Counter-Currents
3,716 words 
Matthew C. Ehrlich
Dangerous Ideas on Campus: Sex, Conspiracy, and Academic Freedom in the Age of JFK
Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2021
The so-called “Great Awokening,” which started during Obama’s unfortunate second term, was the novel-appearing social framing which led to hysterical young liberals at universities dissolving into immature puddles of emotion over “dangerous ideas” and from those puddles, demanding censorship. At the time, roughly from 2015 until 2021, these anti-free speech explosions were a shock to the mainstream, but concern over what is said or published at a university is not new. Debates over free speech have been raging at universities for decades.
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was the scene of two significant free speech battles during the 1960s. Matthew Erlich, a professor emeritus at U of I has published an excellent account of the events as well as the hot-button issues discussed. The book also describes Revilo Pendleton Oliver Jr.’s (1908 – 1994) very public entry into white advocacy at the national level.
The Generational Alignment at the University of Illinois in 1960
The theory called the Fourth Turning holds that generations arrange into a four-stroke pattern of idealists, reactives, civic heroes, and adaptive-artists. The pattern is self-replicating over time, so the generations are repeating archetypes. This theory claims that the different generations are defined by the social circumstances of their childhood and how those different generations align impacts the overall direction of society.
The theory is probably bunk, but it is interesting, and it does work when applied to the generational alignment between 1933 and 1970. The arrangement of generational cohorts during the Great Depression and World War II was such that gray haired idealists who’d struggled with moral (and racial) issues since the Spanish-American War were in the top spots. Mid-grade management at the time was led by realistic reactives such as Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower. The young adults were the civic heroes who followed orders and got the job done during World War II. The adaptives were too young to be involved. With the generational types in the theory’s ideal array, the Depression and War were vanquished by 1945, and it looked easy.
During the 1960s, the generation which was running things was made up of the WWII veterans (civic heroes). They’d gained accolades as teenagers and young adults for following orders, but they had a hard time seeing the moral and spiritual basis for why an order should be given or not given and followed or not followed. The World War II veterans who embroiled America in the Vietnam War thought that they were avoiding “appeasement at Munich” by deploying troops to South Vietnam.
The policy choices made by the civic heroes regarding what to do in Vietnam were a simplistic misreading of what was an issue of vast moral complexity, and disaster followed. The inability of the World War II generation to collectively grasp the moral issues as they moved up in their individual respective careers is critical to understanding the social revolutions of the 1960s.
The Silent Generation at the Dawn of the 1960s
The students filling up the classes at the University of Illinois in 1960 were part of the Silent Generation. This was a generation of adaptive-artists. They were too young to take part in the heroism of World War II. Overshadowed by the WWII veterans, their generation was continually dogged by unfair accusations of “youth and inexperience,” as GI Generation member Ronald Reagan humorously said of Silenter Walter Mondale in 1984. Only a Silent Generation member, Dick Clark, could be called the “world’s oldest teenager.” Senile Joe, the only member of the Silents to become president, was led by others throughout his presidency – including someone in an Eastern Bunny suit during one event. In 1951, a Time Magazine article bestowed the “Silent” moniker upon the rising young adults saying,
Youth today is waiting for the hand of fate to fall on its shoulders, meanwhile working fairly hard and saying almost nothing. The most startling fact about the younger generation is its silence. With some rare exceptions, youth is nowhere near the rostrum. By comparison with the Flaming Youth of their fathers & mothers, today’s younger generation is a still, small flame. It does not issue manifestoes, make speeches or carry posters. It has been called the “Silent Generation.” But what does the silence mean? What, if anything, does it hide? Or are youth’s elders merely hard of hearing?
The time of the Silent Generation’s youth, 1948 to 1963, was relatively peaceful. There was the Korean War, and rather nasty things were going on related to the Cold War, but no political crisis spiraled out of control to the point of involving the youth in a major jihad somewhere. This nothing-to-do situation created the best backdrop for coming-of-age movies. The giants of the genre, Stand By Me, Oh, What a Night, and Grease are set in the late 1950s or early 1960s. The protagonists in Stand By Me are of the Boomer Generation so the film’s focus is on a variety of serious issues, but the main characters in the latter two movies are squarely in the Silent Generation. With little going on in the bigger picture, the plots of the films focus on the protagonists’ respective quests to have sex. In the book, Ehrlich mentions Where the Boys Are, a coming-of-age film which was released in 1960 with Silent Generation actresses as protagonists who are seeking sex although their respective quests to do the deed end with mixed results.
