Thursday, March 28, 2024

Universities Have a New Plan to Fight Racism: Segregate Students

The Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) is rolling out a new plan to fight racism on college campuses — by funding segregated dinners. Yes, you read that correctly.

Brown University, one of the 10 schools being awarded the AAC&U’s grants, recently announced the new program via its student newspaper. Having been selected by the AAC&U in partnership with the left-wing W.K. Kellogg Foundation and the Newman’s Own Foundation, Brown will receive a $30,000 grant to be used over the next three years to “tackle racial issues and work toward racial healing.” To this end, the Ivy League school will begin offering two segregated dinner discussion groups — one for black students and one for Muslim women.

According to the AAC&U’s website, institutions awarded the grant must use the money to develop and implement a plan which will:

  • create a positive narrative about race in the community
  • promote racial healing activities on campus and in the community
  • erase structural barriers to equal treatment and opportunity within the economic, legal, educational, and residential components of the community

Brown, and apparently the AAC&U also, believe that the best way to erase racial division and achieve the above stated goals is to segregate students in the cafeteria. They don’t call it segregation of course, but instead give it a more pleasant sounding name: “racial reconciliation.”

This initiative is just one of a long list of segregative programs being implemented at liberal colleges and universities around the country:

  • Last September, California State University Los Angeles introduced its segregated housing initiative to offer a “housing space delegated for Black students.”
  • In February, students at the University of Michigan demanded a permanent no-whites-allowed space in the center of campus for black students and other students of color only.
  • In May, The American University in Washington, D.C., gave persons of color an extension on their final exams following an alleged racially motivated vandalism incident.
  • In June, Evergreen College in Washington state was forced to shut down its campus multiple times due to safety concerns stemming from student activists ordering all whites off campus for a “Day of Absence.”

Despite their varying forms, these segregation initiatives all bear the same message: “No whites allowed.” And although these racially exclusive university programs could never be equated to some of the worst past instances of segregation — such as those faced by Jews under the Nazi regime or by blacks in the Jim Crow South — we would be remiss not to notice a similarity between what is happening on college campuses today and what has happened in some of the darkest pages of our history books.

Racial segregation should never be tolerated, no matter who it targets, and any act of segregation must be snuffed out before it is allowed to spread, grow, and intensify. These types of initiatives have no place at institutions of higher education — which ironically claim to support diversity. They are counterproductive and ought to be ended, lest they promote further disunity in our already badly divided nation.

More From The Pulse