So What?

This item at Inside Higher Ed highlights how 1,500 alums of Rhodes College -- the alma mater of Supreme Court nominee Judge Amy Coney Barrett -- have signed a joint letter opposing her nomination. The letter's authors also refer to the way that the current Rhodes president said the nomination reflected well on the school:

“We are likewise firmly and passionately opposed to Rhodes administrators’ attempts to embrace Amy Coney Barrett as an alumna of our beloved alma mater. We oppose this embrace because we believe both her record and the process that has produced her nomination are diametrically opposed to the values of truth, loyalty, and service that we learned at Rhodes.”

Now, anyone can have any opinion they like about Judge Barrett or her nomination. The letter is amusing in the way it opposes the college president's "attempts to embrace Amy Coney Barrett as an alumna of our beloved alma mater." The letter's authors seem to have overlooked that if she is in possession of a valid diploma and transcript, then Judge Barrett is in fact an alumna of their beloved alma mater no matter what the president -- or they -- say about it.

What the letter fails to do is to tell me why I should care what the authors and signatories think. Their opinion is supposed to carry more weight because they too went to Rhodes College, some of them at the same time as Judge Barrett did? That argument makes no sense. I have a number of classmates who would cast doubt on my qualifications for my current line of work, given that my goals and behavior as an undergraduate do not match it in the slightest. None of the people who supervised my candidacy and ordination process would have cared if my classmates had submitted a public letter opposing my ordination if they evaluated me as fit for the role.

Things like this seem to be more and more common these days -- the many times direct descendant of some Confederate general or another is quoted as not opposing the removal of the statue of their ancestor as though their particular opinion carried any more weight than anyone else's. I have yet to read a one of these stories where the interviewer asks the one question that matters more than any other: So what? And since no interviewer asks it for me, I do it for myself and ignore their opinions as swiftly as I can unless they offer some other and much better reason that I shouldn't.