How “woke” are American colleges and universities? That is to say, how much do they seek to implant in the minds of their students ideas hostile to our traditions and society?
In many cases, the answer is “very,” and if you doubt that, consider George Mason University, where incoming students were just hit with the school’s whining “land acknowledgement” at the beginning of orientation for the fall semester.
Read all about it in this Liberty Unyielding post.
A slice:
The first presentation in the orientation, the “Patriot Welcome,” began with a “land acknowledgment” saying that GMU was on the land of one of Virginia’s Native American tribes. In the video containing the land acknowledgment, America was referred to as “Turtle Island.”
But “Turtle Island” was not the word used for America by Virginia’s Native American tribes. And the U.S. is not an island, but rather, includes much of the North American continent. The Powhatan tribes in Virginia’s Tidewater region called their territory Tsenacomoco, not Turtle Island. The Lenapi Indians who once lived on the island of Manhattan did use the word “Turtle Island” for the continent, but George Mason University is not located in New York, or anywhere near it. Today, Turtle Island seems to be a term mainly used by anti-American radicals, some of whom say their “goal is to dismantle the settler project that is the United States.”
In many of their courses, students will be subjected to a wide array of leftist ideas meant to turn them into social justice warriors, but the university’s administration couldn’t wait for the semester to begin — it felt the need to start the guilt-tripping right away.
The piece ends with a useful suggestion:
Rather than suggesting that a college is on stolen land (when a college has no intention of “returning” that land to the tribe), colleges should focus on helping tribes by expanding tribal self-determination and ability to use their own lands. Many federal regulations make Native Americans poorer and stifle economic development on Indian reservations, as The Atlantic has noted, and as tribal appeals court judge Adam Crepelle explains in a new book.
Sure, but that isn’t what the leftists care about. They seek to foster guilt and grievance, not self-improvement.