College is Not For Coddling
And yet, the response -- a hunger strike by graduate student Jonathan Butler to force the university president to step down, seems disproportionate to the offense. Not the offense of racial slurs -- the offense of the university's reaction. University President Tim Wolfe failed to get out of his convertible when student protesters swarmed it during the homecoming parade. Chancellor R. Bowen Loftin waited too long to condemn the N-word incident.
This hardly feels like George Wallace standing in the schoolhouse door. Indeed, it hardly feels like University of Louisville President James Ramsey dressing in a poncho and sombrero for Halloween. Yet, Wolfe is out, and Loftin is stepping aside.
More complicated factors may have been at work in Missouri. The football team exercised its economic muscle to demand Wolfe's ouster. The faculty was revolting against Loftin over budget cuts. But the punishment seems disproportionate to their supposed offenses.
Writing in The Atlantic recently, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt warn of the new "coddling" of college students: "A movement is arising, undirected and driven largely by students, to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense."
College is not supposed to be a "safe space," as one Yale student demanded. It is supposed to be a provocative environment -- broadening, not sheltering. When professors have to worry about showing famous paintings with topless women (degrading), and when they are instructed that "America is the land of opportunity" constitutes a micro-aggression, something is seriously amiss.
And that is scarier than any Halloween costume.
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Ruth Marcus' email address is ruthmarcus@washpost.com.
Copyright 2015 Washington Post Writers Group
