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Cambridge College removes historic bell from view, amid fears it was used on a slave plantation
Mindless virtue signalling. They are desperate for something to protest about
A Cambridge College has reacted to the university wide inquiry by removing a historic bell from view, amid fears it was used on a slave plantation.
St Catharine’s College believe that the Demerara Bell, which was donated by alumni Edward Goodland in the 1960, “most likely” came from a slave plantation.
The bell remains in place but has been “shuttered” off from view while the College investigate its origins.
Founded in 1473, St Catharine’s counts the broadcaster Jeremy Paxman and the actor Sir Ian McKellen among its alumni.
Last month, Cambridge University announced that it will launch an inquiry into how the 800-year-old institution benefited from the slave trade.
Researchers have been commissioned to pore over the university’s archives to how much it gained from the “Atlantic slave trade and other forms of coerced labour during the colonial era”.
The two-year inquiry will examine whether financial bequests made to departments, libraries and museums were made possible from the profits of slavery.
The inquiry only covers university-owned buildings and faculties, but it is understood that Colleges are following suit and investigating their own links to the slave trade.
Gill Evans, emeritus professor of medieval theology and intellectual history at Cambridge University, said that College will “all want to jump on the bandwagon”.
She told the Daily Telegraph: “It has now become a reputational damage issue. This is clearly the next line of worry. No College will want to be the last ones to do it.”
Mr Goodland studied at St Catharine’s from 1930-33 and went on to become a successful industrialist, running a factory that made sulphuric acid and cement.
He was appointed as the technical director at Bookers Sugar Estates in the then British colony of British Guiana, which is now Guyana, according to the archived issues of the College’s magazine, St Catharine’s College Society.
Mr Goodland donated the eighteenth century mission bell with the inscription "De Catherina 1772” to the College a few years after his arrival in British Guiana in 1958.
It was initially hung in a belfry outside the Porter’s lodge where it was used to “summon College residents to food and to prayer”, the magazine says but in 1994 it was moved to a less prominent position in one of the accommodation blocks.
The Booker Group, which was the UK's largest food wholesale operator and founded the Booker Prize for literature, controlled most of the sugar industry in British Guiana at its peak and was so powerful that the country was referred to as "Booker's Guiana".
A spokesperson for the College said: “As part of the ongoing reflection taking place about the links between universities and slavery, we are aware that a bell currently located at the College most likely came from a slave plantation.
“A more detailed investigation is under way into the bell’s provenance as part of a wider project researching the College’s historical links to the slave trade.”
Dr Miranda Griffin, the College’s senior tutor, said it is important for St Catharine’s to “acknowledge historical links to slavery and the slave trade”.
She added: “As an academic community, we will continue to conduct rigorous research into all aspects of our past and to reflect on our commitment to diversity, inclusion and asking challenging questions.”
SOURCE
I’m a College Student. Here’s Why I Oppose Socialism
In the 2016 presidential primaries, 2.1 million people under age 30 voted for democratic socialist Bernie Sanders. But do young Americans really know what it means to live under socialism?
Cambodia, like other countries in the past and present, offers clear evidence of the outcomes of socialist policies such as the Green New Deal championed today by many liberals in the U.S.
Bopha Sayavong, a family friend of this reporter, lived in Cambodia in the 1970s when it was under both socialist and communist control. She survived the government’s work camps and was able to come to America in 1981.
“People that refer to themselves as the millennial [generation], they have no clue what socialism is,” Sayavong, now a pharmacist in Illinois, told me. “I lived in both socialism and communism, and then I lived in the world of the U.S. One thing I can tell you is there is no place like the U.S.”
However, the enthusiasm with which millennials advocate socialist policies suggests an ignorance about history, markets, and government. This is in part due to the failures of the education system.
Liberal arts courses in the United States are ripe with the opportunity to teach the proper context needed to understand the consequences of socialism and communism.
However, the education system’s failure to connect the dots leaves students with the impression that socialism is a venture yet to be tested.
“People think it’s so wonderful, it’s so fantastic, but that’s not true,” Sayavong said. “It’s just like a painting—it looks fantastic. But when you live in it, then you know it. It brings me pain to even think that our children go that far [consider socialism].”
