How PC culture is killing higher education
By Glenn
Harlan Reynolds
Universities like Emory trivialize education by rewarding politically correct student dictators.
That’s precisely the
response that university presidents should give to students who come, claiming
fear and trembling, to see university presidents because they’re unhappy with
the speech of other students. Instead, all too often, these students are
indulged in a way that the Winklevoss twins were not, with consequences for the
university, for higher education — and, actually for the complaining students
themselves — that are likely to prove disastrous.
The latest example of
this phenomenon can be found at Emory University in Atlanta.
At Emory, students of
the “social justice” variety were upset when someone chalked ”Trump 2016” on sidewalks. The
students announced that they felt “fear” and “pain” as a result. The
students challenged the administration; one student demanded that it
“decry the support for this fascist, racist candidate.” According to TheEmory
Wheel, another student complained: “I’m
supposed to feel comfortable and safe (here). But this man is being
supported by students on our campus and our administration shows that they, by
their silence, support it as well … I don’t deserve to feel afraid at my
school.”
Emory President James
Wagner at first showed a bit of resistance, but quickly caved, promising to
identify and discipline the authors of the offending pro-Trump writings.
TheEmory Wheel reported, "The University will review footage 'up by
the hospital [from] security cameras' to identify those who made the
chalkings, Wagner told the protesters. He also added that if they’re students, they
will go through the conduct violation process, while if they are from
outside of the University, trespassing charges will be pressed."
As New York
Magazine’s Jesse
Singal wrote, this response was “extremely creepy, and a sign that
something has gone seriously wrong.”
Writing in The
Atlantic, Conor
Friedersdorf noted that this sort of embarrassing student “activism” is
actually fueling Trump’s rise. And as Reason’s Robby Soave commented: “No
wonder so many non-liberal students are cheering for Trump — not
because they like him, but because he represents glorious resistance to the
noxious political correctness and censorship that has come to define the modern
college experience.”
But Friedersdorf
makes another point, one that college presidents should keep in mind: The Emory
protesters managed to fill a conference room and meet with Emory President
James Wagner, but they don’t actually represent the feelings of Emory
students overall. He observes: “On
Yik Yak, a social media app popular among college students in large part
because it permits anonymous speech, the Emory student reaction to the chalk
controversy wasn’t mixed, as often happens when one views that platform during
a campus controversy. It was clearly, overwhelmingly antagonistic to the
student activists.”
Freed from a fear
that student “activists” — and their allies in the university’s Student
Life and Diversity offices — might punish them, students expressed their true
feelings, and they demonstrate that the “activists” are a small, unrepresentative
slice that is being indulged at the expense of the university as a whole.
(This is probably why so many campus administrations and activists don’t
like Yik Yak: It allows students to express themselves without
fear of repercussions.)
And indulging those
activists is dangerous to universities because it makes them ridiculous. As Friedersdorf also
notes, Emory and its “fearful” students were widely mocked, even in the liberal
press. And they deserved to be mocked, because their behavior was childish and
silly.
Higher education
already faces falling enrollments, reduced public
support and a general decline in public esteem. In
Connecticut, the state legislature is even looking at taxing
the enormous endowment of Yale University. Universities used
to be revered, but now, as Walter Russell Mead writes, “From the point of view
of much of the public, highly-endowed colleges are becoming an
underperforming asset: The feeling is growing that elite fat cat
universities are an expensive luxury, and that the money spent propping up
their endowments would be better spent buying school lunches for needy kids, or
topping off up the pensions of retired civil servants.”
When students at
Emory University — annual cost of attendance, $63,058 per year — act
so foolishly , and worse, are indulged by those who are supposed to supply
adult guidance, it gives the appearance that higher education is largely a
waste of societal resources. That’s not a good place to be, right now.
University presidents, take note.
Glenn
Harlan Reynolds, a University of
Tennessee law professor, is the author of The
New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from
Itself, and a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors.
