Welcome to the Poison Ivy League

Columbia University has announced that starting in the spring it will designate student and faculty bathrooms as “White” and “Colored.” 

Segregation is important for students to have a clear sense of their own cultural identity, the administration did not say.

Things have gotten so insane in Woke America that this could almost be true. It is not true.

But this is: Columbia in April will offer six virtual graduation ceremonies segregated by race, nationality, gender, even income level.

Welcome to the Poison Ivy League, where academics demonstrate why they are a danger to America.

The hypocrisy, sanctimony, division and unAmericanism is so thick it’s hard to know where to begin to slice the pap pie.

I will begin by saying Columbia is not the first university to turn back the clock and engage in separate, but equal, which we have been taught all of our lives is intrinsically wrong, and unequal.

The multi-cultural graduations are actually unicultural. They supposedly “honor” students’ “diversity,” says an announcement on the school’s website.

“These events invite community members to reflect on personal growth and community experiences that have impacted their time as students through to graduation,” says the website, while at the same time announcing the segregated events are open to all students. Huh?

The separate ceremonies are for Black, Latino, Asian, Native American and LGBTQ+ students, plus one for FLI — first generation or low income students. Yes — a new oppressed minority!

Columbia is trying to have it both ways, or six ways, and also will stage the, um, white(?) big graduation that everyone can attend. How many graduation ceremonies do you need? I was happy to get one at my municipal college. (Go Brooklyn!)

The obvious question is this: Why do not Jewish students and Muslim students get separate ceremonies? Anti-Semitism? Islamophobia?

Where is the ceremony for Pacific Islanders? Hutus? Bulgarians? Each has something “special’ about them. 

When you start dividing people it’s hard to know where to stop, like eating Lay’s potato chips. “Betcha can’t mollify just one.”

If you are biracial, can you attend two of the segregated ceremonies? If you are biracial and gay and poor, can you go to four? It gets ridiculous, doesn’t it?

The hypocrisy continues, as noted by the Black Enterprise website when it reported on a deadline for nominating students for multi-cultural graduation cords “who have demonstrated an outstanding commitment to inclusion, global diversity, social justice, and multiculturalism.”

Get that? The cords for inclusion, diversity and multiculturalism will be awarded at a ceremony that has none of those virtues.

This is not entirely new. Many colleges have received requests from Black students for separate dining facilities, housing, and graduation.

Here’s where I become Dean of one of those schools.

“If you want a graduation ceremony, or dining halls, or housing, restricted to Black students, you should have gone to Howard University, or another Historically Black University or College, but even there you would find white students mixed in.

“The purpose of this university is to educate and broaden you, not to constrict you. The purpose of this university is not to protect you from others who are ‘different,’ but allow you to engage them on safe terrain. That’s why there are no ‘safe spaces’ here, because there are no bomb shelters in the real world to protect you from strange ideas.

“If you choose to eat with others ‘like’ you, that is a free choice for you to make, but I will not designate ‘white’ and ‘Black’ and ‘gay’ and ‘straight’ tables. Nothing could be more harmful. I will not normalize segregation. I will not institutionalize segregation.

“Student housing will be assigned randomly. There will be no ‘white’ dorms and no ‘Black’ dorms.

“There will be only one university graduation ceremony, for all who have earned the right to attend. If any group chooses on their own to sponsor an additional ceremony, they may do that, using campus facilities, at their own expense.”

Maybe even more damaging than the race separation is the twaddle of income stratification.

In an era where social justice warriors are demanding that all housing be multi-income and multi-cultural, for every kind of diversity you can shake your booty at, here we have a university — despite questionable good intentions — celebrating a kind of caste system. Isn’t that the tokenism the Left is supposed to hate?

The national motto is e pluribus unum, which means “out of many, one.”

That motto is aspirational, because we have not always lived up to it, and in some respects we still do not. But it remains the goal.

The goal is not to take the “one” and shred it into many.

Those who separate us are not celebrating us.

They are destroying our national fabric.

They do unimaginable harm, and I wonder why they do it. Is it simple ignorance, or is it hate of our country?