Notre Dame Student Group Demands Less Material from White, Male Scholars
There’s always one group on every college campus that’s to the left of the College Democrats or even whatever variety of social justice network exists on campus.
We only used the phrase “woke” as the past tense of the verb “to wake” back in my day, but our version of the group — which usually served to deliver unreasonable demands to people who had no intention of reading them — managed to get a decent following on campus despite the fact they did nothing at all.
But ah, now we have social media, which means that small student groups can have a huge reach despite the intellectual bankruptcy of their ideas. A Notre Dame group has found that out by going viral with their demand that they receive less scholarship from white male figures.
The group is called End Hate at ND. Spoiler alert: Their mission is about something a bit bigger than ending hate at Notre Dame. It contains a five-point manifesto; some of these are germane to Notre Dame itself, like a request to end parietals, which are rules governing opposite-sex dorm visitation.
However, one of the rules that seemed a bit more generalized — and like something we’ve seen before — is one about the kind of scholarship they want to see more of.
The group says that “no course or program of study should have a view limited to white, western, and/or male voices. We demand that people who are of Color, Indigenous, Black, queer, or not male are represented in the authorship of at least half course and major required readings.
“Diversifying the canon helps eliminate the violence of only privileging white scholarship,” the demand, titled “Decolonize Academia,” read.
https://www.instagram.com/p/B48dCkinZZR/
Ah yes, the violence of Descartes.
Notre Dame is one of the most prestigious, selective universities in this country. Let’s say they determine — as is often the case — that the best scholarship is from white males.
It happens not infrequently. The scholarship universities use often dates back hundreds, if not thousands, of years. We’re told that rampant cultural misogyny and white supremacy are alive and well in this day and age, so just imagine what it was like back when that stuff actually happened.
So, imagining this were the case, how would students of any background benefit from this? Why would denying them scholarship their peers were reading make them better? How is this going to end colonialism?
Another spoiler: It’s not. What it will do is take the best scholarship out of the classroom, at least if the authors are white and male, and replace it with scholarship that ticks boxes.
There’s no merit to this.
This doesn’t open up opportunities for heretofore ignored academics.
There’s nothing here that will make students’ lives better, whether they be marginalized or privileged. This is deliberately dumbing down education at an educational institution where one year’s worth of tuition could buy you a fairly decent Lexus because they need to “eliminate the violence of only privileging white scholarship,” even when — especially when — that scholarship may be objectively better.
This wouldn’t hurt a single white scholar. Instead, who this would hurt would be Notre Dame students. And unfortunately, even though this group appears to be new and small in numbers, they’ve already taken on an outsized role in campus conversation.
Even though the group only has a handful of Instagram posts, they’re suddenly slightly famous because this sort of thing warms the cockles of liberals’ hearts. According to The College Fix, they’re also not just IG warriors; the group protested twice late last month to protest the aforementioned parietals, which they say engender “white, cis-heteronormative hegemony.”
Parietals essentially ensure that male visitors are out of all-female residence halls and females out of all-male residence halls by midnight on weekdays and 2 a.m. on weekends.
This, End Hate at ND says, puts LGBT people at risk.
“We already know what parietals are: an institutional attack against womxn, gender non-conforming students and the poor,” junior David Phillips wrote in a letter to the Notre Dame Observer.
”For gender non-conforming students, parietals mean exclusion from safer spaces after certain hours. Furthermore, wealthy students may avoid parietals altogether. I have heard men brag about ‘taking girls to their off-campus apartment’ — a luxury that only the very rich have. For those of us who do not have multiple places of residence in South Bend, parietals are unavoidable.
“Notre Dame’s choice to institutionalize sexism, trans-exclusion, queerphobia and classism through parietals is nothing short of reprehensible,” he continued.
”The longer this issue is drawn out, the longer Notre Dame positions itself as a proponent of a white, cis-heteronormative hegemony. We are approaching a watershed moment in Notre Dame’s history: We may choose to abolish parietals and take a tangible step towards disarming sexual assaulters, misogynists, queerphobes and trans-exclusionists, or we may remain complacent in our exclusion. The choice seems clear to me.”
Apparently, Phillips chose not to read his formal logic textbook because the author was a cisgender white male and hasn’t learned what the false dichotomy fallacy is yet. Pity, that.
There’s nothing new under the sun, alas; this has echoes of the infamous protest against Stanford University’s Western civilization course 32 years ago. Back then, activists led by Jesse Jackson chanted “Hey hey, ho ho / Western civ has got to go!” They succeeded, and now Stanford is a diverse campus with a significant number of lower income bahahaha, oh, who am I kidding?
Anyhow, after a sit-in protest against parietals which included a sit-in at an all-male dorm until 5 a.m. and a demand to not meet the university anywhere but “in a public forum” since a closed-door meeting would be “a muzzle on any activity or speech,” the group met with university officials behind closed doors and decided to play along, considering they were facing expulsion for the sit-in.
As for the diversity in scholarship thing, nothing on that yet, but hey — if Jesse Jackson’s unavailable, I hear Shaun King is probably free. He’s like Jesse Jackson 2.0. Go nuts. See where it gets you. One can only hope — for the students that attend Notre Dame, particularly from marginalized communities — that it’s not far.
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