Still, instead of borrowing the colors of the Swedish flag, you’d think it might’ve been more appropriate for the designers of the logo to use the green and red of the Mexican standard. Or else replace the definitely retrograde image of an open book with a picture of – oh, I don’t know – a frisbee? Che Guevara? Dianne Klein of the Office of the President of the University of California said the following by way of explaining the new logo: “They wanted something that would reflect the innovation, the character of California – just more modern, user-friendly.” Of course, if “they” really wanted something that would reflect the way things are going in California in 2012, how about – well, hmm, how do you come up with a simple, catchy image that represents productive members of society being taxed to death, corporations fleeing the state, and an endless stream of non-taxpaying, undocumented aliens flooding in across the border? How about a picture of that eagle from the Mexican coat of arms strangling to death not a snake but the grizzly bear of the California state flag? Too subtle?
Klein insisted that the purpose of the new seal was “not to take away from the gravitas of the original seal.” But shedding gravitas is exactly the point of all these sorts of changes. Where at the University of California today, after all, will you find anything remotely suggestive of gravitas? It could be argued that for nearly the last half-century, California’s public higher-education system – which consists not only of the ten University of California campuses but also of twenty-three California State University campuses and 112 community colleges – has been ground zero for the effort to crush into a fine powder any trace of gravitas in American higher education. It was at San Francisco State College (now San Francisco State University) that riots, bombings, and other aggressive and violent acts by Black Panthers and their allies led to the establishment in 1969 of the country’s first Black Studies program, a phenomenon of which civil-rights leader Bayard Rustin quite properly asked: “Is Black Studies an educational program or a forum for ideological indoctrination?” (Correct answer: B.) It was at San Fernando Valley State College (now the California State University at Northridge) that similar gravitas-free hijinks created what is now the world’s largest Chicano Studies department, devoted then as now to the cultivation among students of an overwhelming sense of alienation from, hostility to, victimization by, and inability to make any kind of headway whatsoever in mainstream American society.
Then there’s the University of California at Irvine, which in recent years has earned the dubious distinction of being almost certainly the nation’s most poisonously anti-Semitic institution of higher education. Then, needless to say, there’s the University of California’s oldest campus, and the one where all this mischief-making can plausibly be said to have started – namely Berkeley, which has been a notorious hotbed of far-left brainwashing ever since the 1964 “Free Speech Movement,” a development that, as David Horowitz has rightly noted, “was ultimately not…about free speech” but “about the right of the political left to agitate for its agendas within the confines of the campus itself,” thereby inserting “ideological politics into the heart of the university community.”
So bring on the new logo. With its vapidity, slickness, and utter lack of character, it’s the perfect symbol for what a University of California education has, in all too many cases, become in these benighted times.
Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: Click here.
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Klein insisted that the purpose of the new seal was “not to take away from the gravitas of the original seal.” But shedding gravitas is exactly the point of all these sorts of changes. Where at the University of California today, after all, will you find anything remotely suggestive of gravitas? It could be argued that for nearly the last half-century, California’s public higher-education system – which consists not only of the ten University of California campuses but also of twenty-three California State University campuses and 112 community colleges – has been ground zero for the effort to crush into a fine powder any trace of gravitas in American higher education. It was at San Francisco State College (now San Francisco State University) that riots, bombings, and other aggressive and violent acts by Black Panthers and their allies led to the establishment in 1969 of the country’s first Black Studies program, a phenomenon of which civil-rights leader Bayard Rustin quite properly asked: “Is Black Studies an educational program or a forum for ideological indoctrination?” (Correct answer: B.) It was at San Fernando Valley State College (now the California State University at Northridge) that similar gravitas-free hijinks created what is now the world’s largest Chicano Studies department, devoted then as now to the cultivation among students of an overwhelming sense of alienation from, hostility to, victimization by, and inability to make any kind of headway whatsoever in mainstream American society.
Then there’s the University of California at Irvine, which in recent years has earned the dubious distinction of being almost certainly the nation’s most poisonously anti-Semitic institution of higher education. Then, needless to say, there’s the University of California’s oldest campus, and the one where all this mischief-making can plausibly be said to have started – namely Berkeley, which has been a notorious hotbed of far-left brainwashing ever since the 1964 “Free Speech Movement,” a development that, as David Horowitz has rightly noted, “was ultimately not…about free speech” but “about the right of the political left to agitate for its agendas within the confines of the campus itself,” thereby inserting “ideological politics into the heart of the university community.”
So bring on the new logo. With its vapidity, slickness, and utter lack of character, it’s the perfect symbol for what a University of California education has, in all too many cases, become in these benighted times.
Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: Click here.
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In fact I think it is high-time the symbol be changed, because they no long merit the old logo. Instead the slick shallow, shades of Sweden, are a more accurate reflection of who they have become.
Eastern Sun Rising Over The West.
Who needs a book in the seal? What's a book?
I don't get it.