Posted on 02/19/2024 6:09:04 AM PST by MtnClimber
Left-wing racialism has become the lexicon of the Ivy League, so it is only natural that its feeder schools have adopted it as well—partly out of idealism, partly out of cynicism.
The most prestigious of these is Phillips Exeter Academy. The school has graduated senators, diplomats, generals, and titans of industry. In the past, this meant assimilating the manners and mores of America’s elite Protestant culture. Today, it means drilling students in ideological concepts such as “white privilege,” “white fragility,” and “queer theory.” The Exeter man is prepared to rule or, at a minimum, to conform to the culture of those who do.
I have spoken with a recent graduate and obtained documents that show the shocking extent to which Exeter has assimilated fashionable left-wing ideologies of race and gender, which stand in stark contrast with the founding mission of the school and the common conception among many of its alumni. (Phillips Exeter Academy did not respond to a request for comment.)
The story begins with the 2020 death of George Floyd. Following the lead of Ivy League presidents, Exeter principal Bill Rawson published an open letter promising to “combat the pernicious legacy of systemic racism that Black people and other people of color face each and every day.” To do this, Rawson continued, “will require a willingness, particularly on the part of the white members of our community, to be actively and effectively anti-racist.”
“Black lives matter,” Rawson pleaded. “Black voices matter.”
Since then, Exeter officials have established large-scale DEI initiatives designed to overhaul administrative and academic life in accordance with BLM-style ideology. Individuals are subordinated into racial groups, such as “BIPOC” and “LatinX,” and administrators work on “building anti-racism practices in academics, dormitory life, extracurricular activities, assessment and discipline, and college counseling.” Policies include an informal affirmative-action program for “Faculty of Color” and formalized training in “anti-racism.”
Meantime, the coursework has degraded serious subjects into pure ideology. English has become an “exploration of racial identity”; history focuses on “transgender identities”; economics examines “racialized and gendered” forms of “income inequality.” There are courses with titles such as “Mathematics of Social Justice,” “LGBTQ+ History,” and “The Intersection of Science, Health and Race in America.” A course on Shakespeare examines the Bard’s work through the lens of “race, gender, [and] sexuality,” and promises a “queer reading of Twelfth Night.”
Victimology has become the language of America’s elite, and so, by inheritance, it has become the language of Phillips Exeter.
Not everyone is thrilled with this turn of events. Justin Rigg, son of Exeter graduate and noted Holocaust historian Bryan Rigg, graduated from Exeter last year and describes the school’s culture as monolithically left-wing. The faculty pushes the ideological line that “America is a fundamentally racist country” and that “oppression can only stem from identity.” Consequently, white students are treated as oppressors and minority students as oppressed, regardless of their background.
“It’s comical,” says Rigg. One minority student, the child of a billionaire, presents herself as oppressed, while a white scholarship student, who has experienced genuine hardship, is considered an oppressor. “The only oppression they accept is racialized or identity-based oppression,” says Rigg. “All other forms of oppression are moot, null, and void.”
On gender, students are expected to conform to the dictates of queer theory, state their pronouns at the beginning of each semester, and address their fellow students and faculty with neologisms such as “they/them” and “ze/zim/zir.” They face immense pressure to participate in the social rituals of gender. Rigg estimates that approximately 40 percent of female students in his class identified as “queer,” “trans,” or “nonbinary.” The reason is not, he believes, because so many genuinely believed themselves to be transgender but that they were “pressured to conform to this ideology simply because [they] don’t want to be socially ostracized.”
The ideology is upheld through formal and informal controls. The Office of Multicultural Affairs serves as an ideological enforcer, and students are encouraged to report one another for violations of race and gender orthodoxy. Students, too, serve as informal enforcers. “Whenever students see someone or something they view as antithetical to their ideology, they are very quick to protest, coordinate, organize,” Rigg explains. They drum up anonymous social media campaigns against transgressors or, if that fails, report them through official channels.
In sum, despite abstract commitments to “diversity and inclusion,” the environment at Exeter is intellectually repressive. “My father is a Holocaust historian and I’ve been raised with what I would consider to be a decent understanding of the history of totalitarianism in the twentieth century,” Rigg says. “What the culture reminded me of at Exeter was similar, in that, if we thought someone was committing ‘thoughtcrime,’ we certainly had the avenues and the encouragement to report on that individual.”
I also contacted several alumni who were angry about Exeter’s recent transformation but reluctant to come forward, given long-standing family ties to the school and the risks of publicly criticizing elite institutions.
