Following the Money at Washington and Lee

by Al Benson Jr.

After the culturally genocidal move of Washington and Lee University to ban all Confederate symbols, uniforms, flags, whatever, from the Washington and Lee campus, someone on my email list sent me a message in which he wondered where Washington and Lee got some of its funding. I thought that was a legitimate question and I hadn't seen anyplace where that was dealt with, not that I am surprised at that. So I did a bit of "huntin' and peckin" on the Internet, as my daughter calls it to see what I could find.

The six black students who were so uncomfortable with Confederate symbols are all law students, at least according to the news accounts I've read and they want everything Confederate removed from the campus and they've threatened "civil disobedience" if no one paid attention to their demands. That the school administration grovelled before them doesn't surprise me in the least. In the experience I've had with colleges they always seem to bend over backwards to cow-tow to the deviations of the leftist politically correct. No one else matters to them. That the majority of their students may not be politically correct and may not agree to the deviations of the left makes no difference whatever. The squeaky wheel always get the grease.

In scrounging around on the Internet I came across a couple things of interest. There was an article posted on April 30, 2014 by a Peter Jetton, the headline for which was: "W and L Tax Clinic Receives IRS Grant for Seventh Straight Year." The article started off: "The Tax Clinic at the Washington and Lee University School of Law has been awarded a matching grant from the Internal Revenue Service's Low-Income Taxpayer Clinic Program (LITC). This is the seventh straight year that the Tax Clinic has received federal dollars to support its efforts. The grant of $75,000, the largest in the Clinic's history, will help fund the Clinic for the 2014 calendar year."

According to another article, the clinic is directed by Michelle Lyon Drumbl, a former IRS attorney who is an assistant clinical professor of law at Washington and Lee University. The article went on to note that the Tax Clinic is "independent of the IRS and the federal government." That may be so, but they still take money from the IRS.

Back in August of 2010, in an article by Jeff Hanna, which appeared on http://www.wlu.edu  it was noted that: "Affordable high-speed Internet access will be extended to Rockbridge County residents and a new shared data center will be built at Washington and Lee University, both as a result of a $6.9 million federal grant announced on Wednesday, Aug 18." I submit that $6.9 million ain't chump change. It seems that the university has done pretty well with federal grants over the years.

I don't know if any of this federal money has had any influence on how quickly the university sought to purge its campus of anything Confederate or not. I can't say for sure. But, with my suspicious mind it does make me wonder. Had the university leadership had the intestinal fortitude to at least look at the other side of this issue and consider how people on both sides felt, would further federal funding have been withheld? Again, we don't know, but it would be nice if we did. Is federal money used to blackmail institutions into doing what the feds want done? It wouldn't be the first time. They tried the same game at Hillsdale College in Michigan several years ago now and the way the Hillsdale administration got around it was to end up flat-out refusing to accept any students that took federal aid in any form. Based on what I have read about the leadership at Washington and Lee, I doubt they would be willing to do that. Cultural genocide against Christian whites and their history and heritage is much less expensive.