Daniela Hernandez: who’s that? Why that’s the ever-so-sensitive junior at Dartmouth who shut down a charity event, intended to benefit cardiac patients, because she found the theme of the event—“Phiesta,” i.e. “Fiesta”—offensive.
Yes, that’s right. As The Daily Caller reports, the self-described “Mexican-born, United-States-raised, first-generation woman of color” (where’s the air-sickness bag?) didn’t like “the Americanization of Cinco de Mayo,” so too bad for those blokes with dodgy tickers.
Listen to the rancid, semi-literate P.C.-speak from this embarrassing beneficiary of the American educational system:
There are various problematic structures and ideologies regarding a Cinco de Mayo-inspired event, and I am sure that we, as a Dartmouth community, could learn from the extensive literature written about the Americanization of Cinco de Mayo and its construction as a drinking holiday in the United States, cultural appropriation and the inappropriate usage of cultural clothing, and the exploitation of groups of people and cultures for the sake of business opportunities.
Give me a break.
But what’s even more dismaying than Hernandez’s little pout is the reaction of Taylor Cathcart, the president of Phi Delta Alpha, the fraternity that had planned the event, as you’ll see on the next page.
“We felt,” said Mr. Cathcart, “that the possibility of offending even one member of the Dartmouth community was not worth the potential benefits of having the fundraiser.”
Really? This is an American college? This is Dartmouth? This exhibition of emasculated, lily-livered timidity is just another sign that academia in this country is in a terminal state. It has become the protected home of modern-day Eloi, the fragile, pampered, defenseless beneficiaries of other people’s labor that H.G. Wells portrayed in The Time Machine. There has been a lot of talk recently about the “higher education bubble,” and no wonder. By reneging on their obligation to foster independence and free inquiry, those privileged bastions have utterly forfeited the moral authority our society invested in them. The accumulation of repulsive and cowardly episodes like this one at Dartmouth will sooner or later—probably sooner—erode pubic trust to the point that the entire higher educational establishment will implode. That’s if the Morlocks don’t get them first.
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