A half-century ago, college students rallied against administrators who told them what they couldn’t say. In 2015, that politically correct paternalism is what they demand.
Students have made scapegoats of University of Missouri System President Tim Wolfe, who resigned Nov. 9 under intense pressure from the Concerned Student 1950 movement, and Yale professors Nicholas and Erika Christakis, who eloquently explained why a campus-wide warning against racially insensitive Halloween costumes was overkill.
The Mizzou football team refused to play and a passionate protester endured a week-long hunger strike. Students demanded that Wolfe step down because they say he didn’t do enough to quell racial tensions at the school.
Several students said their schoolmates shouted slurs including the N-word, African-American women claimed they were denied access to a frat party on the basis of race and an unknown vandal scrawled a swastika in human feces on a bathroom wall.
Administrators denounced the incidents, launched an investigation of the fraternity and instituted mandatory diversity and inclusion training. Demonstrators weren’t satisfied. They wanted Wolfe’s head to roll for no other reason than the turmoil transpired on his watch.
Seems to us the students’ quite justifiable anger was misdirected. Instead of confronting peers who express bigoted views and picketing the offending frat, they deposed a fatherly figurehead because he couldn’t protect them from individual students’ random, self-initiated and unpreventable acts.
At the Ivy League campus in New Haven, Conn., the Christakises are facing heated calls for their ouster simply for questioning the conventional Yale wisdom that students should avoid ethnic costumes like sombreros, headdresses and turbans. While some may find those articles of clothing insensitive, Erika Christakis said discouraging the dress could deprive students of intellectual discourse on the subject.
“Nicholas says, if you don’t like a costume someone is wearing, look away, or tell them you are offended,” she wrote in a reply to an administrator’s mass email denouncing offensive garb. “Talk to each other. Free speech and the ability to tolerate offence are the hallmarks of a free and open society.”
We applaud and echo that statement. Yale students, however, responded by surrounding Nicholas Christakis and unleashing a vulgar tirade, then demanding his and his wife’s resignation.
Progressives spawned the 1964 free-speech movement at the University of California-Berkeley when administrators there sought to suppress their political views. Today’s campus liberals, however, are quick to deny others the same freedom.
Modern undergrads want to live in “safe spaces,” collegiate cocoons where PC values are sacrosanct, dissent is silenced and offensive speech protected by the First Amendment is quashed. They believe administrators should control student expression — even their dress — like overbearing parents.
If young adults can’t read classic literature without trigger warnings or endure a controversial opinion without throwing temper tantrums, our universities, our workforce and our society will ultimately suffer.