It’s All About ‘Muscle’

Three major protest movements have marked the Obama era: Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and the as-yet-unnamed campus protests that began at the University of Missouri and Yale and have now spread across the country. The Occupy movement failed utterly. The Black Lives Matter movement has been on a fast track to irrelevance, its only success having been to discipline Democratic presidential candidates to deny that “all” lives matter, while insisting that “black” lives do.

The campus protests are different. At one school after another, protesters have achieved the resignation and/or humiliation of high officials. They have extorted a great deal of money. They have tried to establish new conventions for the behavior of the media and have even intensified what may prove to be a serious debate about the future of the First Amendment. And in all of this it has become clear that the campus protests aren’t about race or privilege or safe spaces. They’re about power.

Seen from a certain angle, the campus protests are anomalous—the result of a freakishly improbable chain of events. If Michael Brown had not been shot and killed by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014, there would be no Black Lives Matter movement. The Concerned Student 1950 protests that grew out of Black Lives Matter this fall could not have happened at any school other than the University of Missouri, because while Ferguson was national news, it was also an intensely local story. And the Mizzou campus is a two-hour drive from Ferguson.

The chain gets longer. University of Missouri system president Tim Wolfe was unpopular for all sorts of reasons having nothing to do with race. For instance, he was appointed president in 2011 despite a total lack of academic experience. As sportswriter Jason Whitlock noted, the school’s curators “plucked Wolfe out of the unemployment line,” for no discernible reason, at the end of a closed hiring process that reeked of favoritism.

Even so, Wolfe probably could have survived Concerned Student 1950. Except that one of the protest leaders, a 25-year-old black graduate student named Jonathan Butler, went on a well-publicized hunger strike, declaring that he would eat again only once Wolfe was out of his job. (Butler, by the way, comes from an extremely wealthy family in Omaha. His father, a railroad executive, made $8.4 million last year. In the Occupy era, he would have been part of the villainous 1 percent.) But even Butler’s hunger strike probably wouldn’t have mattered except that the former high-school football player was friendly with a number of players on the Mizzou team. (Mizzou’s most famous liberal activist/football alum, the gay former defensive end Michael Sam, stopped by early on to lend support to Butler.)

Tim Wolfe shortly before resigning, November 9, 2015 (Credit: Newscom)

Meanwhile, the Mizzou team was mired in a terrible season. They were 4-5 with a locker room divided over a quarterback controversy. Inspired by Butler’s example, some of the black players decided that, since the team’s season was effectively over, they would “strike”—that is, refuse to fulfill the obligations of their athletic scholarships—until Wolfe was gone. In an ordinary situation, you might expect the coach to step in and enforce some order. After all, supporting mutiny against a sitting university president guarantees that no other university president will ever hire you for another coaching job. But again, there was a wrinkle: Head coach Gary Pinkel had recently been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and was in the process of checking out of his career.

And that was that. On November 7, the black players decided to strike after meeting with Butler. On November 8, Coach Pinkel gave them his blessing. On November 9, Wolfe resigned. And on November 13, Pinkel announced that he would retire at the end of the season because, as he put it, “I want to focus on enjoying my remaining years with my family and friends.”

Take away any of the links in that chain—if the hunger striker hadn’t been pals with the football players, if the team had been having a meaningful season, if the coach had retained any investment in his career—and the outcome at Mizzou could have been different. But it wasn’t. And après Mizzou, le déluge.

It was only after Wolfe’s resignation that the world met Melissa Click, the Mizzou journalism professor who called for “muscle” to remove a student reporter trying to cover the protests. And while Butler was beginning his hunger strike, students at Yale were beginning their protest of Erika Christakis—a lecturer who sent out an email suggesting that students not turn Halloween costumes into a thermo-nuclear grievance war. The protests at Yale took the form of marches (of course) and lists of demands (of course) and even a public shaming of Christakis’s husband, Yale professor Nicholas Christakis, in which students surrounded him and screamed curses at him. On November 8—the day Coach Pinkel approved the black players’ football strike—Nicholas Christakis appeared before protesters again. This time flanked by school administrators, he apologized for both his wife’s email and his failure to have immediately acceded to the protesters’ demands.