Sex and Politics at the University of Illinois
In 1948, Alfred Kinsey published Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and followed up with Sexual Behavior in the Human Female in 1953. These two books became the metapolitical launch pad for the Sexual Revolution, where it became socially acceptable to have sex outside of marriage. As the broader culture was steadily liberalizing in terms of sex, the U of I’s incoming freshmen in 1960 were entering an institution which had a charter to act in loco parentis. As a result, campus police were required to check motels for cars with university stickers to ensure there were not illicit hookups, and the etiquette surrounding “making out” or “heavy petting” was a big deal.
In 1960, the University’s president was Dr. David Dodds Henry (1905 – 1995). He’d replaced George Stoddard (1897 – 1981), who’d faced accusations he was selectively hiring East Coast leftists and communist sympathizers. Stoddard resigned after a confrontation with the Board of Trustees over his disbelief in a wonder drug said to be a cure for cancer. The “cure” didn’t work, but the University’s vice president Andrew Ivy, had hyped the drug which caused a furor. Henry had also had to fend of accusations he was a communist sympathizer – the attacks probably came from an academic rival and were groundless. Nonetheless, the political situation was such that the top job at the university was insecure. Meanwhile, Henry’s biggest concern was preparing for the wave of students which would arrive in 1964 which were part of the post-war baby boom. To accommodate the oncoming demographic bulge, Henry needed the state legislature to vote yes on a bond issue which would provide the necessary funds to expand classrooms, dormitories, and other facilities.
While Dr. Henry was not a communist, the Cold War fears of communist infiltration within cultural high points were not unfounded, and Illinois had some serious anti-communist activists. The most important one was Ira Latimer (1906 – 1985). He was what we’d call today an “influencer.” He was a radio broadcaster who’d been a communist in the 1940s. Eventually he grew to hate communism and left the party. Ex–communists were highly prized by the growing conservative movement in 1960, and Latimer had a following as well as supporters like William F. Buckley. Should Latimer take notice of a scandal at the University of Illinois, the bond issue might not clear the legislature. The anti-communist Latimer was a major proponent of “civil rights.”
The University’s Dean of Women, Mariam Aldridge Shelden (1912 – 1975) supported the policy of in loco parentis. She believed that a university education for a young woman was an outstanding dowry. She also served in the Naval Reserves and rose to the rank of Commander. She didn’t believe in premarital sex and often remarked that there was no freedom without restraint. She viewed Kinsey as a pseudo-scientist. She did, however, support “civil rights.” Shelden never married.
The faculty member at the university who was the opposite of Shelden was Leo Koch (1916 – 1982). Koch was originally from North Dakota but moved to California with his family. He was of immigrant stock – his father was a Russian–German. As an undergraduate at Berkely, he was president of the Student Workers Federation and attended meetings of other leftist organizations. During World War II, Koch had served in the navy where, by his own account, his only accomplishment was arguing with his commanding officer until the commander was replaced. Koch married a woman, fathered a child with her, and then they parted ways within a week. Several years later he married a woman named Shirley and had three children with her. He earned his doctorate at the University of Michigan in 1950.
Koch worked as a biology instructor on the faculty at Bakersfield College in California where he taught as much leftism as biology. He was forced out in 1954. So, he got a yearlong appointment in Tulane University in New Orleans and then was recruited for the University of Illinois starting there in the fall of 1955. After a successful first year, he clashed with other faculty members and there were suspicions among the U of I faculty management over his unusual requisitions of supplies and requests for travel funds. Koch did not have tenure.
Then, on March 16, 1960 an article came out in the school’s paper, the Daily Illini, whose editor-in-chief was then Roger Ebert (1942 – 2013), who would go on to be a nationally famous movie critic. The article was called Sex Ritualized. The gist of the article was concern over a social development whereby students of the opposite sex would “make out” in the various sorority lounges until curfew at 1 A.M. Should a young man leave before the curfew, the young lady would be humiliated. The article went on to encourage all students to really get to know each other and seek something more than mere heavy petting. In response to this article, Koch penned a letter to the editor which pointed out that because of contraceptives, one could have sex outside of marriage if both partners were ready, so hours of agonizing heavy petting were unnecessary.
