Pat’s Polemics

When three goofy professors publish a paper suggesting we try harnessing mice to carriages to replace the car, the pundits declare the end of the university. It has been over 25 years since I’ve taken a college class but I spoke with students who had left my classroom for college plus I’ve attended many lectures on campus. I admit to being a bit taken aback at my first sight of an Islamic veil on campus but some crazy yelling by students seemed no different from my day 60 years earlier. I recall liberal profs and conservative ones and I have a hard time believing the business department is full of Marxists – one or two, maybe.
But I do recall on teacher a couple of years before I started college who daily harangued me, the only kid from the North in that Alabama classroom, about the evils of people she did not call Negroes. She used a scene of graphic violence as to what she would do if a Black ever sat next to her mother at a ball game (??!!). No one stopped her nor did any of her colleagues remotely behave like her.
So I can use her to point up a system of racial privilege and immunity she had without condemning the whole school or public system other than for its strict racial segregation. But my later high school in Phoenix was de facto segregated while my wife was forced to attend high school where Black students like her were a tiny minority.
OTOH, no one reads my posts here except Wes who set my blog up for me. So perhaps if I were to depict my misadventures in Dothan as routine and horrifying, traumatizing me for life, I might get a few more hits. Just sayin.