A column by Mike Myer, executive editor of The Intelligencer/Wheeling News-Register
WHEELING, W.Va. — Is political correctness coming to West Virginia University? Well, it probably has achieved at least a beachhead there. WVU is a university campus, after all.
But recent news from Morgantown may make some West Virginians wonder. Is our state university about to go the way of campuses that ban certain words because a handful of people say the language makes them feel “threatened” or “trigger” uncomfortable emotions?
The University of Michigan spent $16,000 to warn students against a long list of words, including “crazy” and “insane.”
On at least one other campus, “Man up” has been termed so emotionally damaging that it is banned.
University of California faculty members have been warned phrases such as “America is the land of opportunity” and “I believe the most qualified person should get the job” are “macroaggressions.”
And at Wesleyan University, a student newspaper lost funding after running an editorial critical of the “Black lives matter” protests.
WVU has just hired a director of student conduct to promote “a culture of respect and social responsibility on campus.”
So, does that mean the Mountaineer mascot is about to be banished? He or she dresses in animal skins and carries a gun, for heaven’s sake.
Think I’m going overboard? Not in the current politically correct climate.
How bad is it? Well, at Yale, Cornell, Vassar, Syracuse and Oberlin, administrators were caught in an undercover videotaping operation as they agreed to destroy copies of the Constitution because a person they thought was a student termed the document “oppressive” or “triggering.” One university official, preparing to run the Constitution through a shredder, said it “is a flawed document and the people who wrote it are certainly flawed individuals in my mind.”
Well, some of them had major character flaws. Some, including George Washington, were slaveholders. But the Cornell bureaucrat included all of them – and the most effective guarantee of freedom humankind has ever seen – in her “certainly flawed” category.
Of course, in some minds I suppose the Constitution and Bill of Rights are junk. They require liberties such as freedom of speech, after all, regardless of who might be offended. And there’s that pesky, politically incorrect Second Amendment.
So yes, there’s no question the Mountaineer mascot would be banished from some campuses.
But wait. We’re not talking some campuses. This is WVU. And unless I miss my guess, university President E. Gordon Gee – who has been accused of political incorrectness himself once or twice – has better things in mind for the student conduct director. Reining in brutish behavior at a few fraternities may be on his list.
So don’t worry. I’ll bet the new conduct officer will do some real good on genuine – rather than invented – problems.
After all, we’re West Virginians, not those crazies in California and Michigan.
Myer can be reached at: [email protected].
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