Rigg, however, did not share these reservations. When I asked if he would like to remain anonymous in this story, he responded without hesitation: “I think it’s cowardly to stand for something behind the guise of anonymity, so I will definitely put my name out there.”
If more people had adopted this fearless approach years ago, America’s elite institutions might not find themselves so deeply bound by ideology as they are today.
Thought crimes are everywhere. I found a library of thought crimes in my own head.
An important part of the “America is racist” propaganda is the suppression of reports of how racist are other countries.
Example: when Black citizen enters a UK bus he’s greeted with “monkey noises.” Same thing if it’s a Black substitute in a game.
I know this because I read UK media. US media knows it but to keep their jobs, employees suppress it because “US is racist”.
All this from what was considered the top prep school in the world.
Tuition is in the range of $70K/year.
IF I was a billionaire, and could afford to send my son or daughter to a place like this, I would reconsider.
The fact is that most very rich people are not stupid. They are NOT indoctrinated liberals. IMHO, this would be bad for business. If you can afford to send your child to any private school in the world, why send them to a place that teaches this BS.
There are many other elite prep schools that do not promote this crap. Send your kids to Holderness instead.
Or move to somewhere there are good public schools
White fragility? Good God...where do I begin?
Where in the US, pray tell, is that?
Exeter is on of a handful of what are known as “ feeder schools “ that funnel their grads into prestigious universities like Harvard aka a “ivy school”
When I went to college I had several classmates from Phillips Exeter. Privileged class, for sure, well prepared academically; but ready to rule, hardly. Even then (60s) they were run of the mill liberals.
Actually the public schools in NH are rated as some of the best in the country.
Right down the street from my office in Nashua, NH is The Academy of Science and Design. It is a NH public Charter school. It is a middle & high school. It is free to all NH residents. However, you have to test to get in. Then because of demand, they have a lottery to get in.
It is ranked as the number one high school in the state of NH. Some MA residents PAY to bring their children to this school. The border is about eight miles south.
FYI, they have no major sports teams. No lighted football stadium. One of the only sports teams are track and field.
Busing is provided for students who live in the city of Nashua. If you live outside of Nashua, you need to deliver your children to school. Therefore, every morning on my way to work there is a line of cars making the left turn to get to school.
Let me point out that there is a large percentage of ethnic Asian people in these cars I pass. Especially since Asians only make up about 3% of the NH population.
And then there is Souhegan High School in Amherst, NH. My son went there and fortunately, didn’t waste our family money on college. Instead, he got a part-time retail job that changed to full-time in six months and leadership positions up to store management in less than three years.
I had a chance to talk to some of the students in 2016 during the local elections and I was appalled at their ignorance of civics and the Constitution.
Souhegan continues to suck up volumes of taxpayer money to produce societal drones, ready to do whatever is displayed on their cell phones.
I drove by there last night and there was a crowd of these idiots out holding signs protesting for Gaza. Rich idiots
Communist race and gender indoctrination had been going on for a long time before George Floyd’s drug over dose death. On the bright side, the BLM riots caused a back lash to Critical Race Theory and DEI to build.
I can’t wait until we get to buy Souhegan another $1 million dollar field for football.
It is almost ten years old, so it is going to need to be replaced soon.
A couple guys in my office were all for this field when it was first purchased. Mostly because some individual was kicking in $500K. These guys also had kids in scholastic sports.
No one ever mentioned back then that the field would need to be replaced in ten years for another $1MM + cost.
I say, tear it out and replace it with grass.
Many, if not all, of those prestigious New England prep schools have succumbed to DIE.
BTTT
Holderness ( I actually looked this school up a few weeks ago and read, FROM THEIR SITE, what was what there !)is NOT the same as it was in the early-mid 1960s and neither are ANY of the other boarding schools that I know. Neither are the elite of the elite private day schools in N.H., N.Y., Mass., Ct., etc.!
And even in the 1980s, many of these boarding schools ( Middlesex, for example, was getting "loopy"! ) were NOT anything at all like they once were, when I went to one. But at least in the '80s, scholastics were more or less ( somewhat less, though, than say in the 1950s-early '60s ) at a high level.
Today, yes, even with the WOKE, and worse garbage, these kids are learning more than they would at public school; which isn't saying much really.
“FEEDER SCHOOLS” aren’t quite what they used to be; though yes, going to one DOES give that kid somewhat of an edge; though NOT over the “protected” ( homeless stories, race, sexually confused, whatever ) kids.
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