A University President’s Answer to Safe Spaces

Oklahoma Wesleyan University President Everett Piper has a bad attitude toward “safe spaces.” He’s right. Here’s a note from Everett posted on OKWU’s Web site.

This is Not a Day Care. It’s a University!

Dr. Everett Piper, President

Oklahoma Wesleyan University

This past week, I actually had a student come forward after a university chapel service and complain because he felt “victimized” by a sermon on the topic of 1 Corinthians 13. It appears that this young scholar felt offended because a homily on love made him feel bad for not showing love! In his mind, the speaker was wrong for making him, and his peers, feel uncomfortable.

I’m not making this up. Our culture has actually taught our kids to be this self-absorbed and narcissistic! Any time their feelings are hurt, they are the victims! Anyone who dares challenge them and, thus, makes them “feel bad” about themselves, is a “hater,” a “bigot,” an “oppressor,” and a “victimizer.”

I have a message for this young man and all others who care to listen. That feeling of discomfort you have after listening to a sermon is called a conscience! An altar call is supposed to make you feel bad! It is supposed to make you feel guilty! The goal of many a good sermon is to get you to confess your sins—not coddle you in your selfishness. The primary objective of the Church and the Christian faith is your confession, not your self-actualization!

So here’s my advice:

If you want the chaplain to tell you you’re a victim rather than tell you that you need virtue, this may not be the university you’re looking for. If you want to complain about a sermon that makes you feel less than loving for not showing love, this might be the wrong place.

If you’re more interested in playing the “hater” card than you are in confessing your own hate; if you want to arrogantly lecture, rather than humbly learn; if you don’t want to feel guilt in your soul when you are guilty of sin; if you want to be enabled rather than confronted, there are many universities across the land (in Missouri and elsewhere) that will give you exactly what you want, but Oklahoma Wesleyan isn’t one of them.

At OKWU, we teach you to be selfless rather than self-centered. We are more interested in you practicing personal forgiveness than political revenge. We want you to model interpersonal reconciliation rather than foment personal conflict. We believe the content of your character is more important than the color of your skin. We don’t believe that you have been victimized every time you feel guilty and we don’t issue “trigger warnings” before altar calls.

Oklahoma Wesleyan is not a “safe place”, but rather, a place to learn: to learn that life isn’t about you, but about others; that the bad feeling you have while listening to a sermon is called guilt; that the way to address it is to repent of everything that’s wrong with you rather than blame others for everything that’s wrong with them. This is a place where you will quickly learn that you need to grow up!

This is not a day care. This is a university!

The only thing I’d add to this is my own disdain for precious snowflakes who want to blame others for causing the snowflakes’ own character shortcomings.

 

h/t PJMedia

Political Commitments

Presidential candidate Donald Trump, early in his campaign, refused to rule out running as an Independent, saying he didn’t want to give up the leverage.

Then he very publicly signed a pledge not to run as a third party candidate and to support the Republican nominee.

Now he’s renewing his threat.

Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump suggested Sunday that he would be open to running for president as an independent if he concludes Republicans aren’t treating him “fairly.”

With this demonstration of the value of his word, in what way is Trump distinguishable from the Democrats against whom he purports to be running—as a Republican or as an Independent?

“Refugees from War Aren’t the Enemy”

That’s the title of “The Editorial Board’s” opinion piece in their New York Times Wednesday. I used quote marks in that prior sentence because the persons who wrote this absurdity lacked the moral, much less the intellectual, courage to sign their names to it. The lede is this:

The House is expected to vote Thursday on HR 4038, the American Security Against Foreign Enemies (SAFE) Act of 2015, which Republican sponsors say “would put in place the most robust national-security vetting process in history” for refugees, one that would “do everything possible to prevent terrorists from reaching our shores.”

The opinionists then proceed to distort that explanation: their title says it all, but they make things explicit with this claim in their penultimate paragraph:

…it is fair to say that the people who will be denied resettlement by this bill would be the victims of war….

No, that’s not the case. This bill simply looks to ensure that the terrorists are adequately sorted out from refugees and the former barred.

No one, as even this Board knows, is arguing that refugees are the enemy. This is the NYT‘s straw man. Those worthies will have to play with their dolly without me.

Legitimate Terrorism

Because if you angrify the terrorists in a specific way, their response is justifiable anger.

That’s what the motorboat skipper who sits in the Secretary of State’s chair is saying, John Kerry, anyway.

There’s something different about what happened from Charlie Hebdo, and I think everybody would feel that. There was a sort of particularized focus and perhaps even a legitimacy in terms of—not a legitimacy, but a rationale that you could attach yourself to somehow and say, okay, they’re really angry because of this and that.

No, not everyone. Certainly not anyone with any capability to discriminate evil from good. Only someone blind to reality, someone like a John Kerry, would feel that.

Thirteen more months of this sewage. And of the damage this…person…will cause.

Free Speech According to the Left

On Tuesday afternoon an Israeli academic was shouted down by two dozen protesters as he tried to begin a lecture before about 100 students and faculty at the University of Minnesota. The speaker was Moshe Halbertal, a professor at NYU Law School and a professor of Jewish thought and philosophy at Hebrew University.

Dr Halbertal had been invited by the university to give the lecture, and after the disruption, he was able to proceed.

The gang of protestors bragged about it.

Today, this apologist for Zionist war crimes spoke only sporadically, as his lies were interrupted again and again by protesters who refused to listen to his anti-Palestinian hate speech.

And not only that. This gang did their best to deny everyone else their right to listen to the speech. The right of those others to determine for themselves what they will listen to is strictly in the hands of this gang. Free speech, according to these, is limited to the freedom to speak or to hear only that which these personally approve.

The silence of the rest of the Left—not even the Star Tribune, a newspaper local to the region, spent any column inches on the thing—is clear: the Left as a whole agrees with this view that only speech of which the Left approves may be freely spoken.