The recent events at Yale and Missouri are so ugly and absurd that they probably have many “progressives” saying to themselves, “Stop it you dumb kids — you’re going to ruin the lovely gig we have going here.”
In this Federalist piece, Robert Tracinski argues, “If administrators don’t have the nerve to re-assert the actual educational purpose of the universities, this makes a pretty good case that it’s time to burn the universities to the ground (metaphorically speaking, of course) and start over from scratch.”
At Mizzou, president Tim Wolfe has been forced to resign by mob action because he allegedly wasn’t “completely aware” of the “systemic racism” that engulfs the campus. Wolfe tried to save himself just the way Larry Summers did a decade ago — by apologizing for not being sufficiently sensitive to things that shouldn’t concern a university president at all. By now it should be clear that groveling won’t work, but merely whets the mob’s appetite for blood. Tracinski writes, “It reminds me of the old rule about totalitarian revolutions: first, you go after the counter-revolutionaries, then you go after the insufficiently enthusiastic. Wolfe had to be removed for failing to show immediate and total compliance toward their political agenda.”
And at Yale, which regards itself as a school where our future leaders are educated, we witness outrage over a mild email suggesting that students simmer down about supposedly offensive Halloween costumes. How dare anyone tell us when we shouldn’t be offended! Tracinski writes, “The mob at Yale knows where it stands. To hell with all that intellectual stuff. We want the university to enforce conformity by complying with whatever demands we laid down in our latest tantrum.”
At the very least, these events will open some eyes and shut some wallets.