American college students have the luxury of viewing the world from an ivory tower, combating injustice through thought experiments.
Students approach the world’s problems as if this were a game in which there are no consequences, and every variable is easily known and controlled. They say: “If we could remove markets, there would be no poverty, and if the government made the decisions, there would be no oppression.”
This critique of higher education has been made many times over many years by conservative academics. William F. Buckley Jr. shocked the academic world with his 1951 book “God and Man at Yale” and its scathing critique of the liberal bias at Yale University.
Still, to this day, higher education doesn’t provide a more rounded view of the world.
History classes fail to teach that notions such as socialism already have failed the test of time, and the outcomes have birthed nothing but pain and suffering.
For example, 2 million people died between 1975 and 1979 at the hands of the communist Khmer Rouge regime. Headed by Pol Pot, that regime put Cambodians, including Sayavong’s family, in work camps.
That’s almost as many dead as the number of young Americans who voted in 2016 for Sanders.
Other such experiments include the Soviet Union, Vietnam, Cuba, and now Venezuela, all of which produced some of the most severe human rights violations known to man.
Economics classes in college fail to teach students that capitalism provided ubiquitous products such as the iPhone that almost every student takes for granted. These classes also fail to teach that competition and innovation provide affordable goods and services, as opposed to oppressing the poor.
Lauren Chen, a conservative YouTube blogger based in Canada, stated the issue clearly April 14 on “The Ben Shapiro Sunday Special” when she said: “Millennials don’t know who people like Pol Pot, or Stalin, or Mao are, which is kind of to me what being a millennial is all about—all of the enthusiasm with none of the knowledge.”
Just as college campuses don’t solve the world’s problems, Capitol Hill doesn’t solve the country’s problems. A few congressmen can’t pull a few levers and push a few buttons to secure equality.
The swipe of a pen at the bottom of a nonbinding resolution “creating” the Green New Deal doesn’t eradicate poverty.
“I do believe in equality,” Sayavong told me. “I want … no rich, no poor, all even; but as a human being, think about it: If the government tells you what to do, how to eat, how to breathe, how could that be equal? They are above you.”
Firsthand experience with socialism and communism has been around to offset academia’s utopian visions for a long time.
Perhaps because unlike baby boomers and Generation X they don’t have wars to fight, millennials and Generation Z have the privilege to disengage from history.
SOURCE
This STEM-focused, prank-loving school in remote northern Maine is No. 2 in the nation
A selective school
LIMESTONE, Maine — This town 2 miles from the Canadian border is home to five churches, a post office, an ATM but no bank, Mike’s family market, a hairdresser, and a nonprofit coffee shop that runs on donations. There is no stoplight.
It is also home to the second-best public high school in the entire country, according to new rankings from U.S. News & World Report.
Even the administrators at the Maine School of Science and Mathematics are a bit baffled as to how the tiny magnet school beat out 17,000 other high schools across the nation.
“I really didn’t believe it,” Alan Whittemore, the dean of enrollment, said about seeing the rankings posted online. Initially, he thought perhaps one of the computer geniuses at the high school had hacked into the U.S News rating system.
M.S.S.M., as the students call it, is not a typical public school. It’s a boarding school, but tuition is free for all students from Maine; room and board, though, is $9,300 a year. A rigorous application process requires prospective students to submit SAT or ACT scores, recommendations, and essays. The school has about a 75 percent acceptance rate, according to Whittemore. There are no set grade levels: Freshmen learn alongside juniors and seniors, taking whatever class fits their interests and skills.
The students are very bright and the isolated setting, in a part of the world where winter stretches on endlessly, nurtures an offbeat and intensely close community, as if a girl who could recite 70 digits of pi and a boy who spoke exclusively in iambic pentameter got together and designed a school for kids just like them.
“They’re intensely clever, all the time. They’re very curious, all the time,” said Mark Rhodes, the wiry and energetic head of the math department, who is greeted in every classroom he enters with shouts of “Dr. Rhodes!”
Like about half the faculty, Rhodes lives on campus in housing provided by the school.
Rhodes used to teach at Colby College, but got bored. Now he teaches upper-level math classes at the high school and is not bored at all. The students keep him entertained intellectually, both in terms of academics — one freshman recently took multivariable calculus — and through a series of elaborate, cryptic pranks in his classroom.
