College Has Become Somewhat Indistinguishable From Nursery School
There are no juice boxes or mandated nap times, but Nina Burleigh, in her Newsweek cover story on "The Battle Against Hate Speech," lays out how college has become Tattleville against speech anybody finds (or claims to find) the least bit uncomfortable.

As I've noted, claims of being "microaggressed" are a way to unearned power over others. They're also a way to join a group -- of fellow victims -- and to be au courant.

Some of the craziness Burleigh details:

During his 18 years as president of Lebanon Valley College during the middle of the past century, Clyde Lynch led the tiny Pennsylvania liberal arts institution through the tribulations of the Great Depression and World War II, then raised $550,000 to build a new gymnasium before he died in 1950. In gratitude, college trustees named that new building after him.

Neither Lynch nor those trustees could have predicted there would come a day when students would demand that his name be stripped from the Lynch Memorial Hall because the word lynch has "racial overtones." But that day did come.

When playwright Eve Ensler wrote The Vagina Monologues, which premiered in 1996 and has been performed thousands of times by actors, celebrities and college students, she probably did not foresee a day when a performance of her feminist agitprop would be canceled because it was offensive to "women without vaginas." And yet that day did come--at Mount Holyoke, one of the nation's premier women's colleges.

As professor friends of mine have discovered, there is little a person says that can't be deemed a speech crime, since the definition of a speech crime is now merely anything that is offensive to anyone else. Or can creatively be determined to be.

Even a free speech lecture series, started by a liberal student, isn't immune to the end of the free exchange of ideas -- which, by the way, is how we build and strengthen our own viewpoints (or, if we're open-minded, perhaps change our minds at least a little):

Until it was squashed by administrative decree, Williams College sophomore Zachary Wood headed up an on-campus lecture series called "Uncomfortable Learning." Wood, an African-American who grew up in one of the poorer neighborhoods in Washington, D.C., is a self-described liberal, devoted to learning and books. He liked inviting controversial speakers, usually from the political right, to challenge young progressives cloistered in a collegiate utopia at one of the nation's great small liberal arts institutions.

Last year, though, Wood encountered the limits of free speech at Williams. First, he invited Suzanne Venker, an anti-feminist author and lecturer. After a campus and social media outcry, Wood's fellow "Uncomfortable Learning" leaders disinvited her and then, to avoid further shaming on social media, resigned from the organization.

How is this preparing students for life in a world without speech policing at every turn? Um...

Graduates of the Class of 2016 are leaving behind campuses that have become petri dishes of extreme political correctness and heading out into a world without trigger warnings, safe spaces and free speech zones, with no rules forbidding offensive verbal conduct or microaggressions, and where the names of cruel, rapacious capitalists are embossed in brass and granite on buildings across the land. Baby seals during the Canadian hunting season may have a better chance of survival.

This is, I would venture, doing one positive thing: Making it more attractive to hire older workers who are starting over instead of millennials starting out.

My assistant now and my assistant before her are/were both of the starting over school, and I highly recommend considering older workers.