The College Fix

‘Everyone appears to be retreating into little sanctuaries of sheltered thought and action’

Sometimes the deep weirdness on campus gets a little bit deeper and weirder than normal. We have seen such cases in recent weeks and months, in the form of students demanding racially segregated spaces on college grounds across the country.

The students making these demands are not neo-Nazis or heirs to the white supremacist ideologies of the Jim Crow era; they are, overwhelmingly, nonwhites. At the University of Chicago, a black student group demanded a segregated pre-orientation program for “students of color” (the university is considering it, by the way). At the end of the school year, American University set aside a cafe on campus as a no-go zone for white students so that nonwhite students could have a “sanctuary.” Earlier this year University of Michigan students called for a “no-whites-allowed space” where students of color could do “community organizing and social justice work” away from white students.

There are plenty more instances like this. We can all freely admit that, were similar demands being issued by white students, the uproar would be swift and furious, and rightfully so. That we tolerate this bizarre and counterproductive behavior from any students is a mystery. College administrations, to be sure, are very eager to roll over and surrender to even the most outrageous of student demands—and there are few student coalitions on the average campus more outrageous and inflexible than the mobs who believe in things like segregated orientations. But it is still baffling that it has gotten to this point, where public institutions—nominally bastions of rational thought and reasonable inquiry—are seriously entertaining the thought of racially balkanized “sanctuaries.”

A healthy campus culture would not have gotten to this point. A sane one would know where to say, “Enough.” That we apparently have neither is a sign of great concern. The new social justice ethic, of course, demands ever-greater balkanization for an ever-expanding array of “identities,” their scope limited only to the imagination of students. Where once you might have had a music house and a French cooking dorm on campus, you now must have dedicated space for every race, every iteration of the LGBTQRSTUV spectrum,, every nationality, every immigration status, every cause, every platform, every crusade: anything you can scribble onto a piece of paper and thrust into the face of the nearest chancellor, they’ll probably set aside a house for it.

Rapidly receding, it seems, are the days when the college campus was a shared kind of experience, a place where you went to break your own bubble and indeed leave behind the idea of bubbles altogether. More and more people appear to be retreating into little sanctuaries of sheltered thought and action. This time, however, such segregation is looked upon as a mark of progress and progressivism—a twisted worldview, to be sure, but one that is at this point all-but-inexorable.

MORE: Universities, students of color embrace segregated spaces on campus

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