Vermont’s Middlebury College Should Not Receive Federal Funding

DEI, CRT, and anti-Semitism must go!

Middlebury College was a bastion of eugenics theory a century ago. The school today teaches an offensive array of racist ideologies that are indistinguishable from its eugenics advocacy of yesteryear. Middlebury College seeks to scapegoat former Vermont Governor John Mead for modest pro-eugenics comments made a hundred years ago, obscuring its active and ongoing neo-racist teachings. The Trump Administration should turn a critical eye toward this fountain of toxic, patently racist Critical Race Theory (CRT) and DEI.

Middlebury prides itself on its strong DEI curricula, demonstrating that it has not learned from its past errors of race-focused ideology. The ACLU charges that Trump’s efforts to enforce the U.S. Constitution and equality on publicly-funded campuses “corrode[s] principles of academic freedom,” but the opposite is the case — Middlebury teaches subjects that are corrosive to American law, culture, and public safety.

Middlebury has been charged with antisemitic policies that “failed egregiously to provide adequate protection for Jewish students seeking to remedy persistent antisemitic bigotry on campus.” It has realigned its bold DEI policies from its “Office of Institutional Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” (OIDEI) to Student Affairs and the Office of General Counsel. It maintains these unconstitutional, race-centered policies in the deceptive name of “promot[ing] critical engagement, collaboration, and full participation.” Yet, the school has demonstrated the opposite — it does not tolerate critical engagement that questions DEI or CRT.

A description for a course titled “White People”states:

White people did not just appear out of nowhere. Instead, they are the result of a long history of structural and everyday racism that was always intertwined with class, sex, sexuality, and nation. We will explore how whiteness became a foundational category for citizenship in the US, especially after the Civil War when the Color Line was drawn through the legal, cultural, and spatial practices of Jim Crow. We will consider how ‘new immigrants’ and even white ‘trash’ became white primarily through the exclusion of Black Americans. Finally, we will look at the formation of whiteness today as a site of privilege, aggrieved entitlement, and violence.

This course, and the tiresome racism that has saturated Middlebury College’s mission, administration, and instruction for many years, is in direct violation of President Trump’s anti-DEI Executive Order, which “faithfully advances the Constitution’s promise of colorblind equality before the law.”

Another Middlebury College course offering is “Decolonizing Porn”, which incorporates the text of Jennifer Nash’s The Black Body in Ecstasy and edifies students with yet more CRT:

In this course we will use feminist, queer, critical race, and decolonial theories to analyze porn in Europe and the Americas. The goal is to give students the analytic tools they need to think deeply about the centrality of porn to our lives and to global capitalism….

Middlebury staff “anti-racism” book recommendations consist of far-left racist agitation parading as enlightened texts, including Ibram Kendi’s largely discredited tome, How to Be an Antiracist. Kendi’s book turns Middlebury’s pretentiousness of being a fount of critical thinking upside down. To quote Kendi,

One endorses either the idea of a racial hierarchy as a racist, or racial equality as an anti-racist. One either believes problems are rooted in groups of people, as a racist, or locates the roots of problems in power and policies, as an anti-racist.

By this definition, Middlebury College is blatantly racist. It centers identity on race, imposes a hierarchy based on stereotypes of race, labels all white people racist, and implements inequalities of opportunity in the name of equity. Kendi rants that,

Americans have long been trained to see the deficiencies of people rather than policy. White supremacists blame non-White people for the struggles of White people when any objective analysis of their plight primarily implicates the rich White Trumps they support.

Middlebury College is saturated with policies focused on the alleged moral deficiencies of white people. The unproven victimhood of “people of color” (not “colored people”) is used to blame white people for the struggles of black people when any objective analysis negates these racial slurs.

Missing from Middlebury College’s reading list are brilliant books by authors of color, including Coleman Hughes’s The End of Race Politics, and John McWhorter’s insightful Woke Racism, which condemns the cultish race ideology spewed by outlets like Middlebury College as literally a race-focused religion:

Something must be understood. I do not mean that these people’s ideology is ‘like’ a religion. I seek no rhetorical snap in the comparison. I mean that it is actually a religion.

In his seminal study of the statistical perversion of CRT, Thomas Sowell revealed the direct parallel of the progressive eugenics movement of the early twenty-first century (of which Middlebury College was a leading proponent) and its close cousin today:

In the early twentieth century, the key factor behind economic, intellectual and other disparities among different groups was assumed to be genetics. That view was as dominant then as the opposite view today that disparities in outcomes imply discrimination. American colleges and universities had hundreds of courses on eugenics then, just as many academic institutions have courses — and whole departments — teaching that outcome disparities imply discrimination.

[snip]

American Progressives took the lead in promoting genetic determinism in the United States then, as they later took the lead in promoting the opposite presumption that disparities imply discrimination in the second half of the twentieth century. On both sides of the Atlantic, and in both eras, leading intellectual and political figures were in the forefront of those promoting the prevailing presumption of their times. (Thomas Sowell, Discrimination and Disparities, p. 25.)

Middlebury College does not embrace critical discourse on race issues — it practices and encourages racial divisions and stereotypes. It is repeating its past intellectual failure of advocating for the eugenics movement by perpetuating an unconstitutional race-based elitism that is a betrayal of healthy race relations. Middlebury embraces Ibram Kendi’s racist notion that “The most threatening racist movement is not the alt right's unlikely drive for a White ethnostate but the regular American’s drive for a ‘race-neutral’ one.” In doing so, it unwittingly proves Kendi correct when he writes that “Racist ideas love believers, not thinkers.” A “race-neutral” society is the Constitutional law of the land, violated boldly by Middlebury College.

American taxpayers must not be unconstitutionally compelled to financially support such hateful dogma and accompanying anti-semitism. President Trump and the federal government must suspend all funding for Middlebury College until it ends its illegal racist policies and instruction.

(Originally published at American Thinker.)