It's important, in the polemics biz, to not gratuitously rant about every instance of higher-education shamefulness. They come down the pike with such regularity that we risk becoming inured to the cultural rot they further.
Occasionally, though, a story points up a particular kind of rot with such egregiousness that it must be remarked upon.
I guess you know who Suze Orman is. She's one of the superstars of the financial-advice-for-everyday-folks field, alongside Dave Ramsey. She's about empowering people. She's about as uncontroversial as one can get.
Well, except in the eyes of the trade association for student-affairs administrators. That's the bunch that's in the field of offering guidance to college and university students sorting out the life decisions facing them.
Their collective view of how to go about their work is downright chilling, as the American Enterprise Institute's Frederick Hess recounts:
It’s one thing to insist that we need to address systemic challenges and structural barriers when talking about economic circumstances. It’s quite another to insist that anything else is verboten and to shout down talk of personal agency as “tone-deaf, uninformed and out of touch with the current socioeconomic climate.” Yet, that’s where the nation’s higher education establishment finds itself.
On Wednesday, financial advice guru Suze Orman delivered the keynote for the annual conference of NASPA: Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education (yeah, the acronym doesn’t match the name—don’t ask). Orman, who for decades has been a successful television personality peddling a combination of straight talk, encouragement, and basic financial know-how, delivered precisely what one might expect. Orman emphasized the importance of financial literacy, urged student affairs workers to push for better pay and more opportunities, and addressed the “obstacles to wealth” that an individual can control.
The problem? Some vocal portion of the audience was outraged that Orman didn’t wade into “systemic barriers to wealth such as class, race or gender.” (Oh, and Orman referred to the South Side of Chicago, where she grew up, as “the hood” and “the ghetto.” If those terms are to be memory-holed, though, someone really should tell all the equity-minded academics who frequently use them in their writing.) While the complaints immediately took off on social media, there’s no way to tell how widely shared the concerns actually were—whether they were broadly shared or were the handiwork of a bullying few.
Either way, within hours of Orman’s remarks, NASPA’s leadership blasted out a cringing official apology, begging forgiveness for having “missed the mark” by inviting a speaker who made comments “offensive to your lived experiences and to our NASPA values.”
The apology went on to insist, “We cannot discuss financial literacy without first acknowledging the inequitable and unjust systems that have prevented Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, Queer, Trans, first-gen, low-income, and many other historically minoritized and marginalized communities from attaining education and generational wealth.”
The organization went out of its way to throw Orman under the bus, opting for a familiar tone in declaring that “Suze’s comments tied self-worth to financial progress, ignored the difficulties that many individuals experience when navigating existing systemic structures and tools, and used offensive language to describe the area of Chicago in which she grew up.” Of course, NASPA has also said it will refuse to release the speech, making it impossible for any observers to judge this slur.
It’s appropriate to note that systemic issues can and must be part of any conversation on compensation and opportunity. But even Orman’s most determined critics were quick to acknowledge that, as Inside Higher Ed put it, her “address was not representative of the overall conference.” In other words, the issue was not whether systemic issues should be on the agenda, but whether an invited keynoter could talk about anything else.
The answer: apparently not.
The stampede to disavow and belittle Orman may have been depressingly predictable, given that surveys find that left-leaning student affairs administrators outnumber right-leaning ones by a ratio of 12-to-1. When campus life is managed by those only too eager to kneecap an accomplished keynote speaker that they invited, the troubled state of free inquiry on campus is even easier to understand.
You know, these higher education professionals might want to think about this a bit. Given that they work in a sector whose whole existence is premised largely on the notion that taxpayers and students should pay for colleges because they help people achieve better lives, a wholesale denunciation of personal agency seems like a perilous stance. If an emphasis on personal agency truly is irrelevant, or even offensive, it raises grave questions about how we think about the future of higher education.
Ya got yer "unjust systems," doncha know.
By the way, this is a great opportunity to point out once again that only about 3 percent of Hispanics like the term "Latinx."
This push by the Left to make sure that our society never comes to a consensus that we look at each other as individuals rather than demographics that are either oppressed or oppressing is gathering momentum at a terrifying pace.
Those orchestrating this have one end in mind: their own power. They have to keep large swaths of post-America viewing themselves as victims in need of government protection and provision in order to secure their perches in the catbird seat.
The damage is great and undoing it is going to require a level of courage that we'd better get prepared to muster.
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