The mind-set of the modern college student is a charity to behold. The students at St. Olaf College in Northfield don’t seem to mind that they were all pranked by a student who fabricated a threat, racist in tone, left on a student’s car windshield.

That set off a firestorm of protests and demands and class boycotts. The most puzzling of those demands insisted that St. Olaf College be held accountable “for the institutional racism that is embedded within the structure of this campus.’’

In the town of “cows, colleges and contentment,” where every morning smells like breakfast in your grandmother’s kitchen because of the Malt-O-Meal plant, racism is thought to be embedded at St. Olaf.

There apparently wasn’t a problem until there was a problem that now has been admitted to having been made up, which the school’s administrators might advertise as there being no problem. It had to be concocted!

But charity begins at home, and now the students are saying that something good was started at the end of April when they all came together and agreed that committees should be formed and dialogues held about the school’s “climate.”

If I was the president of St. Olaf I’d kick the kid out of school, but I am impossibly out of touch with what appears to me to be the disintegration of higher learning. In fact, I would imagine the president of the school, David Anderson, not only won’t kick the kid out of school but is probably paralyzed with having to make any decision that could shine a poor light on the perpetrator. Related Articles Soucheray: New to politics, low on cash, no help from the party, John Stromenger makes a run nonetheless

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I am not suggesting that Anderson is weak-kneed or indecisive. I am suggesting that in the event he took a harsh look at what was essentially the impugning of his entire institution he would be helping to create the victimization that the person who left the note wanted in the first place, even if the victimization was fiction.

“We confronted a person of interest who confessed to writing the note,” Anderson said the other day. “We’ve confirmed that this was not a genuine threat.”

Anderson also said, “It was apparently a strategy to draw attention to concerns about the campus climate.”

Well, how bad was the campus climate if you had to make up a threat? It‘s almost as though the supposed victim got tired of waiting for real racism to break out so they decided to speed things up a bit.

And now that is being called a strategy.

I wonder how many pairs of kid gloves the typical college or university president has to go through in a single academic year.

The word racism is losing its meaning. It gets shouted too urgently and often too prematurely. On today’s college campus you can be accused of racism for eating Mexican food when you aren’t Mexican. No, wait, that might get called cultural appropriation. There are so many eggshells to walk on that you don’t really ever know when what you do or say will bring a charge of racism.

With there being no shortage of real racist fools it is a shame that the kids have taken to making it up. And not just at St. Olaf. It has been happening at other schools where foul notes or messages have been determined to be fabricated. It seems a post-Trump election phenomenon, which is to say, I can’t recall these types of incidents prior to the election of Donald Trump, an election victory that has so terrorized his opposition that they believe any means justifies their end game. Even lying.

But it is a topsy-turvy world. Lying is now called a strategy to bring about increased awareness of the college climate. Whatever the hell that means. I don’t envy the David Andersons of the academy. They have to be wondering what in the world happened.