For example, Rhodes arrived one day to find a map of California (blue, ordinary) sitting on the floor. He picked up the map, contemplated it briefly, and discarded it on his desk. The next day there were two identical maps of California sitting on the floor.
“Uh oh,” he said. And so it continued, one more map each day. He gestured around the room: Six cardboard boxes filled with maps of California under his desk. Neat bundles of maps of California were stacked on nearly every surface. He now has thousands of maps of California. The students are able to keep a running total using the sum of the first n natural numbers.
“What’s this place like in the winter?” he joked. “They find things to do.”
Classes are rigorous, almost like college, and infused with a kind of humming nerd excitement and sense of purpose. A free period is spent testing a handmade robot’s journey through an underwater obstacle course. When the stars come out, students set up their telescopes for astronomy class. About half the school’s 130 kids are on the competitive math team.
During a two-hour biology lab, students crunched through the woods behind the school, avoiding pockets of snow, and gathered around a tree. George Johnson, an affable 18-year-old who was nominated to be prom king this year and is a self-described libertarian, volunteered to walk deeper into the prickly brush to help with the identifying. Spruce or fir?
“Yeah, there’s resin blisters,” Johnson said from behind the trunk.
“It’s a fir!” shouted Haileigh Luce, a junior.
“If you grab it and it doesn’t poke you, it’s a fir,” Debbie Eustis-Grandy confirmed.
The students learned about everything they saw: They discussed grouse droppings (“pelletized cellulose,” Eustis-Grandy explained), how an alder tree prevents self-fertilizing, and why dogtooth violets bloom so early. One student pointed out a rainbow; Eustis-Grandy explained it was actually a halo caused by the refraction of sunlight on ice in the atmosphere.
In a classroom outfitted with a couch and a poster detailing Kurt Vonnegut’s theory of the shape of stories, Sawyer Lachance, 18, Skyped with his literature teacher, who is on the verge of retiring and is currently teaching from Cape Cod.
“We’ve been talking off and on about what the role of the novel is,” Lachance said.
M.S.S.M. was founded in 1995, a year after the Limestone area was decimated by the closure of the Loring Air Force Base and the resulting loss of more than a thousand jobs. Families moved; the former elementary and high school buildings emptied out. Then-governor John McKernan proposed a math-science magnet school, and the state Legislature approved. Classes take place in the town’s old high school, and the dorms are in the converted elementary school.
Students from all over the state attend, as well as international students — 13 currently, hailing from South Korea, Russia, Ukraine, China, and Italy. Otherwise, the school is mostly white, with Asian students making up 9 percent of the student body and black and Hispanic students together making up just 2 percent.
Maine pays the tuition of state residents, but international students pay full fare — $34,300, plus room and board and a nonresident fee for staying with host families during breaks.
Racheal Jeon, 19, is from South Korea; she heard about the school through an agency in Seoul.
“I didn’t know where Maine was. I didn’t know where Limestone was,” she said, while eating from a pint of Cherry Garcia ice cream and examining her calculus homework. “It shocked everybody in my family that it was farther north than Toronto.”
Whittemore calls the school a “working person’s boarding school,” noting that 40 percent of families are on financial aid to cover room and board. Still, it’s tricky to compare M.S.S.M. to traditional public schools, which have no fees, and, typically, no criteria for admission.
“If you’re trying to rank them, it’s probably not a particularly useful or fair rank, in the sense that they’re so different,” said Casey Cobb, a professor of education policy at University of Connecticut who has written extensively about magnet schools and school choice. Even in admissions processes where anyone can apply, like at M.S.S.M., the ones who do are typically more privileged, Cobb noted; they know how to find out about such programs and negotiate the application process.
“That system, even though it seems really fair, it’s advantaging those already in advantage,” Cobb said. “It ends up, I think, being a little bit like a semi-private school.”
The school was first ranked nationally in 2007, last year it didn’t make the cut at all, and in 2017 it ranked No. 19. The dining hall made a sheet cake to celebrate that year.
The kids weren’t too invested in the No. 2 ranking this year, but they remain hopeful that there will be cake before finals begin, when they will need to really hunker down and get to work.
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