Initially, the letter to the editor was ignored outside of the university, but the Daily Illini published pieces for and against Koch’s ideas, so awareness of the controversial ideas became widely known. Meanwhile, because of his known leftist sympathies, Koch had been on Ira Latimer’s radar since at least 1958. When he became aware of the provocative ideas about sex Latimer was alarmed. He saw the promotion of morally lax behavior as a communist plot. (Which might have been true given that the Zionists broadcast pornography when carrying out unjust military operations in Occupied Palestine.) Latimer joined forces with Eloise Mount of Tuscola, Illinois. Mount was involved in investigating sex education classes and represented a group called the League of Moral Responsibility. Both she and Latimer sent out letters to parents of students at the school as well as others. Koch’s views had become sensationalized and politicized just when the University needed money from the Illinois Legislature.
Due to the uproar, Koch’s days at the university were numbered, and he was terminated before his contract ended. He might have kept his job, but he didn’t have tenure and had rubbed people in his department the wrong way prior to the controversy. How the person “enters the system” is of enormous importance during a trouble-filled event.
Koch was not without supporters, however. Students protested his termination, saying the university violated the principle of free speech. The Reverend at Urbana’s Unitarian-Universalist Church wrote that, “…we can allow the examination of ideas, even controversial ones, which are dogmatically held, in the confidence that the truth twill win.” (p. 86) The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) censured the University of Illinois over Koch’s firing, but the gesture was toothless. Koch eventually divorced again, grew his hair out like the radical, and then dropped from public life to be a homesteader in Arkansas. He passed away in 1982.
The Slack Tide of Camelot
John Fitzgerald Kennedy gave a speech at the University of Illinois on October 26, 1960, and ten thousand students turned out to hear his talk. The election of 1960 was a gentleman’s debate between two very similar candidates. Only afterwards did it become clear that the political calm that year was akin to slack tide, where the tide is shifting, but the water appears to not be moving either direction. The political forces, some of which were uncontrollable, were only temporarily in balance in 1960. Once in office, Kennedy’s presidency appeared to be a steady, brilliant administration, but Kennedy made poor decisions which were not apparent until after his death and he had a reckless private life which was an accident waiting to happen.
One bad decision included tepid support for “civil rights.” Even the sliver of support he showed to “civil rights” leaders during the campaign turned out to be critical for the pro-black agitators later on. The integrationists making trouble in the South throughout the early 1960s had a direct line to Kennedy’s people. This situation became a protection racket and it led to uncontrolled sub-Saharan rioting in the North especially after the illicit second constitution, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, was made law. Kennedy also made choices which would lead to debacles in Cuba and Vietnam. Kennedy’s public approval was never overwhelmingly high during his presidency, and many anti-communists were frustrated by his appearance of appeasement towards the Soviet Union.
Then, on a trip to Texas to raise money, paper over differences between Democrats over “civil rights,” and demonstrate he had popular support in Texas, he was shot by a self-radicalized Antifa gunman acting alone. The shocking murder made Kennedy a national hero. Americans who hadn’t voted for him in 1960 later claimed they’d supported the man all along. As word leaked out that a radical leftist who supported Castro and had temporarily defected to the Soviet Union was the killer, liberals, communist sympathizers, and anti-anti-communists, who controlled the mainstream cultural producing centers created conspiracy theories about homosexual thrill kills, riflemen from New Orleans, the CIA, the Cubans, and the Bell Helicopter Corporation which absolved them of the very real impact of their ideas’ influence over the assassin.
Then, with the nation’s grief still raw following the assassination, a hitherto nationally unknown Classics professor at the University of Illinois, Revilo Oliver wrote an article called Marksmanship in Dallas on 2 February 1964 in American Opinion – the magazine of the John Birtch Society which he’d helped found. Oliver believed that Kennedy was murdered as part of a broader conspiracy of communists. This idea was not the controversial part of the article, however. Many people, then and now, believe that Kennedy was the victim of a conspiracy. What provoked public outrage was Oliver’s criticism of the fallen president when he said,
The departed Kennedy is the John F. Kennedy who procured his election by peddling boob-bait to the suckers, including a cynical pledge to destroy the Communist base in Cuba. He is the John F. Kennedy with whose blessing and support the Central Intelligence Agency staged a fake “invasion” of Cuba designed to strengthen our mortal enemies there and to disgrace us – disgrace us not merely by ignominious failure, but by the inhuman crime of having lured brave men into a trap and sent them to suffering and death. He is the John F. Kennedy who, in close collaboration with Khrushchev, staged the phony “embargo” that was improvised both to befuddle the suckers on election day in 1962 and to provide for several months a cover for the steady and rapid transfer of Soviet troops and Soviet weapons to Cuba for eventual use against us. He is the John F. Kennedy who installed and maintained in power the unspeakable Yarmolinsky-McNamara gang in the Pentagon to demoralize and subvert our armed forces and to sabotage our military installations and equipment. He is the John F. Kennedy who, by shameless intimidation, induced weaklings in Congress to approve treasonable acts designed to disarm us and to make us the helpless prey of the affiliated criminals and savages of the “United Nations.”
