Ben Carson discusses the ongoing situation at the University of Missouri on 'The Kelly File' on Wednesday. Ben Carson slams 'infantile' college protests

Ben Carson decried the ongoing situations at his alma mater, Yale University, and at the University of Missouri, where days of protests and a hunger strike backed by the football team culminated in the resignations of the system president and campus chancellor earlier this week. The problem, the Republican presidential candidate stated on Fox News' "The Kelly File" on Wednesday night, is that there is not a reasonable debate between the two sides in conflict.

"It's part of the problem we have going on in our country right now. We have people who get in their respective corners and demonize each other, but there's no conversation," the retired neurosurgeon said. "And of course, if you ask people to put on the record what their gripes are and what their solutions are, then perhaps they can see that they're not so far apart and they can come up with some reasonable solutions."


But, he added, what happened in the case of Yale and a dispute over offensive Halloween costumes, "is just raw emotion and people being manipulated, I think, in many cases by outside forces who wish to cause disturbances."

The situation at Yale is part of "a very dangerous trend," he said, when a majority of people can say, "'I don't like what you're doing, that's offensive, and therefore I have a right to be violent toward you or to deprive you of rights because I don't like what you're doing.'"

"You know, that really goes against the grain of our constitutional rights, and if we don't see that, we're in really big trouble right now," Carson declared.

Megyn Kelly then mentioned a notice that University of Missouri police had circulated on the Columbia campus earlier this week telling students to call officers to report "hateful and/or hurtful speech or actions." That email came after the university system president and chancellor resigned after a student group protested the response to a string of racial incidents at the university over the last few years. The protest included a graduate student who vowed to go on a hunger strike until System President Tim Wolfe resigned.

"Well we're being a little bit too tolerant, I guess you might say, accepting infantile behavior. I don't care which side it comes from. To say that I have the right to violate your civil rights because you're offending me is un-American. It is unconstitutional," Carson reacted. "And the officials at these places must recognize that and have the moral courage to stand up it. Because if they don't, it will grow, it will exacerbate the situation and we will move much further toward anarchy than anybody can imagine, and much more quickly."

Carson then compared the situation to a failing marriage in which a married couple stops talking before they get divorced.

"The next thing you know, their spouse is the devil incarnate," he added. "That's what's going on, and we cannot allow that in America."

Carson's chief rival Donald Trump called the protests at the University of Missouri "disgusting."

"Trump should have been the chancellor of that university," he told Fox Business' Maria Bartiromo on Thursday. "Believe me--there would have been no resignation."

Many of the demands of the student group, Concerned Student 1950, "were like crazy," he added.