Unsettled by these spectacles, a handful of liberal journalists criticized the student protesters, suggesting that, at the very least, their means were illiberal. Conor Friedersdorf at the Atlantic, Damon Linker in the Week, Jonathan Chait at New York, Ruth Marcus at the Washington Post—all protested the protesters. But the resistance of media liberals was beside the point. What was important was that at both Missouri and Yale, the institutions did not defend themselves. At Mizzou, the football coach blessed the strike; at Yale, the administrators refused to stand behind the Christakises. In both cases the grownups gave in to the mob when their duty was to oppose it. The message was unavoidable: Students could behave however they wanted, demand whatever they wanted, and suffer no adverse consequences from the people in power.

And so, predictably, the protests spread.

At this point, it is difficult to find a college campus that does not have a Mizzou-inspired protest movement. A sympathetic website, thedemands.org, keeps a list of the formal demands issued by many (though not all) of the protesters. As of this writing the site contains demands from groups at 67 colleges.

At Ithaca College, students demanded the ouster of the school’s president, Tom Rochon. Like Tim Wolfe, Rochon was charged not with any actual transgression, but merely with failing to respond to black students’ grievances aggressively enough. The big complaint? During a panel at a conference on the school’s future in October, a black Ithaca alum said she had a “savage hunger” to succeed. And after that, a white Ithaca alum, who was complimenting her, said “I love what the savage here said” and called for Ithaca to bring in more students like her. It was an awkward moment. The white alum should have been—and probably was—embarrassed. Four days later, Rochon condemned the remark.

That four-day lag is the crux of the protests against Rochon. In response, a thousand Ithaca students gathered on the school’s quad and staged a “die-in” while calling for Rochon’s ouster. When they weren’t pretend-dying they chanted a South African rallying cry, “Amandla! Awethu!” This translates from Zulu as “Power! Is ours!”

The Amherst Uprising had humbler beginnings. According to its own website, the movement began on the afternoon of November 12 when three Amherst WoCs—that’s women of color—decided that after watching Mizzou and Yale, they wanted in on the action. Not as expansively aggrieved as their Ithaca comrades, they staged a one-hour sit-in at the school’s library. But then protest magic happened. Here’s the group’s explanation, in their own words:

Mea culpa: Dean Spellman apologizes at Claremont McKenna. (Credit: YouTube / The Dartmouth Review)

There’s a wonderful grace note in the Amherst Uprising’s account of the historic night. After President Carolyn Martin arrived at the library, three Amherst students came forward and proclaimed their own hunger strike. As the Amherst Uprising history explains, “Amherst Uprising does not support the hunger strikes. When asked about their demands, the three students declared that they did not have any. President Martin immediately encouraged those students to practice self-care and to not harm their bodies.”

The scene is an instant classic: Three students stage a protest, more students glom on, professors and administration factotums rush to join. Grievances are aired. Demands are made—or not. And then the college president aborts her trip—to Japan, by the way—in order to solicit the good opinion of the mob.

Yet as confused as the Amherst Uprising was, its list of demands was instructive. The first was an apology from President Martin. Unlike at Mizzou and Ithaca, no one from Amherst believed Martin had committed any sins, either of commission or omission. But she had to apologize anyway. From the demands:

Why should President Martin apologize to these groups? Never mind that. The bigger question was what to do with anyone who might not be on board with the program. For instance, earlier this fall, an anonymous group of Amherst students put up posters on campus lamenting the death of free speech and proclaiming that “All Lives Matter.” One of the initial Uprising demands—#5 on the list—was that President Martin issue a statement saying that such actions would not be “tolerated” at Amherst and that any students committing similar atrocities would be subject to the school’s disciplinary process.

