The College Fix

A bad sign of things to come

As we reported earlier this week, Brandeis University recently cancelled a play set to premiere on its campus out of deference to the Black Lives Matter movement—the play presented the movement in an unflattering light, painting it as part of an oversensitive and overreactive political zeitgeist. The play’s cancellation also turned on the fact that, at one point, a white character in it uses the word “nigger” as part of a comedy routine.

“Following open and productive conversations between [the playwright] and faculty from the Theater department and the Division of Creative arts,” the university declared, “together we decided to engage with the play through a rigorous, team-taught course next semester, while [the playwright] will premiere the play in a professional venue.”

How fragile the campus has become; how incapable of dealing with even a minimal amount of controversy and clever cultural commentary! Our own political discourse has become so inured to this kind of cowardly censorious impulse that we’re apt to forget just how stupid it is; we have grown so used to the idea of grown adults running away from mildly controversial ideas that we are likely to forget just how childish and silly it makes them seem. We might roll our eyes and mutter, “Good grief, campus snowflakes are at it again.” But it is a much more striking problem than that, and much more pressing.

In the past week you yourself have probably confronted several if not dozens of ideas, proposals and demonstrations with which you profoundly disagree; many of them you may have even found deeply offensive (in my line of work I experience probably ten million such encounters every few hours). Yet most of us are more than capable of navigating these experiences with at least a modicum of intellectual dignity. In my own college days there were a great many nasty and unpleasant demonstrations on campus, yet the idea of running them off campus would have been preposterous. Because, you know, grown-ups should be able to handle such things (and, lest it be forgotten, everyone attending college is in fact a grown-up).

I am proposing that we pause for a while and do some serious, quiet reflection on the state of modern campus politics—the dismal and useless corner into which administrators and campus agitators have painted themselves. We should not grow comfortable with it, if we haven’t already. A political environment that does not allow even the moderately edgy fare that Brandeis cancelled is a very bad harbinger of very bad things to come. As has been said before, the men and women attending college today will at some point be the people running the American government and major American institutions. If the future leaders of American society cannot abide mildly offensive and shrewd political commentary, what kind of society will we have when they are running it? Do we even want to know?

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