The training for Residential Assistants — that's administrators who keep an eye on students in college residential dormitories — the training for RAs at Binghamtom University in New York included an event entitled "#StopWhitePeople2K16." The purpose of the course is to teach incoming students about white privilege.

The University of Florida is now allowing illegal aliens to pay reduced in-state tuition fees, thus privileging the illegals over citizens from out-of-state. The university also offers special annual scholarhships just for illegals, worth $600.

One campus at the University of North Carolina has switched to unisex bathrooms. Anyone can use any bathroom. You'd think that would make the crazy egalitarians happy, but no. Campus authorities posted a sign outside every bathroom showing a male figure, a female figure, and a wheelchair figure. "What about transgender people?" the activists are screeching.

Westminster College in Salt Lake City has announced that it will allow men who identify as women to play on female sports teams and use their locker rooms.

Vanderbilt University in Nashville, originally endowed by Cornelius Vanderbilt with the hope it would help to heal the sectional wounds inflicted by the Civil War, has a Confederate Memorial residence hall. It won't have it for much longer. A college committee has decided to change the name to just Memorial Hall. For legal reasons, this will mean the college has to give up a donation made eighty years ago, present value $1.2 million.

The University of Mississippi marching band will no longer play the song "Dixie" at football games. Playing "Dixie" at games has been a long-standing tradition at Ole Miss. The university's Athletics Department announced the decision in a statement August 19th, saying it would make the games, quote, "more inclusive for all fans."

Also in North Carolina, the student union at Appalachian State University in Boone has erected a "Privilege Board" at the entrance reminding students to check their white, male, able-bodied, Christian, or cisgender privilege any time they enter the union. We all know how privileged those white people in the Appalachians are.

Stories like this, and all the fuss we've been hearing the past year or two about trigger warnings, safe spaces, microaggressions, and the rest, it's all got some of us wondering: Why do alumni of these places still send in donations?

People of my generation — not just conservative people, either — roll their eyes and shake their heads at this stuff. And my generation, I hasten to add, is not the oldest among college alumni. Why do they go on donating, when they know how crazy and anti-intellectual it all is?

Apparently some of them are waking up. The New York Times ran a report August 4th, that I just saw on HeterodoxAcademy.org, another website critical of campus looniness. Headline: College Students Protest, Alumni's Fondness Fades and Checks Shrink. Sample, quote:

A backlash from alumni is an unexpected aftershock of the campus disruptions of the last academic year. Although fund-raisers are still gauging the extent of the effect on philanthropy, some colleges — particularly small, elite liberal arts institutions — have reported a decline in donations, accompanied by a laundry list of complaints.

There are some signs that it has. Let's give a round of applause to John Ellison, Dean of Students at the University of Chicago. In his welcoming letter to freshmen, Dean Ellison said the following, quote:

Our commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so called "trigger warnings," we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual "safe spaces" where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own.