University under fire for creating a safe space for white students called 'White Awake'

The Left can't leave race alone.  They've been at it ever since Karl Marx

The University of Maryland's Counseling Center received backlash after they started a group called "White Awake" as a "safe space for white students" to discuss race on campus.
The University of Maryland's Counseling Center received backlash after they started a group called "White Awake" as a "safe space for white students" to discuss race on campus.  (UMD)

The University of Maryland (UMD) was forced to take down flyers and change the name of a counseling program that offered “safe space for white students” after sparking outrage on campus.

At the beginning of the fall semester, UMD’s Counseling Center posted flyers for a new group called “White Awake,” which prompted the backlash.

Early Friday, the university’s website changed the name to “Anti-Racism and Ally Building Group” and scrubbed any references to a “safe space” and “white students.”

“This group offers a safe space for white students to explore their experiences, questions, reactions, and feelings,” the initial description read. “Members will support and share feedback with each other as they learn more about themselves and how they fit into a diverse world.”

The flyer also asked if white people ever “feel uncomfortable and confused” in their “interactions with racial and ethnic minorities,” and if they “want to become a better ally.”

Several students conveyed their outrage on social media and on campus.

“The world is a space for white people to talk in,” one student told The Diamondback, a UMD student newspaper, expressing how unnecessary the new initiative is.

I am ashamed over the execution of white awake nor do I fully understand its clause. “How they can fit into a diverse world”? Why do they need to attend therapy sessions on how to be a decent human being in society? Why do they need to have these sessions to learn how to coexist?

Noah Collins, who leads the group and specializes in group therapy for the Counseling Center with an interest in “racial and cultural awareness,” issued a statement Thursday night saying UMD will discontinue the flyer and consider changing the name, but that it stands by the group.

He added the flyer was “not clear enough” in explaining that the group’s aim is “anti-racism and becoming a better ally.”

The university told Fox News in a statement that UMD’s Counseling Center acknowledges it “did not choose the right words in raising awareness about this research-based initiative, and how this group has been perceived is counter to the values of inclusiveness and diversity that we embody.”

“This is an incredibly difficult, nuanced issue, and that’s the reason we need to discuss it,” Collins wrote. “The aim of this group is to help white students become more culturally competent, so they can better participate in creating a more inclusive environment at the University of Maryland.”

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How Colleges Teach Students to See Bias Where It Doesn’t Exist

“You have blood on your hands. You’re a murderer,” shouted one of the protesters at Judge Brett Kavanaugh during the Senate hearings of his nomination to the Supreme Court. This apocalyptic rhetoric had been espoused before — at none other than the Yale Law School, immediately after President Donald Trump announced the school’s graduate as his chosen replacement for Justice Anthony Kennedy. There, a group of alumni and professors circulated an open letter declaring that selecting Kavanaugh “presents an emergency — for democratic life, for our safety and freedom, for the future of our country.” People “will die” if Kavanaugh is confirmed, the letter announced. By the time of the hearings, Kavanaugh had gone from being a future murderer to an actual one.

These protests, intended to shut down the proceedings — and the fantastical social-media charge that one of Kavanaugh’s former clerks displayed a white-power sign during those hearings — showed how academic identity politics is transforming the non-academic world. To be sure, there were differences: the Capitol police actually intervened to restore order and the Judiciary Committee is ideologically balanced. But the long-term prognosis for reason and civility is not good.

The key feature of academic diversity ideology is the assertion that to be a member of an ever-growing number of favored victim groups at a college today is to be the target of pervasive bigotry on campus — despite, well, being favored. Taught by a metastasizing campus-diversity bureaucracy to believe that they are subject to an existential threat from circumambient bias, students equate nonconforming ideas with “hate speech,” and “hate speech” with conduct that should be punished, censored and repelled with force if necessary. This victimology fuels the efforts to shut down speech that challenges campus orthodoxies. Dozens of times in the past several years alone, classrooms have been invaded; professors, accosted and even assaulted; and outside speakers, silenced.

While these tactics have famously been directed at conservatives, that is not exclusively the case, as senior fellow at the Public Policy Center Stanley Kurtz has documented for National Review Online. It has happened year after year, recently.

In October 2017, protesters at Columbia University temporarily occupied a class and accused a professor who is an LGBTQ rights advocate and one of the school’s premier proponents of the idea that campuses are pervaded by rape culture of creating a “dangerous environment for students, including queer students.”

That same month, shouting activists prevented University of Oregon President Michael Schill from delivering his State of the University Speech. Schill’s merely pro forma support for free speech was enabling “fascism and white supremacy,” according to the student protesters.

In November 2016, Kimberly Peirce, director of the groundbreaking 1999 film on transgenderism, Boys Don’t Cry, was shouted down at Reed College with slogans like “f-ck your respectability politics.”

