The Mountain Echo, a campus newspaper at Mount St. Mary’s University in Maryland, reported this week that President Simon Newman had proposed culling the freshman class to improve the school’s official retention rate. The plan, ultimately thwarted, was to eject 20 to 25 students before the late September deadline for reporting enrollment data to the federal government. But it wasn’t Newman’s questionable ethics that caught the Washington Post’s attention; rather, it was the language he used.

“This is hard for you,” Newman said before a group of faculty and administrators, “because you think of the students as cuddly bunnies, but you can’t. You just have to drown the bunnies … put a Glock to their heads.”

This mixed metaphor—or thorough murder metaphor, depending on how you see it—reflects a larger trend in how we think and speak about students’ feelings. It’s an idea expressed in far more palatable language by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff in their landmark Atlantic essay “The Coddling of the American Mind,” and by countless others ever since: that a feelings-driven campus culture needs to be replaced with tough love and cold rationality. In other words, it might feel wrong to drown the bunnies, but sometimes it’s for their own good.

With such language, Newman joins a national movement ideologically and financially invested in the idea that higher learning has gone soft, and can only be fixed by a lean-and-mean business mentality. But this rhetoric is based on a faulty premise: that feelings and rationality are mutually exclusive.

The media routinely covers student protests of all sorts as matters of “hurt feelings.” And when professors, me included, stand up to those trying to reduce student concerns to matters of hurt feelings, we’re circularly dismissed as part of the coddling apparatus. In the wider frame of U.S. politics, in which the university is equated with left-progressivism, portraying progressives as privileging feelings over facts—or the idea that for progressives “feelings are more important than logic”—has become a prominent and predictable strategy. The objective of this kind of rhetoric—which you’ll also find in abundance in #gamergate and #tcot social media circles—is to minimize, and sometimes to feminize, the grievances of a political or institutional adversary.