Students don't want to learn anymore. They want to teach.

If students really want to encounter classical poetry produced by non-whites, they have options. They can study the relative handful of languages that produced significant literature before the modern period. Hebrew, Arabic, Thai, Chinese, and Urdu come to mind. These are all worthy subjects crying out for more scholarship.

But there’s a catch. And it is what catches our activists out. Studying an ancient language to discover non-white voices is challenging and requires real work. You cannot pass the final exams just by repeating a number of fashionable political slogans. And perhaps activist students do not study these languages because they correctly suspect they won’t find much written in these languages that qualifies as politically correct by the standards of 2017. In fact, you will find in these literatures exactly the kind of messages that activists least like to hear. Lessons like: Humble yourself and mortify your ambitions.

Perhaps it is the students themselves who should have their views “interrogated” and their discourse of power deconstructed. The activist-student is engaged in a power grab. He wishes to delegitimize the power of professors and even the school itself. That is why the activist student defines knowledge itself as a form of malicious participation in an unjust power system. And he does so because this is the only way of dignifying his own ignorance. It is also the only way that he might shame an academic institution into creating a new administrative role for his kind of sloganeering.