The Swarthmore Daily Gazette has utterly failed its student body and it would like to issue a sincere and full apology.
You see, on Monday, the Daily Gazette, the voice of Swarthmore College, printed an opinion column with a conservative viewpoint, overestimating the capacity of Swarthmore students to accept an opinion that might depart, in substance, from the standard liberal pedagogy.
Today, they acknowledge that the column did not meet with its “rigorous” editorial standards — “We Fucked Up,” as the apology is headlined — and such an incident will never happen again.
The opinion column in question, which still appears on the Daily Gazette, is titled “The Admissions Office Doesn’t Care About Your Values.” It begins with an in-depth investigation into how the Swarthmore admissions office bypasses traditional routes in investigating a student’s need for financial aid. It ultimately defends the admission’s office’s practice of allowing wealthy students to attend the private university — a complaint Swarthmore social justice warriors frequently voice against the administration.
Eventually, the column gets around to making its point: that wealthy students subsidize the social justice warriors, allowing them to spend their days promoting their hyper-liberal agendas, while paying little in actual tuition to the college of their choice.
“Demonizing wealthy students is not productive because, in the end, they are paying not just for their own education but also for the education of their hyper-liberal classmates who resent the upper class at its core,” the author says. He then suggests that “aided students warmly say ‘thank you so, so much for being forced to pay for my opportunity’ instead of ‘check your privilege.'”
Cue Swarthmore’s outrage.
According to the Daily Gazette editors, the suggestion — in an opinion piece — that Swarthmore’s liberals are funded by their wealthy classmates “has no factual basis,” (implying, of course, that Swarthmore’s social justice warriors are also wealthy, of course), and that the suggestion to “stop whining” was “just plain offensive.”
People are allowed to have opinions, the Daily Gazette editors cried, but those opinions cannot be conservative — opinions they declared a “self-satisfied” profession of “insidious classism.”
Swarthmore students looking for outrage can still read the column, which will remain up for educational reasons. Don’t worry, though: there’s a trigger warning.
