Editor,
Reading the job description for the UNM presidential opening recently, I noticed a recurring theme in the tone of the University’s hiring and appointment practices.
Seven bullet points are listed. One item stood out in particular: “Position UNM as a model for how a modern university fulfills its missions of academic excellence, research, student success and access given the changing demographics of the U.S.”
What does this mean, functionally? All of those missions are wrapped up in the final part of that item – “given the changing demographics of the U.S.” Are academic excellence, research, student success and access matters of demography?
I was naturally led to the idea of affirmative action: That answering discrimination with further discrimination creates a recipe for disaster, especially when that burden is inherited. Whereas ‘White Privilege’ – and, one can extrapolate, ‘Asian Privilege’ – can be real in one case or another, the blanket application of race as a criterion for anything in our society is not open-minded, but simple-minded.
Our University’s hiring practices reflect an error in judgement. The same people who preach intersectionality fail to realize that it also applies to those who are a part of the “privileged” classes. These conversations over privilege subjugate whole generations and pedestal others, to the great detriment of society at large.
It only incurs incompetency to use factors outside of merit to choose candidates for society’s leadership posts. It only fosters frustration and loathing to tell someone whose family members could have gone through any myriad experiences that their experience is the same as certain others because of the color of their skin.
We live in an extremely primitive society today. Certain people in positions of control have the gall to think that the United States does not offer the greatest opportunities for a diverse populace than anywhere else in the world. The same people who preach tolerance cite homogeneous nations like Sweden to prove how government-enforced egalitarianism must work.
We live in an extremely primitive society when anything other than a person’s actions – which speak to the content of their character – aren’t the sole factor in examining their worth. In some sense, we are no better than cavemen; at least they were honest about their tribalism, rather than inflicting it against certain groups through the faceless means of government and monopolized institutions.
Those who claim whole races of people have one or another experience are not only closed-minded, but they thwart the efforts of people actively trying to amend race relations where they are still quite strained, such as in northern Louisiana. They trample upon the courageous acts of civil rights leaders decades ago, today distorting reality to maintain the lucrative industry of victimhood in western nations.
I remember that they were the ones who avoided the Vietnam War by staying in school, spitting on our soldiers when they came home and ultimately becoming the leading academic class of today. Their pomposity is imbued into the current generation of self-effacing privilege-deniers, creating such a distorted nation that raw talent isn’t enough to succeed in our Brave New World of birthright success.
There is yet tremendous hope for the current generation: Young people today are more collaborative and race-neutral than ever, and that’s only improving with the basic understanding that everyone is deserving of basic respect before knowing who they are as individuals.
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I read your article on the “Dangerous Faggot” Milo Yiannopoulos and how so many student groups are against this speaker. It is well and good if he really is a violent and hateful person and the students out there are against it.
For fair reasons, I have my doubts.
This institutionalized racism of anti-meritocracy, anti-individual academic selection and other forms of affirmative action are things that still stand to dash those hopes, and represent the misguided ways that UNM still operates.
Here’s hoping that the just system triumphs and this iniquitous cycle of wrongdoing can end.
Brian Macklin
Daily Lobo reader