At UNC-Chapel Hill, the demands were titled “A Collective Response to Anti-Blackness.” At UNC-Greensboro, the grievances had no fancy title, but did include a great many items that didn’t seem especially anti-black. For instance, the protesters didn’t want the campus to expand any further into the surrounding neighborhood, because such growth represents “gentrification.” Also, they wanted the school to divest its financial interests in any companies that “profit” from “fossil fuels.” Or “private prisons.” Or “the Israeli Occupation of Palestine.” Almost as an afterthought, they demanded the firing of UNC schools president Margaret Spellings for an unspecified “history of discriminatory statements.”

At Dartmouth the protesters stormed the library and badgered white students who were studying with angry shouts and curses. The Dartmouth Review reports that the protesters told the students who were studying “F—k you, you filthy white f—ks.” And “F—k you, you racist s—ts.” In a different time, the video of the incident might have been considered evidence of harassment. None of the protesters was disciplined. The New York Post reports that at Columbia, “There’s been a campaign of intimidation, where students are going dorm to dorm, floor to floor and asking students to go back to their dorms and put on black if they’re not wearing black.” At a protest on Columbia’s South Lawn, a student led the crowd in a series of chants: “I love black people,” “I love all black people,” “I love queer black people,” “I love black criminals,” and “I love black people who steal.”

The crowd at Columbia numbered in the hundreds, but one of the lessons from the fall term is that you don’t need a lot of, as Ta-Nehisi Coates would put it, black bodies to get what you want. At Princeton a group of 15 students took over the president’s office. Among their demands were the usual fare: a regime of racial/cultural indoctrination—sorry, reeducation—courses for “all college staff and faculty” and “a cultural space on campus dedicated specifically to Black students.” (One commenter at the Daily Princetonian wondered if this space would come with its own water fountain.) But most of all, they wanted Woodrow Wilson expunged from the school.

Wilson is the most famous university president in Princeton’s history, and the school has a program (the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs) and a residential college (Wilson College) named after him. Wilson College features, among other tributes, a giant mural of the man in the dining area. Again, the video of the meeting in the president’s office is revealing. It shows a semi-hysterical young woman berating the university’s president. She does not mount an especially persuasive argument, but never mind that. Care to guess how long this group of 15 students had to protest before the president agreed to do his best to disappear his predecessor? Twenty hours.

Now, it is true that Woodrow Wilson can be justly criticized on many counts, including his performance as president of the United States and his racial views. But that is beside the point. Witness the protests at Johns Hopkins—a school founded by and named after one of America’s bravest and most consequential abolitionists. Ronald J. Daniels, president of Hopkins, was filming a short video on campus when he was surrounded by roughly a hundred protesters chanting, “It happens at Mizzou! It happens here too!” They were not pacified by a campus-wide email Daniels had sent the week before, in which he groveled that the school “wrestle[s] with a complex racial legacy,” conceding that “across the winding history of our university, through our actions and inaction, we have not always lived up to [our founder’s] ideal.” Daniels listed his own achievements at Hopkins: a “mandatory session on identity, privilege, and social justice” for all students! “Under-represented minority” admissions up a miraculous 100 percent since 2009! Ta-Nehisi Coates brought to speak on campus twice in seven months! But it wasn’t enough. The protesters presented Daniels with more demands.

And it will always be thus. The UNC-Chapel Hill protesters actually make this point explicit in their own list, warning administrators that their demands are “a living document that will be modified and added to, evolving over time.” Or anyway, for as long as UNC’s administrators keep rewarding them.

Despite appearances, what you see on campuses is not insanity. It is rational, learned behavior. It works. At Mizzou the protesters evicted the president and chancellor. At Yale they forced a show-trial apology out of a tenured professor for something his wife wrote. At Princeton, they got the president to agree to try to scrub the name of Woodrow Wilson from the school. At Ithaca, the president has promised to create a new position for the college—chief diversity officer—in hopes that it will save his job.

