Other racial incidents have been reported by Mizzou students with varying degrees of documentation: A student says he was twice described with a racial slur, and a swastika was found applied to a dormitory wall with feces. But the University of Missouri is not besieged by the Ku Klux Klan. It is besieged by hysteria. Hysteria needs to be stood up to, not cravenly fed with acquiescence.

When men with souls made of cotton candy wilt in the face of this sort of absurdity, it encourages it. Wolfe is, by his resignation, rewarding destructive and deeply illiberal behavior. (In response to the racism hysteria, a student went on a hunger strike, and a group of black players on the football team threatened to boycott the remainder of the season. That a 4–5 team might skip the remainder of its games is hardly an institutional crisis, but the preservation of mediocrity is the highest priority of college administrators.)

The fact that a young drunk man said something ugly and stupid tells us at least as much about drunkenness as it does racism; as social problems go, alcohol abuse is by most meaningful measures a more significant factor in American life than is racism. But racism is a handy cudgel for the Left, which is why it is deployed at every opportunity — even when those opportunities have to be manufactured.