Revilo P. Oliver Jr.’s article marked the end of slack tide. The Gulf of Tonkin incident was less than a half-year away. The tinder for the black crime wave, the social unrest, and great replacement immigration was laid by Kennedy’s liberal base and the “civil rights” supporters across the political spectrum.
Additionally, the last of the Silent Generation – students born in 1942 – gave way to the first of the Boomers – born after 1943. The shift was unnoticed at first, but the students were idealists, and changes started immediately. At the University of Illinois one alteration demonstrated the shift. The University ceased making all male students attend Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) training in 1963. A Quaker and World War II veteran on the faculty named Martin Cobin had pushed for this change since 1960. The youth bulge helped make the training optional also. There were too many young men to train given the resources anyway.
The Classist from Illinois
Professor Oliver was from an old Illinois family. His grandfather, Franklin Oliver, was a Veteran of the War of 1812 and one of the original pioneers to the region. His father Revilo Oliver Sr. made some relationship mistakes, to put it euphemistically, and died by suicide in 1929.
He was a brilliant student of the classics and learned both Greek and Sanskrit. In 1930 he married Grace Neeham who had two daughters by a prior marriage. He was brought on to the faculty at the University of Illinois in 1938 by William Abott Oldfather. His first book was a translation of a Hindu play called The Little Clay Cart. Grace acted in this play.
During the Second World War, Oliver had worked as a code breaker in Washinton D.C. He would write later that he knew that Roosevelt had deliberately informed the Portuguese government he was seeking a war with Japan and that the Americans would help protect their colony in East Timor. Roosevelt knew the Japanese had broken the Portuguese codes and would thus be more inclined to rashly attack, which would give Roosevelt the opportunity to do an end run around his isolationist opponents and get the war he wanted.
He was a founding member of the John Birch Society and wrote in various conservative journals throughout the 1950s. He was supportive of Francis Parker Yockey and William F. Buckley. He and his wife passed information to Ira Latimer about suspected communists at the U of I. He gave anti-communist talks to local civic organizations and wrote for the John Birch Society. The Birchers did strike fear into the hearts of the 1960s “Have you no decency, sir?” liberals but he wasn’t known until his Marksmanship in Dallas column.
Controversy over Koch’s article about premarital sex took weeks to fully materialize. Controversy over Oliver emerged instantly. The University ultimately didn’t fire Oliver. The Professor was tenured, and how one “enters the system” is of front-rank importance. His speeches and writings were extramural and not the views or policy of the University. He didn’t teach his politics in class, and he was well regarded in the Classics Department and by his students. Roger Ebert’s career took off when he wrote a column defending Oliver’s right to free speech while deploring what he said.
Oliver retired from the University in 1977, and he dedicated the rest of his life to political writings. All his works are worth reading. His only failure is his take on the Apostle Paul, which is a derivative retelling of other anti-Pauline critics, and even that failing is interesting. Oliver died by suicide in 1994, he was in poor health, and he felt his mind was slipping.
The Two Social Revolutions of the 1960s
The 1960s was a revolutionary time, but there were two different revolutions. The first was that of “civil rights.” This revolution was led by ethnonationalist Jews, communists and communist sympathizers, and pro-integrationist blacks. The most important advocates of “civil rights” were American whites who’d served in the military during World War II – especially at the field grade officer level.
“Civil rights,” meaning here, the series of government programs specifically meant to uplift sub-Saharan Africans in America which culminated in the illicit second constitution that is the 1964 Civil Rights Act, was part of a constellation of other social policy ideas. The ideas were unrelated in the strictest sense but the same people who supported one idea often supported another. Those who supported Leo Koch’s support for the Sexual Revolution were often the loudest supporters for integration and “civil rights” measures.
