The College Fix

What does it all mean, anyway?

Here at The College Fix we have covered extensively the madness at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. Just yesterday, for example, we reported on an act of political violence and intimidation at this college committed against an innocent apolitical student activist. It is worth watching in full. The entire altercation has a deflated, mildly depressing feel about it: one young man is writing harmless chalk messages on a wall, while a group of students—angry, irrational and clearly unsure of how to handle a dissenting opinion—hover around the chalker in an intimidating manner, alternately dumping water on him, throwing his glasses to the ground and generally manhandling him. It’s the kind of squabble you expect from either a half-hearted group of Maoist Red Guards or else simply young men and women who have not thought things through very clearly and who are just looking for something they can write about on Facebook later in the evening. “I fought fascism today by screaming at a guy writing chalk messages!” is a great status update, if you’re a certain kind of person. But of course it doesn’t have much bearing on the real world.

But that, really, is the central mystery of the entire Evergreen State debacle (and by extension the histrionics we see on a great many college campuses these days): what do hysterical liberal campus activists hope to accomplish with all of this? Ostensibly their efforts tend to center around certain concrete goals: end racism, fight sexism, vanquish able-ism, squash transphobia, obliterate cissexism, and so forth. And it’s worth pointing out that many student efforts do indeed get results.

But, as we’ve seen, many times the pursuit of these goals often looks like meaningless, nonsensical delirium. At Evergreen State, for example, a group of students decided to patrol campus carrying bats and clubs—for what reason? Nobody knows; doubtlessly even the students themselves don’t know. Or consider the disgraceful behavior of Yale students who set upon a husband-and-wife professor team for the dumbest of reasons; were the students in question genuinely convinced that their outlandish behavior would have some measurable good effect on campus or anywhere else? What about the “tent city” formed by students at the University of Missouri a few years ago? Or the Middlebury mob that ended up sending a professor to the hospital?

Ostensibly the students in question hope by their behavior to effect some change of some kind. But ultimately it seems as if these demonstrations are little more than an excuse for students to stand around, watch some white people get yelled at, and then post about it on Twitter later. The great protests and movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—the suffragette movement, say, or the March on Washington, or the Indian civil disobedience campaign—were each coalesced around certain practical goals and intended outcomes, and all that these movements did was geared towards realizing those goals and outcomes. It is difficult if not impossible to say the same about the campus hysteria movements, the participants of which seem dedicated only to (a) shrieking at professors for no reason, (b) sitting in large groups and scanning social media on their cell phones, and (c) occasionally assaulting innocent people. What is supposed to come of this? It is a baffler for the ages.

One assumes that, years from now, the vast majority of these students will look back on this silly and pointless behavior with awkward embarrassment, the way we might look back on the awkward clothing styles we had in our middle school days. The excesses of youthful vanity will sometimes do that. But in the meantime we must deal with all of this: the caterwauling, the useless demonstrations, even the occasional bouts of genuine violence. The sheer worthlessness of it is something to marvel over, and reflect on, as the slow march of hysteria continues across American higher education.

MORE: Protesters make fools of themselves outside Charles Murray lecture at Indiana University

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