At Claremont McKenna College, a Latina student wrote an op-ed for the student paper complaining about the racist atmosphere at the school, which made her feel she didn’t fit in. Mary Spellman, the dean of students, reached out to the young woman in an email, saying she wanted to make the college more welcoming to “students, especially those who don’t fit our CMC mold.” After a week of protests—including a public session in which students condemned Spellman while she apologized—the school president declined to stand behind his dean. She resigned.

University of Kansas communications professor Andrea Quenette was teaching a graduate course the morning after the school hosted a heated public forum in response to Mizzou. Her class became a continuation of the discussion on race, and Quenette said that since she is white, she had never experienced discrimination. But she also said that she did not see a great deal of overt racism at KU. For instance, she said, she had never seen the word “nigger” spray-painted on campus. A week later, five of her graduate students filed formal discrimination complaints against her; protesters called for her firing. The school’s communications department put out a statement not supporting their colleague, but standing “in solidarity with KU students” who “called for immediate action” “to address the racism and discrimination inflicted on members of our community.” Quenette is now on administrative leave.

Sometimes the demands are about aesthetics. At the University of Kentucky, protesters got the administration to agree to remove a giant fresco that was painted in 1934 as part of the New Deal’s Public Works of Art Project. (For the time being, the fresco has been covered in an enormous shroud, to spare the feelings of the students who were suddenly aggrieved by it.) Sometimes the demands are about money. At Saint Louis University, the president agreed to give the protesters all sorts of goodies—an increased budget for the African-American studies department, increased financial aid for African-American students, an “evaluation” of scholarship programs to “better serve” African-American students. All he asked in return was that the protesters disperse from their encampment. At the University of Oregon, the Black Student Task Force demanded the creation of an “African-American Opportunities” commission that would be staffed only by black student volunteers. These volunteers are to “receive financial compensation for their time and effort.”

At Brown University, while the Mizzou crisis was unfolding, several dozen students held a “blackout” rally where they took turns airing their racial grievances. A few days later, 35 graduate students issued a list of demands. The university’s response was a plan to spend—please, imagine the following in Dr. Evil’s voice—$100 million to create “a just and inclusive campus.”

One of the more interesting demands came from Smith College, the progressive women’s paradise. On November 18, the women of Smith held a sit-in at the student center in solidarity with their comrades in Missouri. Between 300 and 500 students showed up. So did some members of the press. The journalists were told that they would be allowed to report on the demonstration if, and only if, they agreed to state in the text of their articles that they support the protest movement.

Shocked, media members went to the college public affairs department. There, Stacey Schmeidel, the director of media relations, said that the college fully supported the protesters’ position. “It’s a student event, and we respect their right to do that, although it poses problems for the traditional media,” Schmeidel explained. She then went a step further, reminding reporters that since Smith is a private campus, the school reserved the right to evict those journalists who displeased the protesters. The Smith College media loyalty oath is not a random bit of noise. It is the logical extension of the wholesale rethinking of free speech that is going on in this country.

Many Americans took notice of the protesters’ hostility to the First Amendment when that Mizzou communications professor was caught on camera calling for “muscle.” Her defense was, as another Mizzou professor explained after speaking with her, that she “felt .  .  . aggressed upon.” The vice president of Mizzou’s student body, Brenda Smith-Lezama, then went on MSNBC to explain, “I personally am tired of hearing that First Amendment rights protect students when they are creating a hostile and unsafe learning environment for myself and for other students here.” This opinion is not as outré as you might think.

Student protesters occupy the office of Princeton president Christopher Eisgruber, November 18, 2015. (Credit: Julio Cortez / AP)

In October 2014, YouGov polled a sample of 997 Americans and asked if they’d like to see “hate speech”—which they defined as “public comments that advocate hatred against an identifiable group”—criminalized. Thirty-six percent of respondents said yes. That’s of the whole group. Fifty-one percent of self-identified Democrats said they supported criminalizing hate speech, and another 21 percent of Democrats said they weren’t sure where they stood. At the time, you might have hoped that these numbers were an outlier. They were not.

