Grand Forks Herald Explains Political Correctness And UND Invites a Terrorist To Visit

Yesterday I did a story on a local sorority that is in hot water from the University of North Dakota because they held a private cowboy party where a few of the attendees dressed up like as Indians. Nobody was offended until a local activists scouring the internet to find something to be offended over found pictures of the party on someone’s Facebook account.
You can read the post here. Someone posted a link to a video made of the pictures made to outrage the public. I don’t get it. It looked like college kids having a good time as they are wont to do.
Lucky for me the editorial page editor at the Herald wrote a column yesterday to explain just why “everyone” including the President of the University is so upset.

The word is mores, and if the UND students who dressed up in American Indian costumes for a sorority party pay attention in sociology class, they’ll learn exactly what all the fuss is about.
A “more” (pronounced more-ay, the “ay” rhyming with “say”) is a standard of decency or manners in a culture. A classic example used at Wikipedia and elsewhere is toplessness: While a man who walks shirtless through downtown Grand Forks will draw glances, a woman doing the same thing will be arrested. She will have violated an American more — and such actions, like it or not, have consequences.
At UND, the students who went to the party smeared in red paint and dressed in stereotypical Indian outfits violated a recent but very powerful American more: namely, Thou Shalt Not Traffic in Ethnic Stereotypes, especially when thou art not a member of that ethnic group.

Get that, you don’t do that because you don’t do that. No reason is explained in the entire article why anyone anywhere should be upset.
Who gets to make up these rules? Does anyone know?
Meanwhile I find this story interesting in contrast. The University of North Dakota has invited a terrorist to the University to lecture us. I’ll give the Herald credit for printing this article by John Leo.

NEW YORK — UND is sponsoring a lecture by 1960s bomber Bill Ayers, now a professor of education at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Three groups invited Ayers to speak April 3: the Department of Educational Foundations and Research, the College of Education and Human Development and Students for a Democratic Society.
[UND President Charles]Kupchella refused to [withdraw the invitation] , issuing a statement that said, “A good case has not been made — ever — that free speech (speech not otherwise unlawfully harmful) should sometimes or by some people be suppressed in the interest of freedom.”….
Ayers has said, sort of, that violence is not the right path, but he also told The New York Times, in an interview published on Sept. 11, 2001, that “I don’t regret setting bombs, I feel we didn’t do enough.”
In his book, he says he participated in the bombing of the New York City’s police headquarters in 1970, the Capitol building in 1971 and the Pentagon in 1972. The reference to the Pentagon may not be true, since Ayers said his book mixes fact and fiction.
Like his wife, Bernadine Dohrn, he defended the bombings they committed in the name of ending the Vietnam War, on grounds that they killed no one, except accidentally their own members. Three allies in the Weather Underground died in 1970 in an explosion while making bombs in a Greenwich Village townhouse.
Ayers has danced around the subject of an apology for years, without flatly saying he regrets what he did. Asked by the Times if he would do it all over again, he said, “I don’t want to discount the possibility.”

So let me get this straight. Some college students at an off campus party offending no one is worth a full investigation and immediate probation by the UND President. But a unrepentant domestic terrorist is just fine and dandy with him.
Something is rotten on University Avenue.