The Multicultural Elite

Harrisburg, Pa.—Every now and then, someone from the multiculturalism industry admits that the battle for campus market share has been won and all that is left is to divide up the spoils. “Today we are not struggling,” Professor Michael Benitez said at a conference here. “We are far from struggling.”

“We are at the other end of entitlement.” For example, five states, including Wisconsin, Oregon and California, have created the post of Director of the Union of Progressive Students.

Dr. Benitez finished his talk with a rap/riff that featured lines like “the streets of Alabamy are paved with red emotion” and “affirmative action, now affirmative privilege.” His presentation was entitled “Redefining Activism in the Age of Conformity.”

“Youth are in Bubbleland and college students are in Bubbleland,” Dr. Benitez observes. He spoke at the Pennsylvania division conference of the National Association for Multicultural Education (PA-NAME).

Dr. Benitez, who directs Lafayette College’s Office of Intercultural Development, is positive that he knows what ails the planet. “We are living in a world where we are enslaved,” he said at the PA-NAME conference. “We are slaves to society and to capitalism.”

He also runs the David A. Portlock Black Cultural Center at Lafayette. In that capacity, he brought Angela Davis to the campus at Easton.

“Professor Davis’s political activism began when she was a youngster in Birmingham, Alabama and continued through her high school years in New York,” her own University of California web page states. “But it was not until 1969 that she came to national attention after being removed from her teaching position in the Philosophy Department at UCLA as a result of her social activism and membership in the communist party.” She has, of course, since been rehired, albeit at a different campus in the system.

“You’re an expert only on your own experiences,” Dr. Benitez told the audience at the conference at the branch of Penn State here. “Anything else you experience second-hand.”

Of his lecture at the PA-NAME conference, the program explains that “This workshop addresses the growing decline in student engagement across college campuses with diversity and social justice in the socio-cultural academic community by making connections between historical philosophy and contemporary practice.”

“We can learn a lot from the right wing,” Dr. Benitez told the audience. “They took our strategies from the 60s, they raised money and they became the transformers.”

The transformation that he sees is not one he is particularly enamored of. “I listen to Bush give a speech and I feel dumber,” Dr. Benitez said. “I feel the need to read a book.”

“I’m sorry if I offended anyone but that’s me using my academic freedom and not the kind that [author and activist David] Horowitz talks about.” Dr. Benitez serves as an adjunct faculty member at Duquesne as well.

The PA-NAME conference program claimed that the Benitez symposium “touches on history, activism, intergenerational privilege, and issues of apathy and conformity, followed by discussion on practical activism, neoliberalism and the formulation of ideas as they pertain to campus involvement and systemic change.”

So what exactly does the affable young man with the lively intelligence want to change? Well, for one thing, “We’re still teaching Columbus,” he said.

“It’s been disproven long ago.” He did not say by whom, where or when.

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.