YouGov polled the identical question again in May 2015 and found that overall support for criminalizing hate speech had grown to 41 percent. And the growth hadn’t come from Democrats, whose numbers were the same in both polls. Instead, the change was in Republican respondents—who jumped 12 points in favor of hate speech laws—and blacks, who jumped 18 points.

Last month Pew asked Americans a battery of questions about free speech, including, Should the government be able to prevent people from making statements that are offensive to minority groups? Only 28 percent of respondents said yes. So if you’re a glass-half-empty type, one out of four Americans is willing to use the full force of the state to prevent people from offending minorities, with the offense being something the minorities alone determine. But if you want the really bad news, look at the two groups most supportive of this proposition—nonwhites (38 percent) and millennials (40 percent)—and suddenly what went on at Mizzou makes a great deal of sense.

Teasing out the causes of the campus protests is more complicated than it seems. The pretexts were clear enough: the Ferguson riots, the weak university president, the losing football team with the checked-out head coach. And it’s easy to see how the contagion spreads. Like the Occupy Wall Street movement—which set up camps in every major city in America—every self-respecting college leftist wanted her own Mizzou franchise.

But if you look at the actual state of America’s colleges, it’s clear that the university has been a powder keg of illiberalism for at least the last 40 years.

This observation is not new. Allan Bloom diagnosed the problem back in 1987 in The Closing of the American Mind. But the character of the movement has changed. As NYU sociologist Jonathan Haidt remarked in a recent interview, “this whole vindictive protectiveness movement is only about two years old. .  .  . If you do a Google trend search, you see that words like ‘microaggression’ and ‘trigger warnings’ didn’t exist until 2012 and only really became common in the fall semester of 2013. Then spring 2014 was the time when so many speakers were disinvited from speaking on campuses, including Christine Lagarde and Condoleezza Rice.”

The pace at which college radicals have manufactured fake crises has also picked up over the past two years. The insane claim that 20 percent of all women who attend college are sexually assaulted during their undergraduate years is so widely accepted on the left that the president of the United States parrots it—even though it has been thoroughly debunked. And in its wake has come a series of rape hoaxes, from the fabricated University of Virginia fraternity “gang rape” depicted in Rolling Stone to Columbia’s Mattress Girl (an honored guest at the State of the Union, despite the fact that no criminal charges were filed against her alleged attacker and the university’s star chamber dismissed all charges against him). A University of Wyoming student, Meg Lanker-Simons, received wide acclaim when she publicized a comment someone left on her Facebook page threatening to rape her. It turned out that the person who left the comment was Meg Lanker-Simons.

We’ve seen much the same with regard to alleged acts of campus racism. In 2013, Oberlin College shut down because of hysteria over racism. A handful of fliers with swastikas and demeaning comments about Martin Luther King were posted on campus. The school went into such a tizzy that all classes were canceled after a student reported seeing KKK members stalking the campus. But then the story suddenly went away.

Curiously, both the college and the police did their best to obscure the results of their investigations. It was only after the Daily Caller‘s Chuck Ross filed a series of Ohio Open Records Act requests that it became clear what had happened: The people responsible for posting the fliers were two white Oberlin student radicals, Dylan Bleier and Matt Alden. Bleier had organized for the Obama 2008 campaign and participated in a group called White Allies Against Structural Racism. They were trying to raise consciousness. As for the interlopers from the Ku Klux Klan, whose exploits were detailed even in the New York Times, officials were able to track down only a single student who claimed to have seen white hoods. She had been walking with her boyfriend, who later told campus security that he hadn’t seen anyone who looked like the KKK.

What’s important about the Oberlin incident isn’t that it was a hoax—there is literature detailing that nearly all spectacular racist incidents at the modern university have turned out to be hoaxes—but the lengths to which the Oberlin administration went to hide the discovery that there had been a hoax.

