Who's Running the Asylums?

The real problem on college campuses.

We’ve known for decades that in our academic asylums it’s not only the inmates who are insane. The wardens are too. 

Psychotics are also common along the Potomac, where embarrassing scenes are customary in Congress. Last week on the Hill, it all came together when three tone-deaf university presidents soaked themselves in shame. 

When asked if calling for “the genocide of Jews” violates their “codes of conduct”, the heads of Harvard, Penn, and MIT couldn’t give an unambiguous answer. 

Like choosing their finest wine or favorite movie, “it depended on the context”. It was a revealing equivocation.

How would they have responded if students insisted there were only two sexes, and that only the female one was capable of bearing kids? What if protestors demanded an end to affirmative action, or increased use of fossil fuels?

Would “context” have mattered? Or would the “perpetrators” be reflexively denounced, demonized, and dismissed? The questions answer themselves.

What if someone on campus calls for wiping out white people (which these days happens with some regularity)? Do administrators call the cops…or worry about “context”? Or do they simply nod along with implicit applause?

Yet when whites dare resent calls for their own annihilation, they’re criticized for complaining - for being oblivious to the unwarranted “privilege” that gives them power.

And even when whites keep quiet they’re guilty of aggression. If they did so a few years ago, they were told their “silence was violence”. Such is the convenient flexibility and fluidity of these revolutionary regimens.

In front of Congress, it was as if these university presidents struggled to determine where Jews rank in this “woke” strata. Are they among the oppressors, or part of the oppressed? Villains or victims? Should they be killed…or cuddled? The bewildered academics weren’t sure what they were supposed to say.

Calls for genocide should be easy to denounce. But in a world that’s lost its way because it can’t define its terms, this is apparently more difficult than it seems.

Are protestors and malcontents demanding the literal obliteration of all Jews? Are they merely protesting occupation, or explicitly advocating death? Do they oppose the state of Israel…or the very existence of Jews? These are sharp distinctions with definite differences.

People aren’t synonymous with the reprobates who rule them. Our own governments are our natural enemies. Protesting Israel doesn’t mean one despises Jews. Many of us want to be rid of the US government. But that doesn’t imply we want to exterminate Americans. 

Again, we don’t know what we’re talking about if we can’t define our terms. As with “racism”, “fascism”, “white supremacy”, and so many other words and phrases that’ve lost their meaning, is “genocide” being stretched so far it seldom fits? Or to the point it won’t be recognized when properly worn?

What do “calls for genocide” encompass? Is it limited to explicit calls for extinction? Or does it incorporate ethnic slurs, middle fingers, and dirty looks?

Do they include emblems and expressions from communist sympathizers? What about Che shirts, Mao hats, and Marxist marches? “Elite” colleges have long been filled with such filth. But no Congressman demands such excrement be extracted. 

Why not? These are symbols of support for the most murderous ideology in the history of the world. Not only are they tolerated at most universities, but sympathy for them seems almost a prerequisite for admission and a condition of employment.

Since the congressional testimony, the president of Penn lost her job. The other two were initially in limbo, but now seem safe. All three were accused of hypocrisy for supporting some sorts of speech while suppressing others. 

Yet that indictment misses the mark. These ladies aren’t hypocrites. Hypocrisy is pretending to a set of beliefs to which one’s behavior doesn’t conform. But by imposing varying standards of what can be said, these college presidents are acting perfectly consistently with what they deeply believe.

The problem is often misdiagnosed because of the prism thru which most people view it. The wrong lens is affixed to the scope.

Chaos and lunacy on campuses is more about enforced group-think and degraded behavioral standards than inconsistent policies about what’s allowed to be said. Speech proscription (and prescription) is more symptom than disease, a pernicious variant of the “woke” virus that infects these institutions.

The words, writings, speeches, or slogans these indoctrination centers condone or condemn are the holy water of the ideological cesspools in which they baptize their students. 

Restrictions on what can be said at colleges is a problem. But they’re not haphazard, capricious, or “inconsistent”. They’re consistently applied, and always in one direction.

What’s missing most in these identitarian ivory towers is a sense of basic decency and civilized conduct (which most faculty and students once instinctively displayed). But as with so many things in our fractured society, we’ve lost our cultural consensus on what decorum means.

Till relatively recently, disruptive, loutish, and threatening behavior…whether organized as a “protest” or not… simply wasn’t allowed on college campuses. Physical harassment could get you expelled, and assault would get you arrested. Now discipline depends on the pigmentation, proclivities, and politics of the respective disputants.

Free expression, vigorous debate, and exchange of ideas should be encouraged on college campuses. Ostensibly, that’s why universities exist. But that doesn’t mean anyone there can act like an idiot or become a menace.

And that should include the people charged with running the schools.