To put political correctness on college campuses in some actual perspective—terrible scourge, or media hysteria?—it helps to look at another institution that houses and trains a lot of angry and hormonal 18- to 24-year-olds: the U.S. military.

These institutions have more in common than you might think. Both have to make a lot of rules to anticipate the actions of thousands of teens gathered in a strange place with sudden access to freedom and money and booze. Both bring together kids from all over, some of whom haven’t met many people of different races and ethnicities. Their relationships are more intimate than most of us have with our coworkers, because they live together, and they also can’t be immediately fired for being jerks. This is a serious problem for the military, because it needs the teens to kill bad guys, not each other. And so it has procedures for dealing with conflicts over teen identity politics that can be far more intrusive than any university faculty training on microaggressions.

A fascinating example is a chart from a June 2000 Army handbook on the threat of hate groups in the ranks titled, “EXTREMIST TATTOO DECISION SUPPORT MATRIX.” The EXTREMIST TATTOO DECISION SUPPORT MATRIX is about a serious subject, but it is delightfully absurd. Basically all the caution and nervousness in, say, competing university memos about racist Halloween costumes is rendered in the stilted formality of military language and broken down into a multi-step process. The problem the MATRIX is meant to solve is what to do if your soldier appears to have a racist tattoo.

U.S. Army

“Private, is that a swastika?” Glances at matrix. “I see. Are you familiar with the connotations of a swastika?” Checks matrix again. “Hmm. And how committed are you to the tenets of national socialism?”

The reason college students have become obsessed with political correctness, according to everyone from National Review to The Atlantic to President Obama, is that kids these days want to be “coddled.” The insinuation is that today’s youth are fragile and weak, the products of “helicopter parenting.” A September Atlantic article stated, with no statistical evidence, that millennials “got a consistent message from adults: life is dangerous, but adults will do everything in their power to protect you from harm.” In a recent interview with ABC News, Obama said: