Silly Little Country

One Point to Victor Davis Hanson

He is right in one key area, and I suspect, as a result, many of his others.

Are not those with Spanish surnames per se often considered minorities for university purposes, regardless of national origin, ethnic background, or citizenship?

As a grad student, not at Stanford, but at Berkeley, I took a job as a special tutor, paid for by the state, to minority students in need of help. I wound up with three students, an Asian-American and an African-American, who both needed help. The third student had a Spanish surname; he was the son of the Argentine Ambassador to the US. He needed neither the tutoring nor the subsidy for it. It was absurd.
As Hanson rightly says:

My examples were not cheap, toxic, or despicable, but drawn from my own experience with higher education over some 40 years as both student and professor, in which tragically the university often discriminated against students of all races and heritages by applying fossilized racial categories that have no place in 21st-century America.

He deserves the last word in his defense against some silly bint who writes for the Stanford Daily:

But as a classicist and historian, I do not need lectures from the Stanford Daily about scholarship. As someone with a long familial relationship with Stanford dating back over 65 years, I do not need reminders about Stanford tradition and decorum. As someone who lives at the heart of illegal immigration from Mexico in Selma, California, with a racially diverse extended family, I do not need lectures about campus notions of racial insensitivity.
Just as Hoover is connected with Stanford University, so Stanford University is affiliated as well with the Hoover Institution; each conducts itself with logical argumentation rather than easy invective like “trash.” A university newspaper that so easily casts charges of racism and wishes to silence the views of others is obligated to demonstrate why and how its allegations are true. The Daily did neither.

posted by Alan Adamson @ 1:13 AM