Posted by
Bruce Armstrong on Friday, June 15, 2007 7:54:07 PM
John Leo has an outstanding article at CityJournal.com about the proliferation of separatist graduation ceremonies at UCLA. Seems the number of separatist graduations poses quite a scheduling problem:
The university now has so many separate identity-group graduations that
scheduling them not to conflict with one another is a challenge. The
women’s studies graduation and the Chicana/Chicano studies graduation
are both set for 10 AM Saturday. The broader Hispanic graduation,
“Raza,” is in near-conflict with the black graduation, which starts
just an hour later.
Other students have to figure out which of the many race- and sex-based ceremonies to attend:
Some students are presumably eligible for four or five graduations. A
gay student with a Native American father and a Filipino mother could
attend the Asian, Filipino, and American Indian ceremonies, plus the
mainstream graduation and the Lavender Graduation for gay, lesbian,
bisexual, and transgendered students.
While some aspects of this are funny, in a sadly humorous way, Leo points to separatist graduations as a symptom of a larger problem: the war against assimilation.
[O]n campus, assimilation is a hostile force, the domestic version of
American imperialism. On many campuses, identity-group training begins
with separate freshman orientation programs for nonwhites, who arrive
earlier and are encouraged to bond before the first Caucasian freshmen
arrive. Some schools have separate orientations for gays as well.
Fifty years ago, people fought segregation. Now, some demand it. Some progress we've made, eh?