The Cargo Cult at Dartmouth

A professor of writing at Dartmouth recently engaged in a weird conflict with some of her students. She believes that the data of science have nothing to do with the outer world. She feels that the so called laws and facts of science are merely tools used by the patriarchy. Such foolishness is not unusual on college campuses these days (the really foolish thing is that people actually give these colleges large sums of money to educate their kids). Some of her students disagreed with her. Some of them even voiced their own opinions. The teacher was so upset by this that she suspended her class for a week without giving prior notice to the students. She later sent them all emails saying that she was going to sue them for discrimination, abridging her intellectual freedom, and creating a hostile work environment. She also told the kids that a probable cause of her problems was the fact that she is from India and is being discriminated against for that reason. And she told them that Dartmouth is such a well know hot bed of intolerance that she has to stand up to it and get some lawyers to fix the problem. Her threatened law suits have so many different legal holes that they will probably never happen except for a possible suit against the college for a hostile work environment. She graduated from Dartmouth over fifteen years ago and has worked in the US since. So what is her problem?
This strange Dartmouth teacher reminded me of another bit of theatre of the absurd I’d recently seen. There were three Canadian Muslim law school students that I saw in a sort of a debate with Mark Steyn. They are angry that a big magazine in Canada had published some articles about Islam in the modern world that they had found offensive. They had attempted to bring a suit against the magazine to force the magazine to publish an article on the subject that they found acceptable. They sat there for a half hour using terms like “freedom of expression” and “human rights.” But the way they used these terms made it obvious that they had not a clue what they meant. I read some conservatives that said it was difficult to watch since these kids exhibited toxic levels of entitlement. But I think it might be something else. Something that makes them like the Dartmouth teacher.
Basically they are all cargo cultists. I feel fairly sure that they have had little or no education about the genesis and evolution of such concepts as intellectual freedom, tolerance, freedom of expression or the scientific method. They came to this shiny, sparkly place that is the Anglo-American world, saw people having a slip and fall and a lawyer followed by a lifetime of freedom from want. So they said, “Why not me? You have to do what my lawyer says.” Cargo cultists believe that there is a big package coming for them with their name on it that will answer all of their needs. Sometimes a bureaucrat might steal the package from Heaven so these people have taken it a step farther by getting their own bureaucrat.