Neither Lynch nor those trustees could have predicted there would come a day when students would demand that his name be stripped from the Lynch Memorial Hall because the word lynch has “racial overtones.” But that day did come.
When playwright Eve Ensler wrote The Vagina Monologues, which premiered in 1996 and has been performed thousands of times by actors, celebrities and college students, she probably did not foresee a day when a performance of her feminist agitprop would be canceled because it was offensive to “women without vaginas.”
And yet that day did come—at Mount Holyoke, one of the nation’s premier women’s colleges.
Graduates of the Class of 2016 are leaving behind campuses that have become petri dishes of extreme political correctness and heading out into a world without trigger warnings, safe spaces and free speech zones, with no rules forbidding offensive verbal conduct or microaggressions, and where the names of cruel, rapacious capitalists are embossed in brass and granite on buildings across the land. Baby seals during the Canadian hunting season may have a better chance of survival.
Their degrees look the same as ever, but in recent years the
programs of study behind them have been altered to reflect the new
sensitivities.
Books now come with trigger warnings—a concept that
originated on the internet to warn people with post-traumatic stress
disorder (veterans, child abuse survivors) of content that might
“trigger” a past trauma. Columbia’s English majors were opting
out of reading Ovid (trigger: sexual assault), and some of their
counterparts at Rutgers declined an assignment to study Virginia
Woolf (trigger: suicidal ideation).
Political science graduates from
Modesto Junior College might have shied away from touching a copy of
the U.S. Constitution in public, since a security guard stopped one
of them from handing it out because he was not inside a
25-square-foot piece of concrete 30 yards away from the nearest
walkway designated as the “free speech zone”—a space that
needed to be booked 30 days in advance. Read more:
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