George Will on the dysfunctions of academia:  

What I want to talk to you about tonight is the amount of intellectual ingenuity that is now devoted to rationalising the disappearance of free speech… Today’s attack… is an attack on the theory of free speech. It is an attack on the desirability of free speech… What we have today is an attack on the very possibility of free speech. The belief is that the First Amendment is a mistake.

The bureaucratic farces and assorted psychodramas described by Mr Will may be familiar to regulars of this parish. Though it may be news to some that Texas Tech University, with an undergraduate enrolment of 28,000 people, now confines displays of WrongThought™ to a “free speech gazebo” some twenty feet wide.

Charles C W Cooke on the cultivated pretensions of student “radicals”: 

Take a look at this farcical missive from the Oberlin Review, in which around 150 students at the college claim repeatedly that Christina Hoff Sommers was coming to campus to present not a viewpoint with which many of the students vehemently disagree but rather an actual threat to student safety. Sommers, the signatories contend, is not an academic sharing her work, but a participant “in violent movements” and an accessory to “threats of death and rape.” […] Held hostage by the twin evils of mawkishness and self-indulgence, [the protestors] have taken to masquerading as the martyrs of the piece. You will note, of course, that none of the outraged parties at Oberlin were obliged to attend Sommers’s talk, or even to be on campus while she was being hosted. Had they wished, they could have sat the whole thing out with nary a word. Indeed, it was quite by choice they injected themselves into the event at all.

Ah, but a sense of moral proportion is of no use whatsoever to an in-group of narcissists, poseurs and passive-aggressive harpies. The kind of would-be intellectuals who, instead of doing something else, turn up out of spite to jeer and interrupt – thereby drawing attention to themselves – while making theatrical displays of how “unsafe” they feel when confronted with information they do not like. The kind of would-be intellectuals who claim that theirs is a campus “laden with trauma and sexualized violence,” who pre-emptively slander those who disagree with them, and who respond to criticism with the words, “We could spend all of our time and energy explaining all of the ways she’s harmful. But why should we?”

And Darleen Click quotes the deep, deep wisdom of professor of anthropology and ostentatious male feminist, Melvin Konner: 

In addition to women’s superiority in judgment, their trustworthiness, reliability, fairness, working and playing well with others, relative freedom from distracting sexual impulses, and lower levels of prejudice, bigotry, and violence, they live longer, have lower mortality at all ages, are more resistant to most categories of disease, and are much less likely to suffer brain disorders that lead to disruptive and even destructive behaviour. And, of course, they can produce new life from their own bodies, to which men add only the tiniest biological contribution — and one that soon could be done without… There is a birth defect… called maleness… To call being male a syndrome is not an arbitrary judgment.

Yes, “a birth defect… called maleness.” Thank goodness only the finest minds educate your children.

For instance, people such as these:

Stevenson College is apologising to its students for serving Mexican food during [a science fiction event]. In a letter sent out to students, the college apologised for having “a Mexican food buffet,” while also featuring spaceships and aliens.

Wait for it.

The college received complaints saying the combination was racist because of the association between Mexicans and illegal immigrants.

Despite eight years of doing this, I didn’t see that coming. Let’s take a second to check the algebra of umbrage: Science fiction event plus chili and burritos equals racism.

After receiving complaints, Dr Carolyn Golz said that the event “demonstrated a cultural insensitivity on the part of the programme planners and, though it was an unintentional mistake, I recognise that this incident caused harm within our community and negatively impacted students.”

At this point, bear in mind that several students, our fearless intellectuals of tomorrow, have felt a need to publicly articulate some version of the following, rather staggering idea: “Dear Sir or Madam, I have been negatively impacted by your insensitive buffet.”

Naturally, this explosion of WrongThought™ will have to be punished:

As a result, Dr Golz “will require cultural competence training for Programmes staff, in addition to implementing mechanisms for future programme planning that will ensure college programmes are culturally sensitive and inclusive.”

In the wake of this terrifyingly racist punch in the face of decency, expressed via the medium of reheated beans, Dr Golz urges students to report any further incidents of “hate” to the university’s Report Hate website, and thereby “cut down on insensitive events like Intergalactic Night.”

Update, via the comments:

Devorah Goldman on “diversity” in schools of social work: 

[The professor] explained to me that people who were viewed as too conservative had had problems graduating in the past, and he didn’t want that to happen to me. I thought he was joking… until I realised he wasn’t.

Dave Huber on Duke’s vanishing “noose” story and faculty demands for “eliminating white supremacy” on campus: 

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, chair of the Sociology department, added that “Duke is not a neutral racial space,” and that the school “oozes whiteness.”

If oozing whiteness sounds a bit much, you may want to revisit previous mentions of Professor Bonilla-Silva. When not denouncing “white logic,” the professor equates critics of affirmative action with 19th century supporters of slavery. One of the more bizarre indicators of Bonilla-Silva’s mental state is his written insistence – published in a course syllabus – that students must control their “body language” and avoid “irresponsible contestation” of his arguments. Black students who disagreed with the professor’s lurid racialist theories have been denounced by him as “Uncle Toms.” Professor Bonilla-Silva, a grown man, a tenured academic with a six-figure salary, refers to the United States, in class, as “AmeriKKKa.”

