A Revolt of the Coddled

Noah Rothman:

It has been said that college is where students go to learn how to learn. That is increasingly looking like an assumption based only in faith. The crisis of enforced intellectual homogeneity on America’s college campuses has been an acute one for several years. Despite the public’s growing concern for the integrity of American higher education, it is a crisis that seems only to get worse.

Colleges have courted a reputation not for shaping young minds and molding them in preparation for entering the workforce, but for mollycoddling a student body that seems forever engaged in one long, defensive, threat display. It is a true paradox that institutions with the mission of exposing students to new ideas, which will inevitably include some offensive or even dangerous ideas, are increasingly under fire for doing their job. Prospective campus speakers like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Christina Hoff Sommers, and Condoleezza Rice, are perfect examples of this phenomenon. These women of stature who fail to comport to the stereotype of victimization to which women and minorities are, in the progressive mind, supposed to conform were disinvited from their respective speaking engagements following a revolt of the coddled. It wasn’t enough for those students to retreat to the Orwellian-named “safe spaces” that shield oversize children from discomfort. No, these aspiring totalitarians had to ensure that no one else could be exposed to these speakers’ ideas or the example that they as role models set.