On December 4, 2014, Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam (R) and embattled former University of Tennessee Chancellor Jimmy Cheek attended a White House higher education summit where other public university administrators were present, where the governor touted the Tennessee Promise program as if he were Herbert Hoover guaranteeing a house with a two car garage for one and all. My hometown newspaper, The Knoxville News Sentinel, reported that “Of the 65,000 high school seniors in Tennessee, 56,000 [had] applied for the Tennessee Promise scholarships, which will be awarded for the first time to the class of 2015. The scholarships pay tuition for two years at a community college or technical school.” With his proposal, the Republican governor of Tennessee had triggered the final microaggression for America’s public universities to fully resurrect “free” Jim Crow “education” beginning at two-year community colleges. By compounding this problem with Haslam’s new initiative, Tennessee Reconnect, introduced in February 2017, Tennessee is poised to become the first state to offer all citizens — both high school students and adults — the chance to earn a postsecondary degree or certificate free of charge, and at no cost to taxpayers — a load of B.S. before the increasingly worthless Ph.D’s become piled higher and deeper in it as well.
Tennessee Promise effectively castrates much of the longstanding initiative achieved through the HOPE Scholarship Fund. No barriers to entry appear necessary — not so much as a firm set of minimal requirements for those students graduating “on the bubble” with currently-unacceptable grades. The HOPE Scholarship, funded by the Tennessee Lottery, could be earned by deserving graduates with a minimum score of a 21 on the ACT and a 3.0 GPA, minus costs for textbooks and supplies. As both a scholarship and mentoring program providing students a last-dollar scholarship covering tuition and fees not covered by the Pell Grant, HOPE Scholarship or TSAA funds, it is honored by all 13 community colleges, plus 27 colleges of applied technology eligible to offer an associate’s degree program in Tennessee, among others. A critical component of Tennessee Promise is the individual guidance provided to each participant by a mentor as he or she navigates the college admissions process. In addition, Tennessee Promise participants must complete eight hours of community service per term enrolled, while maintaining satisfactory academic progress (2.0 GPA) at their institution.
Said Gov. Haslam, whose family of billionaires is the de facto czardom presiding over the University of Tennessee and former owners of Pilot/Flying J Travel Centers, “We feel pretty good about just out of the gate having almost 90 percent of our high school seniors apply.” President Obama, in guaranteeing that academically-inept students will achieve the same “learned” status as the voting dead in his hometown of Chicago, declared that by streamlining all “teachers, parents, nonprofits, corporations, school districts, university system — if we make sure they remain the best-educated generation in American history, there is no limit to what they can achieve.”
Hello grade inflation, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to many more of Sonya Sotomayor’s unqualified “Affirmative Action babies” receiving ridiculously curved test scores, while punishing better qualified white peers or the racist docking of Asian “cookie cutters” 55 points on the SAT exams to prevent oversaturating entry into higher education with elite oriental students through harsher racial quotas! And despite the “free” scholarship paid for by lottery revenue through the assumption the money would be put to good use and see returns on its investment, Nashville Public Media reported that only 11 percent of students graduated from community colleges in Tennessee in 2014. Even during program czar Mike Krause’s “pitch-‘n-plea”, he admitted that while there was to be no targeted graduated rate, the state wants 55 percent of all adults (a target) to have college degrees by 2025.
Surely the snowflakes of the 21st Century can handle all that, right? Not so fast.
As a University of Tennessee alumnus watching in horror the school’s push to the forefront to legally merge the two sexes biologically into one, I have accepted that today’s students are afflicted with the deadliest of disorders, where their spines are not fused to their brains. Diversity and inclusivity count for all people, not simply atheists, Marxists, Muslims, feminists or in the case of Harvard and other colleges, the Church of Satan. It is why, more than ever, I am convinced the Morrill Act must either experience a dramatic overhaul of its legal nomenclature, or be repealed. Lastly, public universities must be privatized as a means to stamp out federally-funded repression by academia.
What America is witnessing are the seeds planted for an Apartheid state in full bloom after eight years of Barack Obama. What her public universities and colleges are not, are centers for maturation, who instead seek to infantilize and manufacture an indefinite future led by “useful idiots”. Today’s professors must take the bulk of the credit, many of whom cut their teeth participating in the turmultuous 1960’s counterculture movements. Academia’s full reversion to a modern Jim Crow era as repayment for centuries of “white privilege” and slavery began most prominently with the University of Missouri protests that spread nationally in October 2015. The entire Democratic Party and left-wing political sphere in support of the Antifa riots at Berkeley have formed a modern Rainbow Coalition in unison with most radical Marxist ideologues at these same public universities. Reports in recent years from California universities’ and other states of systemic anti-semitism such as the February 2015 vandalism by University of Wisconsin students spray painting pro-Nazi graffiti at Jewish organizational buildings and synagogues, or the same at Emory University in Atlanta in 2014, grow increasingly commonplace.
But persecuted Jews are the not alone behind the iron curtain of America’s socialist higher education vanguard. Far more cases are being reported of discrimination and physical violence against Christian students, while entire Christian organizations are shut down by administrators such as at California State University for refusing to recognize a well-established international organization, the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, simply for adhering to their faith that effectively closes its leadership ranks to non-Christians and gays, claiming it violates state-mandated nondiscrimination policies requiring open membership and leadership to all. Furthermore, other schools that have challenged InterVarsity, including Rollins College, Tufts University, and of course, Vanderbilt University. While one is persecuted for seeking a relationship with Christ, the average college campus is complicit in their tacit propagation of a rape culture through the exploitation of gender politics until today, young college men increasingly avoid contact with women out of fear.
With the Left openly in alignment at Ivy League Cornell University with ISIS sympathizers, Winter is indeed coming, and the snowflakes will create a permafrost forcing liberty into an eternal hibernation, making the rejuvenating thaw of spring impossible. As Bertrand Russell reflected upon the Greek philosopher Anaxagoras thousands of years later, the reality today is that snow is not only taught to be black, but rebellious realists defending the truth of it being white are harshly condemned by revisionists for their morbid eccentricity grounded in racism. Privileged students at Harvard University, who earn on average an “A-” in each class, will collectively graduate while recalling precious little about their college years for having wasted away playing World of Warcraft while dining on cheese puffs and orange soda. No one is required to repay the state for failing to graduate, a problem in Tennessee given entrance into Middle Tennessee State University experienced a 4.852 percent decrease for 2014-5 despite the HOPE Scholarship Fund, while just 63 percent of students re-enrolled for a second year through the Tennessee Promise program without expectations for repayment. And rather than stress more fiscally responsible initiatives, the state pours more money into a demented white elephant as it manufactures Tennessee’s own student debt bubble. If such trends continue due to the rapid expansion of more Affirmative Action-type Apartheid regulations, what happens in California won’t stay California, and the repression of conservative Christians and Jews by academia will come free of charge.
THE CONSERVATIVE HISTORICAL REVIEW 