Fred Weinberg: Why the NYT Needlessly Cost a Young Woman Her College Choice
So I wake up last Sunday morning and begin my Sunday routine.
The first thing I do is to read the epaper edition of the Las Vegas Review Journal on my iPad and the first story my eyes settle on (page 3a) is headlined, “Recruitment war: Scouts tangle in court, Girl Scouts allege dirty tricks by rival.”
It was an Associated Press story.
This all started when both the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts, for reasons I can only imagine, opened their programs to the opposite sex.
I was in the Boy Scout programs from the age they accepted Cub Scouts until I joined the Civil Air Patrol at age 15. My late mother was a den mother. (I never made Eagle Scout. The Civil Air Patrol was more attractive to me because I was able to learn to fly.)
My sisters were Brownies and I don’t remember whether or not they matriculated to the full Girl Scout program.
But certainly, I never wished to be a Girl Scout, nor, I suspect, did my sisters desire to join me in the Boy Scouts. We went camping, learned to cook over campfires, had canoe races, fired rifles on the range, constructed signal towers and did all of the things that boys need an adult infrastructure to do.
The girls did similar things but in a girl sort of way. Is that a bad thing?
Memo to the “girls need to play football” folks: You are morons to assert that every girl needs to crack heads with male football players, just like your assumption that every boy needs to play with dolls.
If you can’t tell that there are differences between girls and boys, you need your wiring redone. This is the kind of crap that is pushed along by “journalists” such as those at The New York Times who cost a young lady a slot for both cheerleading and scholarship at the University of Tennessee.
Yep, that’s right. The “journalists” at the New York Times decided to publish a story about a little creep in Virginia who posted a three-second clip of young Mimi Groves, who was forced by the University of Tennessee to withdraw her application when the old clip went public.
The clip went public when Jimmy Galligan, 18, a classmate of Groves who has one parent who is African-American and another who is white, was enraged by the video, in which she uttered the racial slur.
So he waited to publicize the clip until doing so would do the most damage: right after the girl, now 19, had been accepted to the University of Tennessee to join its cheerleading team.
Here’s the problem. The clip was filmed when Groves was 15 and became public this month when The Times had an attack of “journalism.”
That’s like condemning Mel Brooks, who used the N-word — a lot — in the movie “Blazing Saddles” back in the ’70s.
Now, in my humble opinion, Groves should be thankful that Tennessee did what it did when it did, because I’m not sure I’d want to be a current alumni of a university that does stupid things like that.
Tennessee’s current leadership is actually dumber than what passes for editors at The Times.
Here’s the real problem.
What passes for leadership at The Times think you and I are stupid.
And what passes for leadership at Tennessee is stupid.
They’ve bought into Ivy League’s zero tolerance for free speech policy. Who knew that the Ivy League had such influence on the SEC? Too bad that Harvard doesn’t play football as well as Tennessee does.
Among my friends, I have several Volunteer alums. None of them are reflective of the stupidity of the current management of their alma mater. Perhaps they should go to work dealing with that financially.
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