And Bryan Burrough on the “revolutionary” terrorism of the Weather Underground: 

Outside the leadership, there was widespread confusion as to what kinds of actions were authorised. There would be bombings, everyone assumed, but what kind? “There was so much macho talk, you know, like the Panthers: ‘Off the pigs,’ ‘Bomb the military back into the Stone Age,’” recalls Cathy Wilkerson of the New York cell. “But did that mean we were actually going to kill people? I never really knew.” Bill Ayers and others would always insist there were never any plans to harm people. The handful of Weathermen who crossed that line, Ayers claims, were rogues and outliers. This is a myth, pure and simple, designed to obscure what [the group] actually planned. In the middle ranks, it was widely expected that Weathermen would become revolutionary murderers. “My image of what we were going to be was undiluted terrorist action,” recalls a Weatherman named Jon Lerner. “I remember talking about putting a bomb on the [Chicago railroad] tracks at rush hour, to blow up people coming home from work. That’s what I was looking forward to.”

But hey, why endure the tedium and pretension of far-left politics if there isn’t a little pay-off, a little personal gratification…?

Feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments.

Katherine Timpf detects more sorrow among the competitively sensitive: 

A student at Harvard University published an op-ed on Wednesday complaining that her school’s “safe spaces” are just not safe enough. According to Madison E. Johnson, her time spent in the “safe space” was really great at first — there were “massage circles,” “deep conversations,” and “times explicitly delineated for processing and journaling.”

Yes, journaling and massage circles. Readers who studied at less glamorous institutions will no doubt feel the ache of deprivation. Don’t you yearn to display undiluted your “more radical views,” free from laughter, contradiction and accusations of pretension? Which is to say, though not out loud, free from other people? All this in a “beautiful” space, one that’s “rife with consciousness.” Though preferably only yours. Is that too much to ask?  

But then it all changed.

Ah. It turns out that a fellow seeker of safety needed a space in which to air their “more radical views,” specifically, their radical poetry:

A white poet gets on stage and says the n-word a few times.

A student poet going rogue. And so,

I’m realising “safe space” might mean different things for different people.

It’s a learning curve, that whole reciprocity thing. What with the radicalism and all.

The poetry slam presents the real question. At this point in reality, can there even be a truly safe space? 

You see, if it’s even remotely possible that “any facets of your experience or identity… could be mobilised against you,” thereby causing you “harm, panic, anxiety, disadvantage” – or fits of pretentious hysteria – then the space you’re in “is not safe.” “And you shouldn’t call it safe, because that is dangerous.” Despite such complications – complications that no mortal brain could possibly have anticipated – Ms Johnson is clear about what a safe space means to her:  

For me, a safe space is one in which I feel that I can express all aspects of my identity without feeling that any one of those aspects will get me (including, but not limited to) judged, fired, marginalised, attacked, or killed.

Yes, killed, as in killed to bits. Possibly by radical poetry. In a safe space that is “dangerous.” On a campus where tuition and board costs $60,000 a year.

For newcomers, more items from the archives:

Dissident Academic Feels the Warmth of Social Justice. 

Or, “If you expose our student indoctrination policy we will punish you.”

According to numerous students, the course’s instructor demanded that they recognise “white English” as the “oppressors’ language.” Without explanation, the class spent its session before Election Day screening Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. When several students complained to the professor about the course’s politicised content, they were informed that their previous education had left them “brainwashed” on matters relating to race and social justice.

Crotch Funk as Art. 

In which I hammer culture into your tiny minds.

Sweat is a performance piece by Peter De Cupere, choreographed by fellow Belgian Jan Fabre, in which five dancers spend fourteen minutes rolling about and jumping up and down – naked, obviously – while attempting to fill their transparent plastic overalls with all manner of body odour. “The intention,” we’re told, “is to catch the sweat from the dancers and to distil it. The concrete of the sweat is sprayed on a wall of the dance lab and protected by a glass box. In the glass is a small hole where visitors can smell the sweat.” Yes, you can smell the sweat. If that’s not a good night out, I don’t know what is.

The Sound of Wringing. 

To show how virtuous they are, and therefore superior, Guardian columnists stick pins into their eyes.

One needn’t be a cartoon Tory to marvel at Decca Aitkenhead’s classic piece, Their Homophobia is Our Fault, in which she insisted that the “precarious, over-exaggerated masculinity” and murderous homophobia of some Jamaican reggae stars are products of the “sodomy of male slaves by their white owners.” And that the “vilification of Jamaican homophobia implies… a failure to accept post-colonial politics.” Thus, sympathetic readers could feel guilty not only for “vilifying” the homicidal sentiments of some Jamaican musicians, but also for the culpability of their own collective ancestors. One wonders how those gripped by this fiendish dilemma could even begin to resolve their twofold feelings of shame.

There’s more, should you want it, in the updated greatest hits.