Suffocating safety.

• Author: Bresler, Robert J.
• Position: STATE OF THE NATION

DURING THE PAST FALL SEMESTER, the country was treated to a college spectacle the likes of which never has been seen. At Princeton and Yale universities, home to the privileged and allegedly gifted, students are demanding "safety" from something called "micro-aggressions"--words that may unsettle them or thoughts they may consider threatening. Faculty and administers are falling all over themselves to find ways to accommodate these sensitive souls. They want to erase the names of those from the past who did not share the enlightenment of today. A group of Princeton students demanded Woodrow Wilson's name be banished from the university--for his racial prejudices. It does not seem to matter that: as president of Princeton (before he was president of the U.S.), he turned the school from an elegant gentleman's club into a first-rate academic institution; was a founder of American progressivism; and the establishment of United Nations was inspired by his vision. You could banish from any university the names of all their honored alumni and presidents who owned slaves, supported slavery, and accepted Jim Crow and the lives of the minority students would not change a bit You can say the same for all of the additional funds some students are demanding to be spent on new diversity programs and deans.

Before these universities spend more money for diversity bureaucrats and chisels to knock the names of offending founders and donors off buildings, a question remains: what is the money doing now? Parents and students are spending a small fortune for a college education that can leave both with burdensome debts. A college education is one of the biggest investments of a lifetime, and it requires a return. What is the return parents, students, and the larger society should expect? Are we getting it? What do we think is going on during the years for which thousands have been saved and thousand more are being borrowed?

Do we care that too many students are consuming alcohol to the point of toxicity? Do we care that too many are engaging in anonymous sex? Are students required to write paper after paper, so they can learn to express themselves with clarity and concision? Do we care whether they are taking demanding courses in the humanities and grappling with complex writers such as James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, Edith Wharton, Henry James, and William Faulkner, or do we prefer that they instead take courses in detective fiction, movies, reality TV, and comic...