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The University of West Georgia is a unique school. As Dr. Sethna says, "it provides educational excellence in a personal environment." He's right.
But with enrollment planned to reach 14,500 by 2015, this college also has a lot of growing up to do if it wants to achieve the "robust" tier status it so desperately craves within the University System of Georgia.
As Editor-in-Chief, I've witnessed a number of interesting phenomena from my bird's eye view at The West Georgian, some of which have been encouraging, while others have been frightening.
Some of the most encouraging signs of progress have been the increasing signs of openness from the administration, and their skill at involving students in the decision-making processes at the school.
UWG also continues to offer students an incredibly valuable education for the money - a lot of bang for the buck - if students choose to take advantage of available opportunities.
Dr. Sethna's construction program has been a smashing success. The TLC, Campus Center, Coliseum, and now the football stadium and Greek Village have all come to life under his tenure.
Students are kept safe by a vigilant police force under Chief Mackel, as Mark Reeves' Auxiliary Services feeds, clothes, and transports them.
Despite these encouraging signs, a dark cloud too-often prevents me from engaging in these types of optimistic reflections: the shadow of division and its tragic result: ignorance.
Understandably, a school must often make compromises between meeting enrollment goals and maintaining high standards, but in my last two years, the trend has not been positive.
I'm willing to forgive a lack of literacy, and even illogical thought processes, but the groupthink mentality with which students arrive at UWG only seems to solidify as they progress here in their college careers. Independent thought, the ability to think on one's own and arrive at different conclusions than others around you, was once a prized component of any liberal-arts education. At UWG, that ship has long since sailed.
There is plenty of blame to go around for this anti-intellectual mindset, but the primary culprit is the truth-by-committee movement's obsession with the hijacked concept of 'diversity.'
To be sure, spending time with a diverse set of friends, reading a diverse collection of books, registering for a diverse class schedule, and listening to diverse opinions is critical to any college experience, but that's not what the word means anymore.
While in theory, it suggests an understanding and acceptance of ideas different from one's own, in practice it often means that ideas and theories considered politically incorrect are demonized by the Orwellian "civility police." Interestingly, the same forces preaching the concept are instrumental in preventing its practice.
In the real world, this twisted version of diversity effectively drives students apart. When "intolerance isn't tolerated," and 'intolerance' is defined as not agreeing with the individual making the accusation, a distinct divide opens up between races, creeds, and cultures.
I saw this firsthand when I discovered that the Greek Variety Show and BSA Step Show were counter-programmed against each other this year. Each event featured dancing with music, the only difference was the skin color of the participants - yet neither group could understand why the other didn't attend their event.
At Loni Love's comedy show this semester, she asked where all the white people were. "They don't come to our events," screamed a group of girls. That's true, I was one of the few whites at "their" event, and there weren't many people of color at the variety show either.
The reason for this separation became clear when we publicized the provably fraudulent SGA election last year. Rather than answer specific charges related to the investigation, students and faculty insisted that the articles were "racially biased," and that we were "racists" for daring to write about a situation where a professor had broken rules in order to ensure that his favored candidates would win an election.
Students held protests, and charged the paper with bias, but never raised a single factual error with any of the articles - articles that were researched and written by both black and white students.
In hindsight, the SGA senators were not at fault. The fault lies with a system that tells students a racist lies under every rock, that every perceived offense must be racially motivated, and that the media exists only to keep down people of color. If someone presented an idea they didn't like, it had to be racism.
The scary thing is, this was the group in favor of mandatory diversity training, according to their campaign materials.
This fact-agnostic mindset reared it's head again when we came under attack for reporting on the post-election Obama chaos, and again and again and again, each time we reported on a controversial story.
We began, fairly quickly, to notice a direct correlation between a student's professed love of diversity and a student's level of ignorance.
One student walked into my office to criticize an article analyzing Black History Month. He believed that we had stereotyped all African-Americans as 'apathetic.' He and his associates were upset about our use of the word "apartheid," which he pronounced "Ah-par-teed." I was forced to explain to the chairman of one of the largest student groups on campus that we weren't accusing black students of being apathetic, because "apartheid" refers to racial segregation in South Africa, a topic about which I'm surprised a student of any color is unaware.
He was a victim of the new "diversity," so wrapped up in buzzwords and so sheltered from opposing opinions and viewpoints that he had failed to learn even basic facts about the world around him
5 comments
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