Last month I wrote about the tensions at Vanderbilt surrounding the school's politically motivated decision to remove the word "Confederate" from the problematically named Confederate Memorial Hall. The United Daughters of the Confederacy, which raised much of the money for the building decades ago, was appalled by the decision, and sued Vanderbilt for breach of contract. Since then, ire and outrage have continued to run high in Tennessee, and have characteristically extended far beyond the immediate issue--whether a building's name can legally be changed without the consent of the donor after whom it is named--to the legitimacy, or lack thereof, of southern history, of Confederate culture, and, most disturbingly, of Confederate descendants.

The Washington Times quotes liberally from an editorial written by Vanderbilt math professor Jonathan Farley, whose contribution to the debate about the building's name amounts to a condemnation of any Southerner who takes any pride whatsoever in his heritage. Pronouncing Confederates to be "cowards masquerading as civilized men," Farley explicitly regrets that the Civil War was not concluded with geographical genocide: "Every Confederate soldier deserved not a hallowed resting place at the end of his days but a reservation at the end of the gallows," he wrote, noting that those descendants of the Confederacy who cherish their heritage are "the new holocaust revisionists." Comparing Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest to a "19th century Hitler," he adds that "the race problems that wrack America to this day are due largely to the fact that the Confederacy was not thoroughly destroyed, its leaders and soldiers executed, and their lands given to the landless freed slaves."

Farley is an untenured assistant professor of Jamaican and Guyanan descent; Vanderbilt administrators support his right to speak his mind, saying that he is protected by academic freedom.

Isn't it wonderful how readily the fight against racism becomes indistinguishable from the worst sorts of supremacist thinking? How quickly the demand for tolerance and inclusion becomes a call for extermination?