The Leadership Institute's Campus Reform blog points to two interesting developments in academia/activism. From a recent San Diego news article the blogger quotes:
"fat studies is an emerging academic field that explores the social and political consequences of being overweight." Its concerns include the negative portrayal of fat people in literature and popular culture; the discrimination against fat people, which "can mask many other forms of prejudice that we already consider to be undesirable"The blogger next compares it to a separate program at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania:
With Democrat sponsorship of identity activism, and the ever-increasing expansion of governmental control over private industry, there's every reason for the conservative to join the libertarian chorus under this administration, if only to strengthen the pull of resistance against the Left's encroachment on individual liberties, as well as their continued attempts to even further divide an already "diverse" nation....students who are deemed too heavy must pass a physical-fitness course.
As part of the university's core curriculum, campus health educators weigh and measure all freshmen during the fall semester, and later calculate each student's body-mass index, or BMI. Those with a BMI above 30, which suggests obesity, must enroll in a one-credit course called "Fitness for Life" before they graduate. Students can satisfy that requirement if they "test out"—by subsequently earning a BMI below 30—or by passing a sports course.
But I have mixed opinions about the comparison.
On the one hand, we have the excesses of a San Diego State University professor forming a "fat studies" program, which we can guess will simply become one more "identity" around which the left will organize an agitated base. Of course, they do this as they downplay helpful categories such as "better than" or "lesser than" in terms of a BMI; this effectively denies obesity should ever be seen as a health concern to begin with.
To me, that is the approach which more resembles that of left-wing LGBT activists: design academic and social programs aimed at engineering a brand new "identity" while lobbying the medical community to strike out homosexuality as a disorder from the DSM-IV--virtually making it impossible to treat one's inability to be attracted to the opposite sex as a disordered state.
On the other hand, we have Lincoln University, which respects the difference between a fabricated "identity" and a genuine health concern--and actually seeks to do something about it. In one sense, the conservative might view this as a victory not just for reason and common sense over political correctness, but as a return to a day and age when schools used to see the student as a whole person, whose physical and spiritual development was every bit as important as the intellectual or vocational. Obviously, this is only a partial step in that direction, but it's a step nonetheless.
So should this return to classical education override individual concern over the role of government? My sense is that the question at least deserves asking; how we respond will, in large part, determine what a conservative America ought to look like.
