Former University of Missouri system president Tim Wolfe lost his job in last fall's p.c. protests. Now, Mizzou is losing a lot more ( CAFNR/Flickr

Well, the University of Missouri deserves it. David French reports:

For months, news has trickled out of Missouri regarding the negative fallout from the fall student protests. The university capitulated in the face of a racial “crisis” wholly of the protesters’ manufacture (demanding a chancellor’s resignation over random racial incidents completely outside his control), and the chickens are truly coming home to roost. Previously, I’ve posted about declining student applications and declining donations, yet the true dimensions of the financial disaster are only just now coming into focus.

Fox Sports obtained a copy of an e-mail the interim chancellor sent out to the university community, which starts like this:

I am writing to you today to confirm that we project a very significant budget shortfall due to an unexpected sharp decline in first-year enrollments and student retention this coming fall. I wish I had better news. The anticipated declines—which total about 1,500 fewer students than current enrollment at MU—in addition to a small number of necessary investments are expected to leave us with an approximate $32 million budget gap for next year.

“Unexpected”?! Please. The entire country knows that Mizzou is a place where student radicals—including the football team—and their faculty and staff supporters bullied the craven administration into caving to their absurd demands. See here for this blog’s coverage last fall of the implosion of administrative character there.

French adds:

Cowardice has its costs. Flagship state universities—backed by the full financial might of the state and its taxpayers—are for now too big to fail, but they’re not too big to suffer. It remains to be seen whether other university administrators will learn the correct lessons from Missouri’s capitulation.

Good. This is all to the good. I hope it happens to every single university that caved. A conservative friend in Kansas says lots of Kansas parents are not considering KU for their kids because of the same kind of nonsense on that campus.

Hit them in the purse. That is the only thing these politically correct college administrators will listen to. Sensible parents don’t want their kids to go to a university ruled by PC stupidity. Bowdoin College in Maine is revealing itself to be a confederacy of crackpots with its insane reaction to the sombrero party. At some point, they must be made to pay a price, or the madness will not end. We are starting to look at colleges for our oldest, and there is no chance—none—that we will consider a college or university that has made free speech, open inquiry, and normal college life hostage to political correctness.

Let’s revisit Jonathan Chait’s essay from last November, responding from the left to the p.c. wave on campus—Mizzou’s in particular. Excerpt:

That these activists have been able to prevail, even in the face of frequently harsh national publicity highlighting the blunt illiberalism of their methods, confirms that these incidents reflect something deeper than a series of one-off episodes. They are carrying out the ideals of a movement that regards the delegitimization of dissent as a first-order goal. People on the left need to stop evading the question of political correctness — by laughing it off as college goofs, or interrogating the motives of p.c. critics, or ignoring it — and make a decision on whether they agree with it.

A movement that regards the delegitimization of dissent as a first-order goal. There you have it. Yielding to left-wing campus bullies has consequences, as Mizzou’s administrators are finding out. May the reckoning spread.