On January 7th, Dr. Philip Tisdall arrived at the Elm Street Mezzanine to find a few early bird students and a new comer, a young adult male of African descent with very formal posture and dress. The man introduced himself as Mr. Islam, a member of faculty recently hired in a multicultural capacity related to Muslim students, himself being Muslim. As they chatted, it struck Dr. Tisdall that Mr. Islam had a unique rhythm to his speech. This being the Academy, with its international student body, and Islam being a recent addition to America’s religions, Dr. Tisdall asked Mr. Islam where he was from. Mr. Islam drew himself up and pronounced he was from Philadelphia. Dr. Tisdall told him that he would not have guessed that from his speech pattern, and they discussed his error. Mr. Islam noted that he had come from a long line of preachers, which made sense to Dr. Tisdall, as African-American churches had always struck him as a unique subset of American culture. By this time everyone had arrived and the meeting had started. Knowing that Mr. Islam was new, Dr. Tisdall made a very clear announcement of the Club’s only rule: Don’t be offended.
By January 15th Dr. Tisdall had been officially banned from campus, courtesy of Dr. Curwen, the Academy’s Dean of Faculty, on the premise that he had told Mr. Islam something to the effect of that he had never heard a black from the Philadelphia projects speak so eloquently before. From the accounts I have been given by Dr. Tisdall and Dean Walsh, the only student present throughout the entire encounter, there appears to have been a gross distortion of what actually happened. Despite these unsettled details, within a week the
de facto nucleus of the Republican Club – a man who had voluntarily served for six years as our teacher, mentor, and friend, had quietly slipped off into the dark. As anyone who has sat through a frustrated round of Harkness knows, there comes a time when you must tear off your mask and call people out on their shit. I believe that our administrators have crossed the line. Yes, the school is theirs and they have the right to run it as they see fit. But as long as I am able to evade Room 101 I intend to use whatever powers I have as a student to stand against what I see as wrong.
Club members often say that they have a difficult time commenting on race at the Academy because they feel that their views are externally defined by liberal stereotypes about Republicans. In this way, we live with dualistic conceptions of self: one that is produced and interpreted by ourselves, and another, a “myth” forced upon us by an oppressive society that produces and interprets its own perception.
I believe that a multicultural school must accept that we
are different. Culture is everything that does not need to be explained. What is the purpose of subsidizing the $73,000/year tuitions of youth from every quarter if asking them about their different cultural axioms is deplored as taboo? Did I misinterpret the phrase “embrace our differences?” Treating everyone equally is quite different than treating everyone as though they are the same. Culture
matters. When the foremost indicator of poverty is the absence of one’s biological father, how can we so swiftly ignore the plight of the inner-city African American family unit? Why is it so terribly inappropriate to question the effectiveness of welfare cheques funded by coercive taxation when such programs have been in effect since LBJ’s 1964 War on Poverty? Why must functional questions be consistently misconstrued as discriminatory? Is there really nothing to be learned from our African Americans, Koreans, and Indians, our Jews, Muslims, and Hindus, our rich and our poor? I do not know Mr. Islam well enough to pass any judgment on him personally, but why, when asked how his community viewed caring for its elders in the midst of a social security discussion, did Dr. Tisdall have to practically go through a thesaurus to find the right synonym for “community?” Why was Mr. Islam’s immediate response, “What do you mean by
my community?”
When the sincere interest in other cultures is co-opted by a group of self-important intellectuals absorbed in a self-affirming, “I’ve done my part” circle jerk, what has been won? Tolerance is a one-way deal for liberals – they have all of the rights and none of the responsibilities. It’s tacitly engineered that way. At some point, all this cannot go on, and we will have the academic version of September 2008 — as parents no longer choose to spend $200,000 to send their children to a 4-year prep school in which they will be likely indoctrinated that they should oppose the very American institutions that created the wealth and freedom that fuel our endowment and pay our faculty. The “best of the best” seem to be unaware that after some 2,500 years of both experience with and abstract thought about Western national economies, we know that a free, private sector increases the general wealth of a nation, while a statist redistributive state results in a general impoverishment of the population.
The Republican Club was never really about being Republicans, it was about having a safe haven where we could be honest and know that our intentions, however clumsy our expression, would not be mistaken. Will we ever feel safe there again? Who cares what it is called if the Thought Police are there – will we ever feel free to speak our minds? What then is left? Over the past years, that's
years, the Club was always a place we could feel free to say the things that were on our hearts, but punishable by our liberal teachers if said in class. The Club was about trust. If Dr. Tisdall can be "banned" for something he didn't say and isn't true, that Club has ended. The Academy has done irreparable damage to its claim of being an institution of intellectual openness, multiculturalism, and diversity by stifling discussion of diversity and acting punitively toward an intellectual minority.
Of his childhood surroundings, David Lynch recalled, “It was a dream world, those droning airplanes, blue skies, picket fences, green grass, cherry trees – Middle America the way it was supposed to be. But then on this cherry tree would be this pitch oozing out, some of it black, some of it yellow, and there were millions of red ants racing all over the sticky pitch, all over the tree. So you see, there’s this beautiful world and you just look a little bit closer, and it’s all red ants.”
– Jimmy
