The Dangerous Safety of College
His op-ed is partly right, partly wrong. His naivety about human nature, especially late-adolescent/young adult nature, is where he gets things wrong. Opinion writers tend to be naive about the college youth, and take them far too seriously. Perhaps they identify with them. College administrators are even worse castrati.
For a subgroup of kids that age who are in fancy schools and usually lack jobs, creating mayhem, especially when cloaked in some imitation of higher virtue (but is also fun when it is not cloaked in anything as in mayhem in Fort Lauderdale or Nassau), it's an attempt to unleash their warrior, reckless natures without fear of being shot by an enemy. It is a sort of play warfare, really. Paintball.
In almost all of human history, it would have been real clubs or arrows or spears or bullets at their age. No safe spaces for anybody.
Can I earn distinction among my peers by shutting down Charles Murray? Seems rather pathetic to me but these are bubble-wrapped kids with the Teenage Diseases. Some of their profs, for sure, never recovered from their own by avoiding the Big World Outside the bubble.
In elite schools, this play war is mostly for kids who didn't make the sports teams. In non-elite schools there is little of this foolishness because there is a diploma to be earned and they have side jobs or their parents are stretched to pay for them to have a positive experience to graduate with a supply of useful skills and enough socio-cultural tools to maybe handle a managerial role and a mortgage at some point.
Were I a college president (which I would not mind being), I would have any disruptors expelled and/or arrested (which is just one of many reasons I am not a college president).
Who was it who said recently that what America needs is a Good War? With a co-ed, or, should I say, pangender draft. There must be people worth suppressing more than a refined, gentle, scholarly grandpa like Murray. Where is the heroism in war against Grandpa?