You might think an institution would be eager to prove that it is not populated by neo-Nazis. By any rational calculation, Oberlin should have thrown Bleier and Alden to the wolves. Instead, the school’s cover-up suggests that the college was embarrassed not to find racists in the student body. You get the sense that if Bleier and Alden had been caught with Confederate flags and Romney 2012 placards in their dorm rooms, they would have been held up for all the world to see. Instead, they were hustled out the back door.

So one lesson students have learned over the last two years is that phony outrages are just as good as real ones—or better, because they can be manufactured on demand. The university responds to them, can be trusted not to debunk them, and is unlikely to impose consequences if they are debunked.

The most recent hoax is unfolding at Harvard Law School, where, on the morning of November 19, first-year students arriving at Wasserstein Hall found that small strips of black electrical tape had been placed over the photographs of nearly all of the school’s black professors. Within minutes this had been dubbed a “hate crime” and reports began to fill the media.

Elizabeth Tuttle

Nothing about the electrical tape slashes made sense as an act of antiblack vandalism. This was not the first time the portraits in Wasserstein had been covered. Last year, during the Ferguson riots, protesters at Harvard covered the pictures of all of the professors with notes such as “Black Lives Matter” and “We’re not doing enough.” Those defacements were intended as an indictment of the school for not being sufficiently attentive to .  .  . well, whatever it was that the elite students in Cambridge wanted to get out of the protests in the faraway town of Ferguson.

Then there’s the fact that, in the current incident, one black professor’s photograph was not marked: Professor Lani Guinier’s portrait was conspicuously untouched. Guinier is an outspoken radical herself and has been aggressively supportive of quotas and other grievance mongering. It would seem that a racist looking to make a statement would dislike Guinier more than nearly all of her black colleagues. Yet she was given a pass.

But perhaps the most damning fact is that the night before the incident, student activists were setting up a protest installation in a room adjacent to where the portraits were vandalized. They were using black electrical tape to cover up a portion of the Harvard Law School crest, which they claim is racist. The protesters have even admitted that it was their tape that was somehow mysteriously used on the portraits by the discriminating racist vandal who likes Lani Guinier.

In short, no reasonable observer would assume, ipso facto, that the tape incident was a hate crime. The most likely explanations are that it was either a protest gone sideways or an outright hoax. But Harvard was not reasonable. Law school dean Martha Minow decried the “defacement” of the portraits and said the incident would be investigated as a hate crime. And then Minow announced that she was appointing a commission to consider changing the school’s crest. Just what the protesters wanted.

There are two other factors that need to be accounted for to understand the causes of what we’re seeing on campuses. The first is affirmative action. In Mismatch, Richard H. Sander and Stuart Taylor Jr. demonstrate persuasively that affirmative action hurts the students it is designed to help by sucking them into colleges where they’re at a disadvantage compared with their non-affirmative-action peers. What takes hold is the “cascade effect,” as Taylor explained in an essay published in November:

Which leads to another effect: Once the mismatched minority students are at the schools that are too competitive for them, they’re pushed out of the most competitive majors and into the easier, more politically radical, victimology tracks. Taylor continues:

It’s not a coincidence that so many of the campus protesters demand more resources for “cultural studies” departments. That’s because affirmative action has made it hard for them to compete in majors like chemical engineering or physics. Academically speaking, a cultural studies major really is a “safe space” for students who can’t handle the more rigorous disciplines. Taylor takes a dim view of the cultural effects of these preferences on campus:

The final ingredient in the mix is, paradoxically, grade inflation. In general, private colleges hand out better grades than public colleges. Stuart Rojstaczer—think of him as the Bill James of grade inflation—calculates that for the 2006-07 academic year (the most recent year for which full data sets are available), public universities had an average GPA of 3.01, private schools 3.30.

We see that trend reflected at the two schools at the center of the current troubles. Yale doesn’t disclose GPA statistics, but various analyses put the school’s median GPA at about 3.5 (A-). At Mizzou, seniors average a cumulative GPA of about 3.2 (B).

