The Occidental President

The buffoonery is in full effect at California’s Occidental College, according to this piece by Mike Adams, a professor at the University of North Carolina. Occidental President Ted Mitchell has used a shock jock’s potty mouth as an excuse to shut down the entire student government, among other inanities. According to the college president, the radio host’s offensive expression was — I hope you’re near your fainting couch! — “masquerading as open expression.” (I’m not sure how, exactly, you can “masquerade” openly; masquerading seems like an inherently furtive enterprise to me.)

Here’s the best part:

In another bizarre twist in the Occidental case, Title IX officer Horowitz blames Jason Antebi for labeling a segment on his show “token black girls.” Horowitz states that the label “is sexist as well as racist, an epithet that implies an adult has a job, or for that matter a college admission that she does not merit.” The problem with Horowitz’s accusation is that the segment was actually dubbed “token black girls” by one of the African American women (a friend of Jason’s) featured on the segment, who discussed race issues from the perspective of an African American female. Of course, Antebi’s speech would still be protected if he had indeed used this label in a derisive way, but the term was simply being used by African-American students to mock tokenism in higher education. For that, Antebi is dubbed a racist and a sexist.

Please direct all outraged emails to President Mitchell here.

Want more? The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (who else?) has the goods.

UPDATE Uh-oh. President Mitchell’s bio page says: “A Dartmouth professor from 1981 to 1991, Mitchell chaired the department of education [of course] and was co-chair of the academic senate for three years.” So that’s where he learned it….