The Silent Generation were not the drivers of the revolution, the World War II veterans were. The Silents were the bureaucratic normalizers of the upheaval. It is notable that when Silent Generation politicians started to leave office in 2025, a Boomer President was the one to strike down “civil rights” laws such as the anti-white Equal Opportunity Executive Order which was signed by Lyndon Baines Johnson in 1965.
The controversy at the University of Illinois over Koch in 1960 and Oliver in 1964 were representatives of the two revolutions of the 1960s. The first – leftist, pro-African, and ultimately pro-reckless sex were personified by Koch. The second social revolution, mildly pro-white, viciously hostile towards communism, and able to draw inspiration from the Classics or the Bible were personified by Oliver.
What is striking about this controversy is that it was not the usual affair of a group of Bolshevik, ethnonationalist Jews against old stock American Yankees. The people involved were ethnic members of Wilmot Robertson’s American Majority. All were from closely related groups common in the Midwest. Leo Koch was a Russian German, George Stoddard and Miriam Shelden were of Old New England Stock. Most, including Oliver, were old stock Midlanders, either Anglo or Pennsylvania Dutch, who had roots in the Delaware River Valley in colonial times. All save Oliver supported “civil rights.” Oliver however recognized the threat to his people and acted accordingly.
Enjoyed this article?
Be the first to leave a tip in the jar!
9 comments
I know of a private college which got through the 60’s relatively unscathed by the radical movements of the time. It had some liberal professors, but it also had conservative administrators who were willing to stand their ground (many conservatives back then were different from “conservatives” of today). When a handful of radical students were planning to hold a demonstration on that campus, ca. 1970, the administrators prevented it by saying “no,” and the local police were willing to help if necessary. This college also kept strict rules for campus life well into the 70’s, including same-sex dorms. Since it was a private college, the administrators maybe had more power over such things than they would at public universities. But it shows that things didn’t all have to go in one direction at the time. A lot of academic administrators in the 60’s and 70’s did cave in, allowing the radical students to do what they wanted. The “Progressivism” and cultural liberalism which had been developing since the early 1900’s probably had captured the minds of many of those weak administrators. They had rules and laws that they could fall back on, but they chose to be liked by the “cool kids” instead.
You mentioned Alfred Kinsey and his books on sexuality. I think that those books were more influential than some of us today seem to recognize. And Kinsey was funded in part by the Rockefeller Foundation. His work was comprehensively discredited later on, but the damage was done. The (((Usual Suspects))) were also undermining things, but they had non-Jewish counterparts too. Hugh Hefner was another.
I’m sure that the whole story of the 60’s hasn’t come close to being written yet. As some Boomers have already mentioned, we weren’t all hippies and yippies and deluded liberals, by a long shot. But the loudest voices often got their way.
Nice book review laying out the major proponents and opponents of the civil right movement, as well as the Silent Generation. The war veterans and Boomers are dealt with and Revilo Oliver is given his due.
American Nazi Party Commander George Lincoln Rockwell, who attended Brown University in Rhode Island, which is one of the “Ivies,” said in a mid-1960s interview that he considered the modern American universities to be infested with Marxism and that he would never send his kids to any of them except for the private Christian schools ─ Bob Jones and Brigham Young.
“I never saw any peace-creeps running around over there,” the Commander said.
Today I would agree wholeheartedly that all of the American Universities are Marxist. I don’t know about BYU today. People can get stabbed to death in their student housing by mystery men and PoC in any college town.
When I went to BYU-Idaho in the early ’80s it wasn’t Marxist and nobody had ever heard of Cleary Act crime reports. But I strongly resented the in loco parentis principle of the school.
This might be okay for young teenagers at a boarding school, but I had already been a couple of years out of High School and had already done a hitch in the Army, where I was known as an exceptionally straight-laced guy who did not even smoke or drink. In those days you could drink if you were 18 on a military base, and off post if you were 19, but there were still serious booze problems, and I don’t disagree with moving the drinking age to 21 at some point during the Reagan Administration.
College Freshmen might be a special case, but I just don’t think treating adults like children trains them to be better adults. We can set priorities, but there is no magic age for accountability.
Part of the draw for BYU-Idaho in those days was that we had students from all over the country, Canada, and overseas whose parents had sent them to an LDS private school in small-town Idaho expressly to keep them out of trouble.
