Monday, January 04, 2010

Yale University administrators are sissies

Yale University administrators, some of whom are men and some women (although it is sometimes unclear which are which), have proclaimed that a freshman class-sponsored t-shirt using the word "sissies" is unacceptable. The word was part of a quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald that was to be included on a t-shirt in anticipation of the 2009 Harvard-Yale football game that read as follows:
"I think of all Harvard men as sissies"
Adam Kissel Director of the Individual Rights Defense Program wrote Yale President "Richard" Levin:
It is not a happy day when a Yale College dean with degrees from Yale and Princeton, an historian of art, declares that T-shirts quoting Fitzgerald are "not acceptable." "What purports to be humor by targeting a group through slurs is not acceptable," Dean Mary Miller wrote to the Yale Daily News, explaining her decision to "pull" the Freshman Class Council's democratically chosen design targeting Harvard students as "sissies."
Similar controversies have erupted over coaches who, trying to spur their players on to greater feats of athletic prowess on the court or on the gridiron, have employed terms such as 'wuss', 'wimp', and 'pansy'. John L. Smith, when he was the University of Louisville football coach, as I recall, was forced to publicly apologize for saying his players had "played like pansies" in a game in which they, well, played like pansies.

Not only is this one more sign of the increasingly intolerant Tolerance Police who engage in frequent and blatant censorship as the liberals who criticize such actions in every other context look the other way, but it is one more sign that our educational institutions are being run by people could be a little heavier in the loafers when it comes to doing the right thing.

The Persian King Xerxes is said to have declared, after observing the failure of his fleet in the Battle of Salamis in which a ship captained by a woman fared better than many of his ships captained by men, "My women have become men, and my men women." The same now seems to have occurred at many of our institutions of learning, where any open display of testosterone is received by the men who run them with cries of shock and alarm (and, one suspects, fainting spells), while the more masculine feminists elsewhere in administration and in the Women's Studies departments pat them on the head and tell them what good boys they are.

It's a sad situation--this world in which college administrators are such sissies.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The haters have become incarnate. Martin Cothran seems to be oblivious to the fact that a young Kentuckian named Josh Shipman committed suicide due to the harassment he received at Dunbar High School in Lexington, Kentucky.

Let Mr. Cothran continue to denounce those of us who argue for tolerance, but I hope those of us who disagree with his inflexible attitudes regarding what the family is speak up too.