The effect of grade inflation is subtle: As marks are inflated, maintaining the same grades requires less work from students, giving them more free time. Every hour not spent studying is an hour that can be spent staging a die-in or putting electrical tape on pictures of black professors. Grade inflation gives you a large group of young people with too much time on their hands. Nothing good ever comes of that.

We constantly hear that the university is in crisis. This is at once false and true. It is false in that there is no rape crisis or racism crisis at American colleges—and the ultimate proof is enrollment. If 20 percent of women were being raped during their college years, no sane woman would enroll at a co-ed university, and no sane parents would pay the equivalent of a single-family home to expose their daughters to such danger. The vast majority of women would flee higher education or create alternatives. Instead, women are enrolling in college in greater numbers with each passing year.

By the same token, if America’s most prestigious colleges were hotbeds of racist bigotry, no minorities and no people of good will would attend them. One protester at Harvard wrote that the “legacy of white supremacy” “drips from every corner of the campus.” But if that were true, only racist bigots would go to Harvard. Anyone else would be repelled by the place and would shun it. No one does. The truth is that not only is the American university not racist—it might be the least racist institution ever constructed by man. It is a magical place filled with exquisite amenities. The Mizzou aquatic center looks like a Disney water park. There are B’s for all and A’s for anyone giving even a half-measure of effort. Safe spaces abound. The time administrators care most about race is during the admissions process.

Yet the crisis claim is also true, and the real crisis has to do with power and legitimacy.

If you arrived from Mars and looked at the Mizzou saga, you would be stunned to learn that Tim Wolfe had been forced to resign. Surely the university president could have simply cleared out the student protesters from the quad, instructed his employees to go back to their jobs or face the consequences, and told the football players that anyone who fell afoul of team attendance rules would have his scholarship revoked. The Concerned Student 1950 protests would have been over in a week. Ditto the protests at Yale. And Amherst. And Ithaca. And everywhere else. Because whatever their delusions, students are interchangeable cogs in the college-industrial complex. Any remotely competitive school can expel a hundred kids tomorrow and replace them with an equivalent group the next semester. The demand curve is that steep. Students come and go; it’s the administrators who have the power.

Yet college administrators have been unwilling to exercise their power. To an aggressive, aggrieved student populace this abdication is a sign of weakness. And weakness is a provocation.

‘We Are Not Afraid’ march at Mizzou, November 13, 2015 (Credit: Daniel Brenner / Columbia Daily Tribune / AP)

As university administrators have folded in the face of the student protests, they have stoked more protests, more sit-ins, and the perpetually growing “living” lists of demands. One young woman at Princeton, seeing what happened to Tim Wolfe, said—and this is a direct quotation—”This campus owes us everything. We owe white people nothing. All of this is mine. My people built this place.” And the president of Princeton, in whose office she was sitting while she shouted at him, gave her what she demanded. The person with power at Princeton isn’t the president. It’s the student who can walk into his office, scream at him, and get him to do her bidding. It turns out that on the American campus, real power emanates from the willingness to believe in your own legitimacy.

In this, the millennials who inhabit America’s campuses have learned a great deal from the left. If The Closing of the American Mind anticipated political correctness, it was Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism that prefigured what we now find on college campuses. Goldberg saw that liberalism had come unmoored from specific policy goals and was finally interested in just one thing: power.

Writing in the wake of his own school’s capitulation, Claremont McKenna professor Charles Kesler observed, “When the leftists lacked power, they embraced free speech. Now that they have power, they don’t need it.” There are a great many other niceties of which the leftists no longer have any need.

Unless it is checked, in the coming decades the movement seen now on America’s campuses will take control of every institution it can and burn to the ground every institution it cannot. Because however ridiculous the student protesters may seem, they have an intense, unshakable belief in the legitimacy of their cause. And they understand, keenly, that power is everything.

Jonathan V. Last is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard and the editor of The Christmas Virtues: A Treasury of Conservative Tales for the Holidays.