My roommate was from New Zealand, and I remember a tall guy in a hockey costume who introduced himself to us in the dorm hallway.
“I’m from Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, eh.”
That guy probably could have drunk Bob and Doug McKenzie under the table and the school’s strict Honor Code may not have helped him.
Basically the Honor Code was: No alcohol, no tobacco, no coffee (or decaf), no black tea, no sex outside of marriage, no cheating, etc.
There was also a dress code. Girls were supposed to wear dresses or slacks, no jeans, no “Butch” hairstyles. Tatts were probably a big no-no too but few had them in those days so I don’t remember. Shorts were a no-go for both boys and girls while in class. Boys could wear jeans but T-shirts were discouraged in class, and they had to have shortish-styled hair and be clean-shaven while in class. No handlebar moustaches. My New Zealand friend wore a Hitler mustache for awhile after unceremoniously being asked to trim the handlebars, and nobody said anything further.
The Honor Code was agreed to in advance and signed by all students in front of an LDS Bishop, and I never had a problem with it and never violated it. The dress code part didn’t really apply if you were not in class.
However, it became tiresome very fast to go take an exam at the Testing Center on a Saturday and then find out that some helpful dweeb had flagged you with an Honor Code violation for sporting a five-o’clock shadow, and I now had an appointment the first thing on Monday morning with the Dean of Student Life. Who did I kill?
So that is my experience with in loco parentis and it still miffs me a little to this day.
It is not hard to find examples of extreme academic institution hypocrisy either, should you be so inclined. The African sportsball players seemed to get away with lots of egregious Honor Code violations. I guess banging half the cheerleaders is expected of them. BYU-Idaho concentrates on academics now and no longer even has its own sportsball team. I don’t really understand why any Universities do. The sportsball team is all that the administrators really care about.
This kind of moral hypocrisy was the same at State U. For example, I had a History professor who was fired for flunking an African student on the sportsball team because he rarely attended classes and did no actual coursework.
“But if you give him the F he will lose his athletic scholarship?”
My professor stood his ground and therefore got fired. Most of his colleagues backed up his side of it, and he did get his job back after a few years of arbitration with the University. He even took another advanced degree while unemployed in the meantime. I don’t remember if he had been tenured or not. This professor was a bit eccentric and once paid off a small IRS fine in pennies.
It distresses me greatly that the usual suspects have literally “marched through the institutions,” and I am not sure exactly what should be done about it. That the Universities are Marxist is no exaggeration, perhaps the administrators even more so than the professors.
The Leftist mask fell off when Trump was first elected in 2016. Like cockroaches, Marxists don’t do so well when exposed to the cleansing light of day ─ and they don’t like freedom-of-speech if they disagree with “you Nazis.” It has been amusing to watch the fear and loathing that has bubbled forth from the reelection of the Trumpenführer to a non-consecutive Presidential term.
If a little moral and political pressure has a disruptive effect, then maybe a little more would actually effect some real change.
🙂
Leftists gained a critical mass in a lot of faculty departments so that, during the hiring process, they could easily weed out those who weren’t considered ideologically acceptable. And I noticed that they became more blatant in their hiring biases in recent years. In multiple academic-related job interviews which I had, I was asked questions such as, “How have you promoted Diversity?” I’m sure a lot of people have been asked that in interviews recently for corporate jobs too.
When I went off to college, I was probably a lot less mature than you were, so I would have benefited from a big dose of in loco parentis. There was almost none of that in the college where I went, so I learned a lot of “extra-curricular” stuff the hard way, wasting a lot of time and effort floundering around. But I can see why you would have resented some of those rules in your situation.
And yeah, college athletics for the most part became just a minor league for the professionals, with lots and lots of media coverage and huge money involved. I think that some Division III leagues still don’t allow athletic scholarships, which helps, but in general it got completely out of hand, like you described.
In multiple academic-related job interviews which I had, I was asked questions such as, “How have you promoted Diversity?” I would’ve gone into smart ass mode just to make tomorrow’s headlines. “Absolutely ma’am. I promote the *****rs in afrika, jeets in india, ***nks in china, and b****rs in mexico. But no jews. Am I hired?”
Ha! Yeah, I wish I had been clever enough to say something like that! They probably would have turned me down for certain things in my resume, anyway.
I can think of at least one guy I’ve known in my career whose response to a question like that about actively supporting Diversity was something like “well, Affirmative Action is discrimination, by definition.”
