By the time you finish reading comedian Nimesh Patel op-ed in the New York Times about having his mic cut during a performance at Columbia University, you realize he learned absolutely nothing from the experience.
“I do not think we should let the actions of a small group — actions that get blown out of proportion because they feed a narrative many people want to hear — paint college campuses as bad places to perform and paint this next generation as doomed,” wrote Patel in the Friday piece.
But the issue with hypersensitive college students hijacking campus events and shutting down discourse isn’t that “the next generation is doomed.” It’s that the students graduating from these places are being deprived what was once known as “an education.” In place of knowledge, they get postmodernist garbage. They’re entering their professional lives unequipped for normal human interaction. Even worse, they bring with them an inflated sense of self-importance that comes from being rewarded for playing the victim.
And it’s not “a small group” of students who are being thus malformed. The student organizers who shut down Patel’s comedy routine were cheered by nearly the entire room for it.
Patel, in his performance, told something we used to call “a joke,” the punchline of which involved the hardship that must come with being both black and gay. “No one looks in the mirror and thinks, ‘this black thing is too easy, let me just add another thing to it,’” Patel said, according to Columbia’s student newspaper.
Patel had been invited to the school to headline an event produced by the Columbia Asian American Alliance, but after that joke, three of the organizers went onto the stage, told him his material was offensive, and then cut his mic.
This is a very minor, nonviolent version of what’s happening on college campuses across the country.
At Evergreen State College in 2017, a mob of angry students confronted biology professor Bret Weinstein in his classroom after he objected to an event that year that pressured white students to leave campus as a way of showing appreciation for minorities. (Because what better way for whites to show their regard for minorities than to leave them all behind en masse.)
A video of the incident went viral and in one part, Weinstein is seen hopelessly attempting to engage these mindless dopes in actual discussion. “I listen to you, and you listen to me,” he says in the video, only to have one of the hysterical students scream back, “We don’t care what you want to speak on, this isn’t about you. We are not speaking on terms of white privilege.”
Administrators at the school effectively handed over control to the students, with one video showing college President George Bridges bowing to demands that he instruct all faculty to suspend any assignment deadlines while protests continued.
“What’s been done about that, because we’re all here on our own time,” one of the brats tells Bridges.
“That is the first thing I’ll do. I have not done it yet. I will do it right now,” he replies.
Weinstein resigned some months later and got $500,000 after suing the school for failing to protect him.
Similar episodes have played out in recent years at Claremont McKenna College in California, Yale, and Duke Divinity School. Professors have been forced to resign and speakers have been shut down because students are afraid of what they have to say and have learned no other way to defend their own ideas. They instead play victim and demand that the rest of the world change to suit them — or else.
Patel wrote in his op-ed that he was surprised that some students reached out after he was kicked off stage in order to apologize or explain that they didn’t find his joke offensive.
That’s good, but he has it backwards: The students who reached out to him are now the exception, or at best the very silent, intimidated majority. The ones terrorizing their campuses by feigning offense have become the rule.
