On a symbolically cold and rainy October morning in northern Mississippi, the beautiful and stubborn state flag was torn down from its post in the Circle. In a direct insult to the state of Mississippi, its people and tens of thousands of students and alumni, the university’s senior “leadership” chose to capitulate to the racist, extremist forces of the “Black Lives Matter” movement.
Defying his opportunity to show leadership and extol the virtues of the University Creed, Interim Chancellor Morris Stocks instead decided to further divide the university while ignoring the traditions and unifying associations of Ole Miss.
So be it. If the university wishes to have nothing to do with its history and proud Confederate heritage, then why stop at the state flag?
Let’s bring down the American flag, as it has flown over racial injustice and oppression many times over the duration of the Confederacy. In the spirit of destroying our Southern identity, let’s strike the name Ole Miss and its antebellum connotations.
Tear down the Lyceum and any building with antebellum styling as they could only represent the society built on the backs of enslaved Africans.
Topple the statue of the Confederate soldier, exhume the bodies of Confederate dead behind the Tad Smith Coliseum, as Black Lives Matter activists have suggested cities across the South do with other Confederate graves.
If it sounds ridiculous, it is.
It’s embittered, petty and nonsensical. But it’s the full extension of the “logic” spewed by our school’s identity-obsessed racial provocateurs. Some of these suggestions have already been made as looming targets to strike after the flag.
These efforts, led by the likes of the College Democrats and the NAACP (who still, in this day and age, cling to the offensive phrase “colored people”) and continually propagandized by The Daily Mississippian, are hypocrites of the utmost degree.
While calling for reconciliation, they incite strife on campus, driving a wedge into the community by demeaning Ole Miss and using institutional power to remove tangible elements of its culture.
In tearing down the state flag in the name of adherence to the UM Creed, they commit the most egregious violations: rejecting civility and fairness by falsely calling whole groups of people or things racist, denying peoples’ dignity by ridiculing their heritage and destroying communities through their divisionary tactics. All of this done to further a larger liberal agenda, each step an experiment into how far they can push decent people to buy into their particular brand of lunacy.
If these destructive miscreants represent the university’s greatest cancer, the school’s administration would be akin to a doctor preferring leaches over chemotherapy.
While a diversity of political opinions and worldviews is expected and encouraged on a college campus, university leaders – including its deans and chancellors – should maintain a campus where all who wish to integrate can be supported and defended when challenged, including the symbol of the very state that provides for the school’s existence.
Lacking a mandate to even consider action, the university leadership chose to kowtow to radical, fringe elements within the university and censor yet another beloved and unifying university symbol: Mississippi’s official voter-approved banner.
If the administration truly believed that taking the flag down and bowing further to the willfully ignorant would improve the racial division on this campus, they were painfully mistaken.
As sad a day as this was for Ole Miss and all who love her, this serves both as a painful lesson and dire warning to those not yet infected with the pestilence of racial prejudice or guilt: that nothing is sacred. Self-loathing liberals and red-in-the-face race baiters have done more to destroy our beloved university than the Union soldiers who once burned it down could ever hope to.
Hateful agitators, despite apparently being “oppressed” to the point of tears, terror, and rally by inanimate objects, voluntarily chose to attend this school. Yet they have no desire to integrate into nor reconcile their issues with it. Instead, they submit the rest of us to their twisted will.
If we as students, faculty, staff, alumni and appreciators of the University of Mississippi and the state of Mississippi stand by apathetically while our school is torn down bit by bit, we’ll continue to watch as what was a great university becomes an embarrassment, a shell of its former self. If we cease speaking truth to power, we can only expect to lose more tangible and nostalgic icons and symbols.
Meanwhile, we should all hold dear to what makes Ole Miss special. Despite the rainy day, despite the ill-will, despite the sadness of attending a university that rejects its own home and its history, good and bad. No longer the University of Mississippi, but a University of Nowhere.
Andrew Soper is a senior business major from Tupelo.
Here is the opposing guest column we published on the same issue:
http://thedmonline.com/opinion-changes-have-made-ole-miss-a-better-place/