They usually chalk up that kind of pushback to that person just being “old fashioned,” and that they are essential to the mission somehow, which probably is not something that younger people can easily fall back on at the beginning of their careers.
Having once been a shop-steward for a big electrical workers union in the broadcsting industry, I have a decent understanding of how HR drones and management operates ─ when to push back and when not to. They tried to do some pricey woke-Negress consultant “Chicago Defender” -style struggle sessions with us awhile ago, and I refused to participate and seemed ready to call in some unfavorable attention to the concept. They excused me from the struggle sessions without penalty and seem to have backed off a bit, and are even in retrench and demoralization mode given Trump’s reappearance.
More White people need to be willing to give them some simple pushback on egregious things. Unless you’re an HR bigshot who actually can control hiring and so on, I don’t see the value in pretending to be Woke. You just don’t want to reactively play the role of bigot for anyone, and thus play into their hands, however much you might want to.
🙂
Basically the Honor Code was: No alcohol, no tobacco, no coffee (or decaf), no black tea, no sex outside of marriage, no cheating, etc.
There was also a dress code. Girls were supposed to wear dresses or slacks, no jeans, no “Butch” hairstyles. Tatts were probably a big no-no too but few had them in those days so I don’t remember. Shorts were a no-go for both boys and girls while in class. Boys could wear jeans but T-shirts were discouraged in class, and they had to have shortish-styled hair and be clean-shaven while in class. No handlebar moustaches. So like, what can you do there? I’ve noticed that BYU (I’ve never seen the Idaho campus) has an unusual amount of good looking White people. If there’s one college that could use a dose of liberalism in the sex arena to up those breeding numbers, it’s in Provo. When I went to SLC for a few days the women there weren’t too shabby either considering where I’m from.
Well, the girls are at BYU to get some well-rounded education, and especially if they ever need it to make a living for their family for some reason. But mostly the girls are there to get their “Mrs. degree.”
For the guys, basically you study, get good grades, maybe go on a church mission ─ often the girls do this too ─ and then you just need to finish out your education, get married, and get a real job. Mormons don’t generally have small family sizes; anywhere from three to six kids is typical.
There were some really nice girls on the Idaho campus, and I had quite a few nice dates, but I just was not interested in a life with religious people.
There is still a problem with getting useless degrees at BYU that there aren’t any real jobs for, but that problem is true everywhere.
It is pretty easy for LDS graduates to get sensitive jobs that require tight security clearances, because they don’t have the usual vices. Otherwise, these days it is hard to find a High School graduate that can even be bonded to work for a bank because they already have long rap sheets with booze and drugs or worse.
But I disagree with the meme (not sure where it comes from) that all the Feds and Deep State spooks are LDS, or that they are unusually pro-Israel. Not that many of my classmates had much interest in a military career, for example, and the ones that did were like me and not particularly religious.
However, in my time, there were a lot of patriotic people who neverthless felt strongly about the Cold War and vigilance against Communism.
Mormons also have a latent skepticism about ZOG and the ultimate trustworthiness of the government, which is one reason why each LDS family has traditionally been asked to have a large food storage plan for disasters and whatnot ─ where others wet their pants at the first sign of a hurricane.
In 1976, I saw this first hand when the Teton Dam collapsed and a wall of water went down into the Snake River plain. It hit Rexburg hard, bordering the college campus, which is on a slight hill. You could literally see many people’s houses just floating downstream. I had been having a flying lesson in Idaho Falls that day as part of the Civil Air Patrol, and later I helped sandbag with my Dad and Uncle at the city powerplant on the Snake River, which was in danger. The old Broadway bridge nearly collapsed.
I go up to Idaho for vacations and to visit family occasionally and there are lots of nice looking tall blond girls in their summer short shorts. The ones without the tattoos are probably Mormons. I am appalled, however, because every quaint town filling with California refugees has a full-blown Pride festival in June, and the Mormons seem not to notice. My reasoning is that all faiths ultimately have feet of clay. Every downtown Salt Lake City shop sports an overkill of Pride flags. This to me is the face of Globalism.
🙂
If you have a Subscriber access,
simply login first to see your comment auto-approved.
Note on comments privacy & moderation
Your email is never published nor shared.
Comments are moderated. If you don't see your comment, please be patient. If approved, it will appear here soon. Do not post your comment a second time.