PrintJudge Sotomayor and Higher Learning
Ever wonder why young Americans graduate from college without ever having read Alexis de Tocqueville, Edmund Burke, Descartes, Goethe, Cervantes, Gibbon or Tolstoy? Well, you can thank young campus crusaders like current Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor for helping to remove the rich European cultural tradition from its esteemed position on the college curriculum.
Back in 1974, when Sotomayor was a member of the “Puerto Rican and Chicano Students of Princeton” she penned a letter to the Daily Princetonian charging the university with “an institutional pattern of discrimination.” Sotomayor argued that the university was on a mission to “relegate an important cultural sector of the population to oblivion.” In other words, since Puerto Ricans made up about 15 percent of the population of the area surrounding Princeton, the university was consigning this cultural sector to “oblivion” by not accepting more Puerto Rican applicants.
In her essay, the young Sotomayor let slip a profoundly disturbing statement that those of us concerned with the quality of higher education in this country ignore at our peril:
“What good is it to know about what happens west of the Urals if you do not know what is happening a few miles around you?”So for Sotomayor it doesn’t do me any good as a student to read Montesquieu, Locke and Adam Smith or study the decline of Rome or the Glorious Revolution in England if I’m not familiar with the Puerto Rican neighborhoods a few blocks away. One has to wonder why Sotomayor obviously never asked herself why Puerto Ricans were coming to America in the first place.
Cultural relativism however was the first stage of a stealth project by radical students and professors to undermine and later smother the European tradition altogether. This has always been the sham of what is known today as “diversity.” Diversity as most of us know by now has always been a “united” front against any and all things white, conservative, and European.
Why did Judge Sonia Sotomayor refuse to respect the achievements of white firefighters in New Haven, Connecticut? The reasons are becoming so very clear to all of us right now.
