Every week brings news of some fresh campus absurdity—tenured professors saying and doing idiotic things, students cursing and attacking speakers while college authorities do nothing about it, schools proudly denying students due process. When news circulated recently that Penn State has forbidden a student outdoor club to go on student-led excursions because these are too “dangerous”—this despite no known mishaps in years—an ordinary person could be forgiven for concluding that modern universities are run by nincompoops.
The problems of American higher education go deeper than headline-making absurdities, of course—soaring tuition, empty degrees, incompetent instruction—but the high-profile outrages indicate a kind of warped mindset. It’s one in which university campuses exist independently of the rules and norms governing other people. Not that college students, faculty, and administrators necessarily think of themselves as superior beings. But increasingly they operate according to an esoteric set of rules that make no sense to people on the outside and perhaps even to themselves.