Dozens of Yale students mobbed sociologist Nicholas Christakis for three hours in October 2015 because his psychologist and faculty member wife had circulated an email suggesting that students could select their own Halloween costumes without oversight from Yale’s diversity bureaucrats. “Be quiet!” shrieked a girl at Christakis, who was frozen in his place. “You should not sleep at night! You are disgusting!” Another mobster complained that Christakis’s invocation of free speech creates “a space to allow for violence to happen on this campus.” When he meekly disagreed, the protester shouted back: “It doesn’t matter whether you agree or not … It’s not a debate.”

The list goes on — from Rutgers in New Jersey and American University in Washington, D.C., to U.C. Berkeley in California and Evergreen State College in Washington and beyond. In none of these instances were the silencers disciplined. In several of them, the college presidents thanked the anti-speech advocates for their courageous stands. Yale conferred its prize for “provid[ing] exemplary leadership in race and/or ethnic relations” on two of Christakis’s scourges, including the student who shouted, “It’s not a debate.”

The belief that college campuses today pose an existential threat to females and students of color is just as lunatic as the belief that Judge Brett Kavanaugh is a murderer or that an Establishment lawyer was signaling her white supremacy affiliation on live TV. American universities are among the most tolerant environments in history towards humanity’s traditionally oppressed groups. Far from discriminating against what admissions officers call “underrepresented minorities,” or “URMs,” every selective college today employs large racial admissions preferences to engineer what they call a “diverse” student body — and they twist themselves into knots to hire qualified minority staff members who haven’t already been snapped up by better-endowed schools. Professors want all their students to succeed, particularly females and “underrepresented minorities.”

But the resulting campus culture often coaches students to see bias where none exists. That delusion continues once they leave school. The result is a growing society-wide intolerance for speakers and ideas that fail to conform to an increasingly exacting code of political correctness, on the ground that such non-conforming speech harms favored victim groups.

The right has its shrill manias— whether the unseemly obsession with Hillary Clinton and her emails, the corrosive Trump-fueled calumny that federal law enforcement agencies have been corrupted by political bias, and the dangerous Trump-induced crusade to turn those agencies into instruments of political revenge. But until now, the notion that silencing non-conforming speech is a legitimate response to disagreement has come overwhelmingly from campuses and other progressive institutions — from Google to the New Yorker. Were Trump to seize the same weapons, arrogating to himself the power to define and punish “hate speech,” the danger of such precedents might become clearer to all.

The new censorship is an outgrowth of the twin ideas that race and gender are the most important features of a human being, and that American society is one long assault on various identity groups defined by race and gender. Until these key tenets of academic identity politics are rebutted, we can expect to see more of the hysteria that characterized the Kavanaugh hearings — and less ability to talk across ideological divides.

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What Shakespeare and the Greats can teach a self-centred world

Professor Panayiotis Kanelos, President of St. John’s College Annapolis, will address the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation on the value of a liberal education in the contemporary world.

“Many people think Shakespeare and the great writers, artists, composers and thinkers of Western civilisation are no longer relevant in the modern world.  They are wrong,” says Professor Kanelos.

“Modernity encourages us to fashion ourselves and a liberal education – understanding the great works of Western civilisation - helps us to understand what sort of selves we ought to fashion.  Shakespeare, for example, still has so much to teach us,” Professor Kanelos said.

“The “liberal” arts have always had at their centre the cultivation of freedom.  Yet as conceptions of freedom have shifted over time, so too has the shape of liberal education,” Professor Kanelos said.  

“In our hyper-individualized world, the role of liberal education has shifted from liberating human beings to teaching us how to cultivate our liberty responsibly,” Professor Kanelos continued.  “So, a liberal education helps students build lives of meaning and purpose and helps society by helping individuals find common ground,” Professor Kanelos said. 

Chief Executive of the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation Professor Simon Haines said, “Professor Kanelos has a rich understanding of the value of a liberal arts education and St John’s College, Annapolis, is one the leading liberal arts colleges in the world.” 

Professor Kanelos has a distinguished background as an educator and is also an ardent Shakespeare scholar, who has authored and edited numerous books, articles and essays on Shakespeare.  He has a Ph.D. from the Committee on Social Thought at University of Chicago, an M.A. in Political Philosophy and Literature from the University Professors Program at Boston University, and a B.A. in English from Northwestern University.

St. John’s College, Annapolis, is one of the oldest colleges in the United States, tracing its origins to King William’s School, a preparatory school founded in 1696, and receiving a collegiate charter from the state of Maryland in 1784.  It has run a Great Books curriculum, based on the Western canon, since 1937.

The Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation was created with an endowment from the late Paul Ramsay AO, founder of Ramsay Health Care, to promote a deeper appreciation of Western civilisation through the creation of university degrees, Ramsay Scholarships, summer schools and public lectures.

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