Missouri’s Lesson: the Campus Wars Are about Power, Not Justice

What is going on at the University of Missouri?  Their president, Tom Wolfe resigned after protest erupted because he didn’t respond decisively enough to various racist incidents on campus.  (In a dramatic flourish, the school’s football team even went on a hunger strike.)

Or at least this is what the news is reporting.  David French, on National Review, takes umbrage at this explanation, because it “collapses under the slightest scrutiny.”

He writes:

The idea that Wolfe presided over a racially insensitive educational empire is a sad joke. A timeline of racial outrages in Columbia is sparse indeed, showing two allegations of racial name-calling (on a campus with 35,000 students) and one disturbing incident in which a swastika was drawn on a dorm wall with human waste. No rational, sentient human being believes system presidents can be responsible for what lunatics do with their own feces, or that they can prevent any given student from shouting racial slurs. Not even the worst communist dictatorships could control the speech of all their subjects. Wolfe couldn’t stop drunk undergraduates from hurling insensitive insults even if he established his own gulag and deployed commissars across campus.”

As the mother of a teenager who is thinking about going to college, this is sobering in deed.  David writes:

Fortunately for the radicals, our universities are populated by the craven and the cowardly. Push a professor, even slightly, and it’s likely he’ll fold. Demand faculty support for your protest, and dozens will rush to join, self-righteously advancing their own false oppression narratives even as they enjoy lives billions of others would covet. There is nothing brave about these people. They are not “elite.” They don’t deserve a single dime of taxpayer money or one cent of student tuition. They dishonor their schools and their country.

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