Opinion: Too Left, Even for Me

If you have kept up with the flurry of news articles coming in from the East Coast, you know that the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT were under extreme pressure recently from disgruntled donors, the communities, and Congress to resign. Two of them did, but the third is hanging on–barely. Apparently, all the fuss was over whether their students had a right under the First Amendment to march on campus chanting, “Death to Jews.” In their own defense, the presidents testified that the words, “Death to Jews,” are not prejudicial or hostile enough to warrant disciplinary action and that it would go against their core values to do so unless the chants had directly incited violent acts. 

As a progressive Democrat, I’m horrified; in addition, I know that if I were the president of a university where students had chanted, “Death to Whomever I Don’t Like,” I would be pouring over the classifieds. Hey, I marched with Caesar Chavez when I was nineteen years old, and, trust me, we never chanted “Death” to anyone.   

In a guest essay published last month in the Pacific Business Times, Lori Varlotta, President of California Lutheran University, wrote about the sad state of polarization on campuses and in work places.  She claims that she is working hard to make sure the two sides on her campus do not “vilify” each other and vowed to create programs to help students find “common ground” for the sake of the safety and inclusion of everyone.  

Admirable, but I’m skeptical because only three years ago, after eight years of teaching at Cal Lu, I resigned from this highly polarized, scary place. When I left, things were looking a bit like Harvard.  Thankfully, no one had yet chanted “Death to Jews,” but I heard rumblings of “Death to Whiteness.”

Rumblings grew to roars during a Zoom meeting on May 20, 2020 when a vociferous portion of the over 500 faculty and staff in attendance, including those calling themselves “white folk,” promised over and over to burn down the Gallegly Center and to topple the bronze statue of Pete Pederson, donor of the land on which Cal Lu stands. The attending administration pled the Fifth and remained silent.

The anger concerning Pederson is explained in the introduction to an article entitled Antiracist and Faith-based:  Critical Pedagogy-Informed Writing and Information Literacy Instruction at a Hispanic-Serving, Lutheran Liberal Arts University, wherein Cal Lu librarians Yvonne Wilber and Megan Kwast and Writing Program Administrator Jolivette Mecenas assert that CLU is located “on unceded land of the indigenous Chumash people” (Radical Teacher, A Socialist, Feminist, and Anti-racist Journal on the Theory and Practice of Teaching, 16).

Quoting ELCA social statements and prominent Lutheran leaders, the authors justify another source of anger toward whiteness–this time assaulting traditional literature which they believe is “steeped in a legacy of racism and white supremacy” (11) and is, therefore, no longer welcomed in our first-year writing courses. The curriculum, wrote Mecenas in May, 2020, needs a “long-overdue” overhaul which requires all English 110 professors to teach The Case for Reparations by one of my favorite authors, Ta-Nehisi Coates. Sadly, my decades-old repertoire of time-honored and diverse writers (including white) were “cancelled” even though they, too, illustrate the virtues of tolerance and antiracism.          

The Harvard, Penn, and MIT reports should be required reading for our taciturn Board of Regents because in the same way that each eastern administration ducked its responsibility to safeguard all students and faculty equally, our president has similarly eluded her duty by restricting the free speech of teachers like me and by bolstering the free speech of her chosen groups.  

Case in point:  I witnessed an influential member of the tenured faculty viciously denigrating all things white on his Facebook page entitled “Fuck Whiteness.” Colleagues claimed that he leveled false accusations of racism at them for years while dodging disciplinary action.  As a lifetime Lutheran and alum, I was outraged and afraid at the same time.

This led me to ask myself: could what happened in the East happen on our campus? Could Cal Lutheran’s acts of violence and threats of destruction turn into protests calling for genocide?  As long as we tolerate a president who condones hateful speech and outright bullying, yes, it could happen here.