This is how you do it: Make woke academics live up to their own rules

American Thinker ^ | 31 Jan, 2023 | Andrea Widburg

[MtnClimber]

At the University of Richmond, the heirs of a benefactor whom a leftist board erased call out the hypocrisy and make some big dollar demands.

Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals” apply to all radicals, including those who take the radical position that patriotic constitutional conservativism is a good thing. Conservatives need to enshrine his sixth rule: “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” That’s the wonderful move the descendants of T.C. Williams made when the University of Richmond deleted his existence.

The University of Richmond is a private liberal arts college in Richmond, Virginia, the former capital of the Confederacy. It was founded as a Baptist institution in 1830 and officially became a college in 1843. During the Civil War, its entire student body enlisted in the Confederate Army, while its buildings were a hospital for wounded Confederate troops.

The college fell on hard times after the Civil War and was saved thanks only to a $5,000 donation ($93,332 in 2023 dollars) in 1866 from James Thomas. Thomas’s papers are at the Duke University Library, which describes him as “one of the largest of antebellum tobacco manufacturers.” If he wasn’t a slave owner, I’ll eat my…well, I don’t have a hat, but I’d eat it if I did. No schools or buildings, however, carry his name.

And then there’s the law school. It was founded in 1870 but got its real boost in 1890 when T.C. Williams, a trustee, passed away, and his family donated $25,000 ($803,999 in 2022 dollars) to start an endowment for the law school. That endowment was so important that, by 1920, the University of Richmond renamed the law school. Up until last year, it was The T.C. Williams School of Law.

[MtnClimber]

Alinsky RULE 4: “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.”

If the rule is that every letter gets a reply, send 30,000 letters. You can kill them with this because no one can possibly obey all of their own rules. (This is a serious rule. The besieged entity’s very credibility and reputation is at stake, because if activists catch it lying or not living up to its commitments, they can continue to chip away at the damage.)

[MtnClimber]

However, the college kept T.C. Williams’s money, leading to the beautiful and brilliant thing T.C. Williams’ descendants have done: Acting via their attorney, Robert C. Smith (also a descendant), they’ve demanded that the University return the money, including compounded interest, for a total of $51,000,000.

[Renfrew]

Fun move, but legal nonsense. Even if the will had iron clad stipulations those would be void by now due to the rule against perpetuities.