Sunday, August 09, 2020

At Converse College, One Professor Asserts His Conscience against Political Correctness

By An Old Friend
Sat, Aug 8, 2020 11:49 p.m.
"At Converse College, One Professor Asserts His Conscience against Political Correctness"



Refusing to be a party to Converse's indictment of America as systemically racist, Jeff Poelvoorde dared it to do him its worst.

America has become a land of leave-takings. Some silent, others with considerable bravura. Americans are sundering their ties with things long close to their hearts: a sport, a product, a profession. Sometimes this is involuntary, as when the cancel culture smites the sender of an incautious tweet. Sometimes it's via a burst of indignation: the fans who won't brook athletes kneeling to the anthem. Sometimes it's both, when demands are robustly defied. "Here I stand, I can do no other."

Each widens an already yawning cultural fissure. On one side are those who see America as basically a land of freedom and justice; on the other, those who see it as one of profound inequity. The latter are now overwhelmingly dominant in academe.
A small but notable act in this drama is playing out on the campus of Converse College, a 130-year-old women's institution in Spartanburg, S.C. There, Jeff Poelvoorde, an associate professor of political science, decided last week that he's had enough with the new knownothingism. Refusing to be a party to Converse's indictment of America as systemically racist, he dared it to do him its worst.
What's interesting about his case is not its occasioning, nor its yet-undecided result, but its uncompromising assertion of the supremacy of the conscience — which places Poelvoorde in a long and storied tradition in the history of our civilization.
Not long after the death of George Floyd, Krista L. Newkirk, Converse's president since 2016, issued a statement attributing the event to systemic American racism. She further asserted that systemic racism haunted Converse's campus. A number of initiatives were accordingly announced to exorcise the local demon, including mandatory "anti-bias training." Only one voice rose publicly against it: that of Professor Poelvoorde.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

" Professor Poelvoorde isn't faced with loss of life. Nor is he Christian, for that matter, but as a lay leader in three synagogues"

I imagine that those synagogues will now be pressured big time to oust the man and declare him Jewish persona non grata.