The counterintuitive lesson drawn by many of his fellow professors was that the rest of society needed to become a gun-free zone just like UNLV. Hmmm. On Tuesday, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges punted on a proposed rule to weigh the diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts of a college or university as a condition of accreditation.
The worst news at least for the public image of higher education came on Tuesday when the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT affirmed the oft-affirmed title of a book I wrote two decades ago called Intellectual Morons.
How might their universities discipline three students sitting next to one another who gave the same profoundly wrong and bizarrely amorphous non-answer answer? One imagines a penalty worse than for any "From the river to the sea"-type chant.
Why did the schools not punish one group for chanting words that a second group found displeasing or legitimately threatening seems the wrong question.
"Elite schools once disdained Jews because they were seen as outsiders to Western civilization. Now they are reviled as that civilization's very embodiment. Students explain that their hatreds come from what they learn in class - that the West is built on white supremacism and oppression. Israel is cast as the Western settler-colonialist oppressor par excellence."
Somebody at MIT taught those 19-year-olds it's okay to blockade Jewish students from attending class.
Rather than punish students who cycle through every few years, why not consciously hire a faculty that represents a broad range of thought rather than the bigoted, narrow crowd that excludes ideas heterodox on campus but common beyond the walls of Harvard Yard?
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