Earlier this week, the communications and marketing department at Western Washington University sent out a school-wide questionnaire that asked recipients to consider: “How do we make sure that in future years ‘we are not as white as we are today?’” Having grown up on the “mean streets” of 22nd Avenue in Bellingham, Washington, Glenn offered the university a couple of tips on radio this morning.
“Now, this is from my own hometown of Bellingham, Washington – one of the whitest, white, whitey, white places in America. I mean I lived on the mean street of 22nd Avenue,” Glenn joked on radio this morning. “It was hard. Wherever you go, there are whites. Occasionally there are some Asians, and occasionally there are some Hispanics… And Western Washington University is the big university that was just about 10 blocks up the street. And they have decided that they want fewer white people attending. I want you to know: This isn't racist at all.”
According to Campus Reform, the “Six Questions on the Future of Western” questionnaire was disseminated through the WWU marketing department's daily newsletter Western Today. It came on the heels “of admonishments given in multiple convocation addresses by WWU President Bruce Shepard for the university’s ‘failure’ to be less white.”
In a January blog post, Shepard explained that if the school is “as white in ten years as we are today,” the university “will have failed as a university”
“Finally somebody says it,” Stu quipped.
Glenn was in a particularly magnanimous mood this morning, and he offered a surefire way to correct the school’s diversity problem.
“If I may, I'd like to suggest that the way to make your university less white [is] just fire all the administration and all of the professors that are white. You do that, and you could change the balance of what's happening on that campus,” Glenn explained. “Fire all the white people that work there because I know you believe in it so much that you would give your job up to be able to have justice and equality.”
It’s safe to say WWU probably won’t be heeding that advice anytime soon. But, then again, what does he know?
“So that's just also tip from me,” Glenn concluded. “You know, but I came from the mean street of 22nd Avenue, so what do I know.”
Front page image courtesy of the AP