The Oppressive Rock

There are some really dumb things going on at our college campuses right now. It seems that the children we are sending to college have no concept of the real world and the fact that in the real world there may be people who say things they might not like.

Yesterday The Daily Wire posted an article about the removal of a boulder from the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus.

The article reports:

A large boulder has been removed from the University of Wisconsin-Madison after the Black Student Union and other racial justice activists complained about it being a “racist monument.”

What makes the rock allegedly racist? In the 1920s, a journalist once used a racist term to describe the large boulder.

The rock’s existence has apparently been oppressing students ever since.

Fox News outlined the “racism” of the rock, as claimed by student activists:

Chamberlin Rock, which rests atop Observatory Hill, is named after a 19th Century geologist and former university president, Thomas Crowder Chamberlin, whose work centered on glacial deposits, according to a bio on the university’s website.

But it was a reporter’s reference to the rock in a nearly century-old Wisconsin State Journal article that prompted the push for its removal.

In October 1925, the university had the boulder excavated and placed prominently atop the hill to honor Chamberlin, who would die in Chicago three years later. The rock was a rare specimen believed to be more than 2 billion years old, and before it was installed on Observatory Hill, only about a foot and a half was visible above ground, according to the article. It was believed to have been carried by glaciers from Canada to Wisconsin.

In the 1920s, a slang term used to describe large dark rocks included the N-word, and it appears in coverage of the rock’s installation.

University researchers did not uncover other instances in print where the rock was referred to with this word, but they said the Ku Klux Klan was active on campus at the time of the rock’s dedication, according to an article in the same newspaper published earlier this week.

How much did it cost the University to remove the rock? How much of that money could have been used for a scholarship for a worthy student? Racism is not acceptable–but it does exist–not to the extent that some claim, but it does exist.