Dearest Reader: A proposal: Camosun requires philosophical reform

Columns January 18, 2017

Dearest reader,

The tendrils of controversy have, for much of our current decade, been inexorably wrapped around the popular topic of European colonialism, its propagation, and the means by which its dastardly influence may at last be wrenched from the shores of our great and multicultural modern nation. In the pinnacle of irony, an answer has presented itself from across the sea, in that shuadderingly vile English land from whence the evil of the white man was amongst the first to emerge.

Dearest Reader is a satire column appearing in every issue of Nexus.

The student union of a prestigious London university has ventured the proposal that Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and all other such unabashedly white authors should be swept from the curriculum. This is clearly a splendid idea, and I hasten to beg not only that such an ordnance be not only implemented within Camosun College itself, but also that we might at last take strides in heeding the wisdom of the great thinkers of the Eastern world.

Confucius, for example, well known for his derision of the idea of democracy and of the expression of the citizen, could easily have his school of thought brought into the fold merely by the immediate cessation of all student and faculty elections, the better that the rule of the college may fall to a single autocrat. For the latter position, previous Camosun president Kathryn Laurin’s sterling and laudable record makes her the natural choice. Confucius’ assertion of the need to control the expression of the individual could likewise be achieved by the regrettable but clearly necessary act of cancelling this very publication. Better still, the latter amendment will ensure that any views found contrary to the general will, and to the sensibilities of the student body, need never again stain our experience both within the classroom and without.

All of this being accomplished, there remains one final task with which to cement the college’s noble philosophical conversion. The traditional baseline of Western philosophy swept from the record, what is to take its place in countering the newly implemented Eastern tradition? A thorough combing of today’s popular internet message boards will provide the answer in the form of their own material.

For what better ideas to comprise the stuff of new Western philosophy than those very informed ideas that first spawned the great academic metamorphosis that is about to occur? Dear reader, I cannot well imagine.