The recent discord on college campuses has been motivated, we are told, by racial insensitivity.  Apparently, minority students don’t feel welcomed enough, and are easily upset and offended.  The curriculum offends them, comments from the faculty offend them, comments from other students offend them, conduct by other students offends them, even Halloween costumes.  Yale’s Intercultural Affairs Council sent an email to students warning against the wearing of any costume that might offend.  Let me pause here.  If racial insensitivity was rampant at Yale, would there even be an Intercultural Affairs Council?  Anyway, back to topic.  A faculty member dared to suggest that it might be acceptable to tolerate a costume that could be considered obnoxious or inappropriate on Halloween.  Helen Keller told us that “the highest result of education is tolerance.”  However, at Yale, the faculty member was run out of his job by screaming students.  Take that, tolerance.  Yale University boasts that its mission is to “train the next generation of world leaders.”  This does not bode well for the world.

So what’s really going on on campus that is causing all this discord?  My theory is that what the minority students are experiencing is equality, and they don’t like it.  Aristotle taught that, “equality consists in the same treatment of similar persons.” That seems logical, but it also stands to reason that, if you’re equal, that means you’re just like everyone else, and if you’re just like everyone else, that means you’re not special.  If you’re not getting special treatment, then you’re being slighted, or in the common vernacular, “dissed,” so you have a right to be angry.  The fact that these students may reach such a conclusion is not their fault.  Colleges have gone to great lengths to insulate minority students, and thus all college students, from the real world.  There is no doubt that racism and intolerance exist.  Clearly, the schools have a duty to ensure that no student is mistreated, but where is the boundary?  For instance, at the University of Missouri, some yahoo in a pickup truck yelled racial slurs at the African-American Student Body President.  That is unacceptable and can’t be tolerated; swift discipline should be meted out.  But how does that relate to students who demand that a teacher be fired because they somehow were made to feel “uncomfortable”?  Place the blame right where it belongs, on the universities.  On college campuses which once were centers for the free exchange of ideas and opinions, they have instituted speech codes and conduct codes which inhibit all but the mindless parroting  of that which is considered “politically correct.”  This PC culture (and I’ve always thought PC stood for “political cowardice”)  stems from faculties which are almost uniformly made up of Leftists who preach liberalism and tolerate no opinions other than their own.  A wise man (Bob Grant) once said, “there is nothing less liberal than a liberal.”  How true.  It’s ironic that these left wing ideologues, who spent their youth railing against “fascism” and chanting “challenge authority,” have created a culture in which all must fear the thought police and careers may hang on the most innocuous of comments.  For you see, now that the inmates are running the asylum, only one view is tolerated, and orthodoxy cannot be challenged.  So much for diversity.

So, back to equality.  Students, if equality means equal treatment, then welcome to the real world, welcome to my world.  It’s a world where everybody in authority is not a Marxist, and some people actually may disagree with you.  You are not special here.  The business world doesn’t run on slogans and platitudes, it runs on profits, and get this, some bosses have a habit of being very demanding and unpleasant, and it’s not because of racial insensitivity.  They’re demanding because they want the job done their way, and on time.  Paul Hornung of the Green Bay Packers said that Vince Lombardi always treated everyone equally – like dogs.  That’s a world for which these students are ill equipped because they have been handled with kid gloves for far too long.  In grade school they were indoctrinated to value self-esteem over self-control.  In college, they were issued rose-colored glasses by red-diaper professors whose ideas of equality would frighten Mao himself.  The colleges have convinced these kids that they are victims, still suffering the badges and incidences of slavery, which the 13th Amendment was designed to remove.  It’s no wonder they have created a generation which recoils at any unkind word.  The colleges  made them exactly what they are, “for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” GALATIANS 6: 7-9.  Oops, sorry about the Bible verse students.  Wait a minute, what you mean by “man?”  Isn’t that sexist?  And if those farmers are going to sow and reap, they better be making at least $15 an hour.