The Washington Post reports that racism is rampant at the University of Virginia. Despite the Post’s spin, the more striking feature of the article is that political correctness on campus continues to spin out of control.
For example, the Post reports that UVA has appointed “a president and chief officer for diversity and equality.” Some students are also pushing for the school to change its honor code — which punishes lying, cheating and stealing with immediate expulsion — to include “acts of intolerance.”
But who would judge “acts of intolerance”? If such a policy had been in place at the University of Florida this week, student cartoonist Andy Marlette would have surely been expelled for drawing this cartoon for the Independent Florida Alligator:
Andy Marlette’s cartoon shows black rapper Kanye West, who two weeks ago said President George W. Bush doesn’t care about black people at a fund-raiser for Hurricane Katrina victims, holding a playing card labeled “The Race Card” while standing next to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. The bubble over Rice’s head contains the words: “Nigga Please!”
Romenesko notes that the university president is now demanding an apology. Why stop there? Why not just kick him out of school?
This after a University of North Carolina student was fired from the Daily Tar Heel for a column that made jokes about profiling Muslims at airports.
NR’s own associate editor and former UVA Cavalier Daily columnist Anthony Dick said:
Race relations were plagued with absurdity while I was a student at UVA. (To my bemusement, I sparked a 400-person protest by the Black Student Alliance when I wrote a column in which I humbly suggested that it might not be a good idea for student groups to engage in incendiary rhetoric that carried palpable overtones of racial violence.) By every indication, things are going to continue to get worse before they get better.”