This Week's Hell's Letters: Letter to the President of the University of Michigan

Note to the reader: Please read the President's letter at the url below, to which the present letter refers: http://www.umich.edu/pres/speeches/index.html

To: Mary Sue Coleman, President, University of Michigan ([email-masked])
From: John 'Birdman' Bryant (www.thebirdman.org)
Date: 15 Nov 2006
Thanx: Brett

Dear Ms Coleman:

I am webmaster of http://www.thebirdman.org/ , a popular webpage that gets more than a million hits a day, and I was wondering if you could answer some questions relevant to your 8 Nov 2006 paean to diversity and affirmative action in light of the recent passage by Michigan voters of 'Proposal 2' which apparently made such policies illegal. Here are my questions:

Rejected by Michigan University

* If fairness is so important to you, then why do you embrace anti-white discrimination? (That's what 'affirmative action' is, you know.) More specifically, why don't you just formulate University admission policy on the basis of objective qualifications, without consideration of race? If you did that, THEN THERE COULD BE NO RACIAL DISCRIMINATION. But of course, what you WANT is racial discrimination, and specifically, YOU WANT TO DISCRIMINATE IN FAVOR OF BLACKS. (Affirmative action isn't an issue in the case of other minorities, like Jews and Asians -- they do as well as whites, or better, in objective qualifications.) So tell me why your desire to discriminate against whites is justified -- after all, it was racial discrimination that the Civil Rights movement was designed to get rid of, and here you are perpetrating it -- just on a different race.

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* Since, as everyone knows, 'diversity' is a code word for diversity in racial, ethnic and sexual populations, why is this diversity so important? If your answer is 'so people of different races, etc, can learn to live together', then why do you view this as a function of an institution of higher learning whose traditional job has always been to give instruction in academic subjects? Furthermore, why do you see as a good thing the bringing together of a racial, etc, admixture of students, when studies and experience have overwhelmingly shown (see black scholar Thomas Sowell's books, for example) that racial etc diversity is a formula for racial, etc, tension -- tension, I might add, which is a DISTRACTION FROM THE MAIN POINT OF THE UNIVERSITY'S SUPPOSED GOAL OF ACADEMIC EDUCATION?

These 'People of color' got scholarships

* If you are so interested in diversity with respect to race, etc, then why do you seem uninterested in diversity of IDEAS, and particularly a diversity of ideas which would challenge the liberal nostrums about race, etc, which you seem to hold? Or to put it another way, why is it that those who oppose the liberal nostrums on race, etc are shouted down as 'racists', 'haters' and the like, and are subject to university sanctions or restrictions, while the ideas embraced by liberals receive the university's imprimatur?

* Why do you say that "we will fight for what we believe in, and that is holding open the doors of this university to all people", when in fact the university should NOT be accessible to all people, and in particular should not be accessible to the people who are not academically or intellectually qualified to take its courses?

I will be publishing my letter on my website, and will be happy to publish your response along with it, plus any further letters that we may exchange.

-Birdman

[Mary Sue did not respond.]

University Of Michigan Issue