By Heather Mac Donald
http://www.city-journal.org/
November 9, 2015
Jonathan Butler, a University of Missouri grad student who did a 7-day hunger strike, is greeted by the crowd of students on the campus of University of Missouri – Columbia on November 9, 2015 in Columbia, Missouri. Students celebrate the resignation of University of Missouri System President Tim Wolfe amid allegations of racism. (Michael B. Thomas/Getty Images)
The pathological narcissism of American college students has found a potentially devastating new source of power in the sports-industrial complex. University of Missouri president Timothy Wolfe resigned Monday morning in the face of a threatened boycott by black football players of an upcoming game. Wolfe’s alleged sin was an insufficient appreciation for the “systematic oppression” experienced by students of color at the university. Campus agitators also alleged that racial slurs had been directed at black students and feces had been smeared in the shape of a swastika in a dormitory.
The university’s board of overseers had convened in emergency session to discuss the football boycott; Wolfe resigned before meeting with them, issuing the standard mea culpa: “I take full responsibility for this frustration, and I take full responsibility for the inaction that has occurred.” According to the New York Times, the university could have lost more than $1 million had it forfeited its football game with Brigham Young University on Saturday. A group called “Concerned Faculty” had walked off the job in solidarity with the student activists and was calling on other faculty to join them.
There is no evidence that the University of Missouri denies equal opportunity to its black students; those black students, like every other student on campus, are surrounded by lavish educational resources, available to them for the asking on a color-blind basis. The university’s faculty and administrators are surely among the most prejudice-free, well-meaning group of adults in human history. Thousands of Chinese students would undoubtedly do anything for the chance to be “systemically oppressed” by the University of Missouri’s stupendous laboratories and research funding.
But Missouri’s political class has embraced the patent delusion that the university is rife with racism. Governor Jay Nixon called on college officials to “ensure the University of Missouri is a place where all students can pursue their dreams in an environment of respect, tolerance and inclusion.” In truth, the only barrier to such pursuit is a student’s own lack of academic preparedness, should he have been admitted under a racial preference. Mayor Bob McDavid of Columbia, Missouri—where the university is located—told CNN after Wolfe’s resignation that he congratulated the “students on achieving their goal.” McDavid insisted that we need to “deal with the pain of minorities” and that we will be “done” only “when every student has the freedom to fulfill his dream unimpeded by racial epithets.”
The precedent set here is monumental. Any student protester who can convince his college’s football or basketball team to threaten a strike will be able to bring administrators to their knees even more quickly than usual. Administrative cupidity and alumni fanaticism have turned the collegiate sports-industrial complex into the most powerful force on campus. If that behemoth can be reliably persuaded to support the latest racial agitation—and there will often be a critical mass of black athletes to appeal to—then an already supine leadership class will discard the reality principle once and for all.
Even without the sports boycott tool, however, the takeover of the college campus by racial hysteria appears all but complete. A video of a black female student at Yale screaming and cursing at her college master is a chilling portrait of self-engrossed, bathos-filled entitlement that has never been corrected by truth, much less restrained by manners: “Be quiet!” she shrieks at the frozen administrator, “Why the fuck did you accept the [master] position,” she continues at full, self-righteous cry. (The student’s tirade was occasioned by a statement issued by the master’s wife disagreeing with Yale’s admonition to students not to wear “culturally appropriative” Halloween costumes.) If anyone has reprimanded the student for her grotesque lack of courtesy, Yale is not letting on. Instead, Yale’s president, Peter Salovey, issued the usual fawning declaration of sorrow for the tribulations experienced by Yale’s privileged minority students: “Their concerns and cries for help made clear that some students find life on our campus profoundly difficult.”
This shocking video is a glimpse of the future—the boorish, hate-filled Cultural Revolution come to America. Colleges have capitulated completely to delusional victimology; unless employers are willing to stand up against the coddled products of the academic hothouse, we may all soon be living in a world of screaming, monomaniacal victims.
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