I subscribed and purchased subscriptions to Subsplash and Bari Weiss in particular for my 2 Gen Y/Millennial sons after hearing her as the guest on the “Good Fellows” program from the Hoover Institute of Stanford. This paper expresses my own frustration about “bystander fear” as exhibited by this incident and others illustrated. Read…
I subscribed and purchased subscriptions to Subsplash and Bari Weiss in particular for my 2 Gen Y/Millennial sons after hearing her as the guest on the “Good Fellows” program from the Hoover Institute of Stanford. This paper expresses my own frustration about “bystander fear” as exhibited by this incident and others illustrated. Reading the paper on the attitude of more educated individuals towards Israel and Jewish folks is equally disturbing but not surprising to me.
I have recently concluded a fascinating life/career as a working person. My experience began in the Air Force near the end of the Vietnam War era. I enlisted because I knew I would be drafted (#32 in the draft lottery) but in truth I planned to enlist after high school to escape an abusive family system and the knowledge that if I wanted to attend college the GI Bill was the most realistic means to that end. So, a kid of average intelligence, a conservative who lived on a steady diet of Wm F Buckley, a Roman Catholic of Polish heritage and descent entered the crazy-ass world of 1971. I did everything I knew of to secure a job as a medic and by a story for another time I made it. Fast forward through life as one of the first Emergency Paramedics in my state, a teaching job at the local community college that I would turn into a 30 year tenure and degrees in Education, Reproductive Physiology and finally a professional doctorate in Pastoral Care and an Ordained Lutheran Pastor.
I watched and lived in higher education with the “least of the least” rather than the “brightest and the best” as is so frequently described in this media. I held high expectations of my students and successfully resisted pressure to dumb down my expectations of students. Teaching at a community college meant having students from ages 14 to 95 in the same New Testament classroom! Being close to the Air Force base that formed me in emergency medicine meant a much more racially and religiously diverse student population than the university where I was also studying to get my college degrees. It is not an exaggeration to say that I loved my work, my students, and often their families for whom I baptized their children, joined them in marriage and buried their parents, because they did not have a church except that crazy professor who wore a clerical collar and joked openly about sex!
After the turn of the century I watched something insidious and terrible happen to my college. By then I decided to use my doctorate in pastoral care to finish off my career as a Counselor. There a new President from California joined our campus. Chairing a selection committee for a new Dean of Student Services, I experienced the Chancellor reject all of our work and gave me 3 files from which to choose in my committee, 3 files of candidates we screened out during the first round, three whose melanin levels were higher than mine because our campus was said to be “too white”. Rather than participate in this charade, I resigned as chair of the committee, the rest of the committee selected the person who would be my boss for the next 3 years….another time I should explain the “3 year cycle” I noticed on application after application.
Why this topic on my first comment? The same thing happening at the elite institutions is happening at the “least” prestigious segment of higher education, one which the Biden administration looks to follow the Obama unfulfilled promise of free community college….in other words, years 13 and 14 of the previous K-12 systems that have failed us so miserably. As if 2 more years of the same woke low standards will change the outcome of performance of success. I pray this is useful to someone here. A blessed Triduum from this retired Lutheran Pastor who loves Jesus first and everyone else because of Him!
I subscribed and purchased subscriptions to Subsplash and Bari Weiss in particular for my 2 Gen Y/Millennial sons after hearing her as the guest on the “Good Fellows” program from the Hoover Institute of Stanford. This paper expresses my own frustration about “bystander fear” as exhibited by this incident and others illustrated. Reading the paper on the attitude of more educated individuals towards Israel and Jewish folks is equally disturbing but not surprising to me.
I have recently concluded a fascinating life/career as a working person. My experience began in the Air Force near the end of the Vietnam War era. I enlisted because I knew I would be drafted (#32 in the draft lottery) but in truth I planned to enlist after high school to escape an abusive family system and the knowledge that if I wanted to attend college the GI Bill was the most realistic means to that end. So, a kid of average intelligence, a conservative who lived on a steady diet of Wm F Buckley, a Roman Catholic of Polish heritage and descent entered the crazy-ass world of 1971. I did everything I knew of to secure a job as a medic and by a story for another time I made it. Fast forward through life as one of the first Emergency Paramedics in my state, a teaching job at the local community college that I would turn into a 30 year tenure and degrees in Education, Reproductive Physiology and finally a professional doctorate in Pastoral Care and an Ordained Lutheran Pastor.
I watched and lived in higher education with the “least of the least” rather than the “brightest and the best” as is so frequently described in this media. I held high expectations of my students and successfully resisted pressure to dumb down my expectations of students. Teaching at a community college meant having students from ages 14 to 95 in the same New Testament classroom! Being close to the Air Force base that formed me in emergency medicine meant a much more racially and religiously diverse student population than the university where I was also studying to get my college degrees. It is not an exaggeration to say that I loved my work, my students, and often their families for whom I baptized their children, joined them in marriage and buried their parents, because they did not have a church except that crazy professor who wore a clerical collar and joked openly about sex!
After the turn of the century I watched something insidious and terrible happen to my college. By then I decided to use my doctorate in pastoral care to finish off my career as a Counselor. There a new President from California joined our campus. Chairing a selection committee for a new Dean of Student Services, I experienced the Chancellor reject all of our work and gave me 3 files from which to choose in my committee, 3 files of candidates we screened out during the first round, three whose melanin levels were higher than mine because our campus was said to be “too white”. Rather than participate in this charade, I resigned as chair of the committee, the rest of the committee selected the person who would be my boss for the next 3 years….another time I should explain the “3 year cycle” I noticed on application after application.
Why this topic on my first comment? The same thing happening at the elite institutions is happening at the “least” prestigious segment of higher education, one which the Biden administration looks to follow the Obama unfulfilled promise of free community college….in other words, years 13 and 14 of the previous K-12 systems that have failed us so miserably. As if 2 more years of the same woke low standards will change the outcome of performance of success. I pray this is useful to someone here. A blessed Triduum from this retired Lutheran Pastor who loves Jesus first and everyone else because of Him!