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At Princeton, the president’s office was recently occupied over the strangely belated realization that progressive icon Woodrow Wilson was a flaming bigot. The administration promptly pumped more into the grievance studies gravy train, offered indemnity for occupying administrative offices and stopped calling people in charge of student dorms “masters,” lest it evoke slavery.

There seems to be a “hegemonic narrative” that youth ought to feel oppressed and resentful. And when they erupt into mob tactics, universities roll over with unseemly haste

Clearly something is wrong in higher education. But these student mobs aren’t original thinkers who came up with this rubbish on their own. So where are they getting it from?

The supposed link between yoga, Halloween costumes and the genuine racism of figures like Wilson is the politically correct claim that Western civilization — frequently pejoratively mislabelled white, male and “European” — has a pernicious habit of “appropriating” ideas, clothing, food, mathematical techniques and anything else that looks good from others, just as they took the Elgin Marbles and aboriginal land.

It is true that colonialism was sometimes bigoted and rapacious. And Western culture certainly adapts whatever it encounters or invents, refining it and transforming it vigorously, exuberantly, sometimes absurdly. Yoga today is not yoga as practised a century ago. Nor is karate. But cultural borrowing and adaptation is not stealing, it is not insulting, it is not intolerant and it is not going to stop. It’s what open societies are all about and anyone can play.