The College Fix

The good news? The Weekly Standard reports that the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs has disavowed itself from the annual White Privilege conference. For years the university’s name – and the fact that it offered its students credit to attend – gave the event a certain level of academic clout. Thankfully it appears that will no longer be the case.

The bad news is, the event will still go on because it has become a “freestanding nonprofit,” the Standard reports.

The university blames the pullout on negative press.

“The relationship with the conference ended as a result of confusion about its name and the negative attention generated by it. University leadership, in concert with the conference organizers, determined the distraction caused by the conference was not beneficial to our student body,” a campus spokesman told The Weekly Standard.

However, a closer look at the agenda might reveal the real reason for the pullout. Charlotte Allen reports for The Weekly Standard:

I like to think that my cover story for the May 27, 2013, issue of The Weekly Standard, “Beyond the Pale,” was a key part of the “negative attention” that the White Privilege Conference had received. I had attended that year’s White Privilege Conference near Seattle, and it had struck me as a three-day festival of white self-loathing coupled with finger-pointing at white people for their supposedly “unearned” wealth and social status afforded them simply by reason of their skin color. The same went for males, heterosexuals and Christians—which necessitated the four solid days of white-bashing, male-bashing, heterosexual-bashing, and Christian-bashing that made up the conference agenda. The bashing was supposed to be good, not just for guilty whites but for members of minority groups whose private paranoias about the way they thought white people secretly felt about them found expression in the conference’s offerings. Workshops bore such titles as “Talking Back to White Entitlement,” “Follow the White Supremacist Money,” and “Engaging White People in the Fight for Racial & Economic Justice.” 

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