While things on college campuses are less chaotic and violent than they were a few months ago, make no mistake—sanity has not been restored. We got fresh evidence of that when the University of Oregon, in the middle of renovating their student center, debated removing a quotation from Martin Luther King Jr. that was inscribed on one of the walls. The offending quote? “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. I have a dream. . . . ”
According to the Oregon Daily Emerald, when confronted with a decision to keep the quotation, sophomore architecture major Mia Ashley asked, “Does the MLK quote represent us today? Diversity is so much more than race. Obviously race still plays a big role. But there are people who identify differently in gender and all sorts of things like that.”
Note that this is not the first time a quotation on the walls of the university’s Erb Memorial Union has been questioned on the grounds of political correctness. In 1985, the school removed an aspirational quote from one of Oregon’s former deans, William C. Jones, in which he outlined the role of the university as a “guardian of the noble in man’s aspiration for the humane society” and “leader in the quest for the good life for all men.” The line was not gender inclusive, so Jones was asked whether he would be willing to alter it. Jones said no, on the grounds that he was unwilling to be “hostage to ignorance.” Suffice to say, they don’t make university administrators like they used to—these days being hostage to ignorance is part of the job description.
Ultimately, the MLK “quote is not going to change, but that decision was not made without some hard thought by the Student Union Board,” reports the Emerald. Thanks to Mark Hemingway’s article in these pages (“Schools for Scandal,” August 11, 2014), The Scrapbook is quite familiar with the idiocy and corruption of Oregon’s student government (among others), and we’re fairly confident not that much cogitation was involved.
