As university administrators have folded in the face of the student protests, they have stoked more protests, more sit-ins, and the perpetually growing “living” lists of demands. One young woman at Princeton, seeing what happened to Tim Wolfe, said—and this is a direct quotation—”This campus owes us everything. We owe white people nothing. All of this is mine. My people built this place.” And the president of Princeton, in whose office she was sitting while she shouted at him, gave her what she demanded. The person with power at Princeton isn’t the president. It’s the student who can walk into his office, scream at him, and get him to do her bidding. It turns out that on the American campus, real power emanates from the willingness to believe in your own legitimacy.
In this, the millennials who inhabit America’s campuses have learned a great deal from the left. If The Closing of the American Mind anticipated political correctness, it was Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism that prefigured what we now find on college campuses. Goldberg saw that liberalism had come unmoored from specific policy goals and was finally interested in just one thing: power.
Writing in the wake of his own school’s capitulation, Claremont McKenna professor Charles Kessler observed, “When the leftists lacked power, they embraced free speech. Now that they have power, they don’t need it.” There are a great many other niceties of which the leftists no longer have any need.
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