A couple of weeks ago, I wrote this post about a possible anti-gay hate-crime hoax at North Carolina State University. It appeared to me that the police had not pursued the most likely suspects — the supposed victims — raising some very serious issues about the impartiality of justice.
Now comes this hate-crime hoax at Williams College. This time the issue is race, rather than gender. But it fits the same pattern: hate graffiti, followed by police investigations, followed by official and student events and actions decrying anybody who doesn’t support the attacked group’s agenda. The handwringing is then followed the proverbial chirping of crickets due to the absence of arrests. Only this time, apparently it’s common knowledge on the Williams campus that the person who wrote the anti-minority graffiti was a minority student. If he indeed wrote the graffiti, why isn’t he arrested for make a false report to the police (plus vandalism)?
There have been dozens of these hoaxes over the last decade — maybe a hundred or more. It used to be that schools actually sought to discover the perpetrators, but it now seems that academia is moving ever further away from unbiased pursuit of the truth. Whether the specific incident involves falsifying climate change research, education professors who teach that science is not objective but is instead dependent upon the background of the scientist or science student, or false criminal reports, the denial is growing in all directions. I wonder where that’s going to lead.