Plato, Plato, Plato—Zeena Rivera is sick of Plato. It seems that she’s been asked to read Plato in four—four!—courses during her two years at Seattle University’s Matteo Ricci College, a small humanities program within the Jesuit-founded school. And no, it’s not that she’s upset that the Platonic tradition is not being counterbalanced with an equal amount of Aristotle: “When am I going to start reading writers from China, from Africa, from South America?” Rivera asked a reporter from the Seattle Times. She is one of a gaggle of angry students who had the original idea of mounting a sit-in at the dean’s office. They want a new dean. They want a new curriculum. Rivera elegantly expressed her fellow protesters’ core gripe: “The only thing they’re teaching us is dead white dudes.”
The MRC Student Coalition soon issued a list of its demands—10 pages’ worth. Demand number one was for “a non-Eurocentric interdisciplinary curriculum” that “decentralizes Whiteness and has a critical focus on the evolution of systems of oppression such as racism, capitalism, colonialism, etc.” (You have to love the “etc.”) They demanded a radical reinterpretation of what it is to train young leaders “for a just and humane world by centering dialogue about racism, gentrification, sexism, colonialism, imperialism, global white supremacy, and other ethical questions about systems of power.”
They complained, “Professors lack the skill set needed to address and challenge microaggressions in the classroom.” The aspiring Maoists of Seattle proclaimed the need for teacher reeducation: “We demand that every faculty member in Matteo Ricci College undergo a training from an anti-racist network in Seattle, such as The People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond.”
The demands went on from there, everything from wanting more course credits for “service-learning” to this very odd assertion: “The college must stop using the bodies of students of color to advertise diversity.” One might be forgiven for thinking, in retrograde fashion, that a brochure featuring only white students would be offensive. But in the bizarro-world of the college left, it is the opposite that offends: “The objectification of these students is an egregious expression of the racism endemic in our college.”
University president Stephen Sundborg, S.J., tried to hang tough. He refused to accede to the student “coalition” demand that humanities school dean Jodi Kelly be fired, even chiding students for calling her “our racist dean,” language which he said ran counter to the school’s “Code of Student Conduct.” But after three weeks of protest, Sundborg was begging the students’ pardon, and it was announced the university provost was kicking the dean to the “administrative leave” curb. “Seattle University will be a better university as we move forward,” the president groveled, “because of our students’ willingness to take a stand they believe in passionately.”
Which isn’t just nonsense, but nonsense upon stilts. Seattle U. will not be a better university but an intellectually impoverished one, a place where students are protected from hearing anything from their cowed, trembling professors that hasn’t been vetted by the revolutionary committee.
Socrates knew something about such things. But then, he was just one of those dead white dudes.
