Without knowing if there are important missing details, it seems like the UH Senate is over-reacting. The VP is elected by the student body, and the VP should enjoy the same freedom of political speech as anyone else.
Whether this is an example of "totalitarianism", over-zealousness, assholishness, dumbness or the inexperience of youth is a matter of opinion, but I think it is bit over the top to refer to this as "totalitarianism" or representative of what goes on in US higher education on a nationwide level.
There may well be missing details as this is a typical article by one publication and copied by others. However, based on what is available the person does not appear to have said anything remotely offensive. In a free society, we hope that universities encourage freedom of speech and do not try to enforce political correctness using semantics and not facts for people to take further into their careers.
There is nothing wrong with BLM as a civil rights movement and as I understand its leaders were quick to condemn the police shootings.
http://www.nytimes.com/live/police-...ge/black-lives-matter-leader-calls-for-peace/
Political correctness is like most things in these times of heightened sensitivity to feelings and the elevation of feelings over facts to guide our actions. PC is acceptable to the degree that it is good manners and when it is supported by facts. It isn't acceptable when it is not within the bounds of just good manners, i.e., there is no reason to use names that offend people. And PC is unacceptable when it is based on feelings, emotions, beliefs that are contrary to fact.
I was appalled watching the two political conventions at how much was based on feelings, emotions, illogic, fantasies, transcendentalism, etc. and how little if anything was based on fact, logic, reality, empiricism, etc.* I see the same thing in these pages, in this thread. I was an engineer, a corporate executive, a Naval officer, a pilot and always a third generation atheist. These are not endeavors that lead one to putting a lot of stock into feelings, so I might be hypersensitive to this kind of thinking. But I can't but think that decisions based on emotions are doomed to fail.
The BLM people are protesting against the realities of their world. They are much more likely to be shot and killed by the police. That is true. In my opinion, it is not even that the police are racists who hate black people, it is because black people are more likely to pose a threat to the police because black people are disproportionately more criminal than others, because 90% of felons live below the poverty line and black people are two to three times, depending where you draw the line, more likely to be poor.
And why are they more likely to be poor? Not because of genetics, not because of choice, not because they are lazy, all positions put forward repeatedly in posts and threads here, but because of the lingering effects of racism on their forebearers and the residual racism that still exists.
Contrast this with the feelings of the proponents of reverse racism, what would more properly be called inverse racism. That black people now hold a privileged social position. That black people have climbed over white people now. This a feeling, not a fact and it assumes many falsehoods. That the civil rights laws eliminated racism against black people by introducing equal or even harsher legal racism against white people. That the economy is zero sum. That others having money means that you have less money. That there are only so many jobs, that there is only so much work to be done. The idea that somehow the market is a natural one. That the market determines a natural value of labor separate from any monetary value, that the economics gods punish those economies in which people are paid more than this never defined natural value.
This is what racism has always been used for. To divide the poor against one another so that they don't realize who is really taking advantage of them. And it is the rich who promote this because the rich believe that in order to maximize their own earnings that a large number of people must be in poverty. Because of the economic fallacy, once again, that the economy is zero sum based.
* And I don't want to give the impression that both sides do it equally, that I am promoting a false equivalency. The Republicans are much more guilty of this type of not thinking, to the point that they seemingly have completely abandoned talking about the world as it is.
