal your tax dollars to aid them in their quest to hijack our institutions.
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