True Story: According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, “scholars across the country have signed an open letter to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum asking that it retract its June 24 statement condemning all analogies to the Holocaust.”
Sorry, scholars. Too little, too late.
The Museum’s condemnation of analogies has prompted a flurry of similar actions by other organizations around the nation. Here are the most recent ones:
— On July 3rd Major League Baseball sued the President of Colby College for his claim that the school had “hit a big league home run” in hiring a new Provost with credentials from the prestigious University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom.
According to MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred, “there is no evidence that Colby’s President, or any member of its Board of Trustees, has ever played professional baseball, much less hit a home run in a game. His assertion demeans the achievements of every Major League player in history who has launched a four-bagger. For the love of God, stop using such language, especially in praising someone who comes from a country that believes cricket is actually a sport.”
— Acting U.S. Secretary of Defense Richard V. Spencer called out the Chancellor of the University of Tennessee on July 10th for her comment that the school “was waging an all-out war against budget cuts to higher education by the state legislature.”
Speaking at a hastily called press conference, Spencer maintained that “the draft-dodging faculty at this ivory-tower cupcake of a university wouldn’t know how to mount a strategic military initiative if the Pentagon gave them an instruction manual using nothing but one-syllable words. In war, Dear Chancellor, people get shot, they bleed, and they die. They live in trenches and foxholes for weeks at a time, stink to high heaven, and eat beef jerky for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. When’s the last time you did anything like that? The day you’re prepared to drop the Big One on the state capitol building while the legislature is in session, you can talk to me about waging war. Until then, stand down and shut up!”
— Finally, there is the beyond-embarrassing episode at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, where the UNLV President characterized a recent 3-hour meeting of the Faculty Senate as a “clusterf**k in which absolutely nothing worthwhile was accomplished.”
In a July 15th letter to the President, the Executive Director of the Nevada Association of Brothel Owners (NABO) indicated that “we are deeply offended by your use of the term in question to describe a dysfunctional faculty gathering. NABO takes pride in furnishing its customers with reasonably priced activities bearing the name that you trashed. Indeed, these services at our facilities consistently receive yelp ratings that average 4.85 or higher on a 5-point scale. You have taken a perfectly good word and smeared it. If you want to criticize the way your faculty run their meetings, by all means do so, but not at our expense. Thank you.”
A point well taken.