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The climax came from one truly precious second-year student — this is Yale remember — who screamed at him ,“Be quiet! … Who the f—k hired you? … Why the f—k did you accept the position? … How do you sleep at night. You disgust me.”

I won’t recap at length the equal insanity, the presidential resignations, the assault on a student reporter, that went on a Mizzou — it’s everywhere in the news and online. But I note that the loudest, crudest, and most hostile voice at their demonstration belonged to a university staff member, a beautifully named Ms. M. Click, lecturer, who’s C.V., whose resume, whose credentials (I’m sorry, Mr. Swift) include: musings on the dark side Thomas the Tank Engine, and “‘More drinkin’, less thinkin’, fewer teeth, and beer’: Representations of class in CMT’s My Big Redneck Wedding.” The rest of her professorial oeuvre consists of “readings” of Taylor Swift, Martha Stewart, and Fifty Shades of Grey, with a promise of work on “subjectivities” in Little Orphan Annie.

(For those wondering: Why, yes, she’s a lecturer of Advanced Feminist Studies.)

The professors and administrators at the universities who do not mock, dismiss and, if necessary, expel those who stage these tantrums are unworthy of the positions they hold

Space forbids a full dissection of this turmoil and madness. American higher education, on the Humanities side, and in particular in those dubiously academic innovational “disciplines” centring on Identity, Race, Gender, and the crapulous White Privilege categories, are blights of the mind. They are transmuting portions of university life (Science is saved by its commitment to reality) into slenderly disguised kindergartens for intolerant narcissists. That the incessant calls for “safe spaces” and “free speech zones” and “freedom from offence” are the wails of people who have forgotten, if they ever had a inking, of its meaning what education at a university is supposed to be about.

The professors and administrators at the universities who do not mock, dismiss and, if necessary, expel those who stage these tantrums are unworthy of the positions they hold in a system that once was the envy of the world. Administrators and real professors should take note: every brain needs a spine.

Finally, every North American student with a trigger warning mentality should, for just one day, walk to school with an Afghan girl of 10. She could teach them a whole lot about safe spaces, real courage, and how sacred the regard for true education should be.

National Post