RUTHFULLY YOURS

This week, in response to calls for the United States government to stop taking in Syrian refugees following last week’s horrific terrorist attack in Paris, Senator Elizabeth Warren uttered words that must now seem terribly ironic to her constituents.

“These events test us. It is easy to proclaim that we are tough and brave and good-hearted when threats feel far away — but when those threats loom large and close by, our actions will strip away our tough talk and reveal who we really are.

Not two days after Ms. Warren made those impassioned remarks on the Senate floor, one of Ms. Warren’s own constituents, eighteen-year-old Ezra Schwartz from Sharon, Massachusetts, was gunned down by a Palestinian terrorist in Israel, together with two other innocent civilians. In response, the sanctimonious senator said nothing.

And that is not because Ms. Warren has a difficult time speaking. On November 18th, the day before Ezra Schwartz was murdered, Ms. Warren’s official Twitter account sent out more tweets than a sparrow in mating season — 11– about lobbyists, tax reform and the Economic Policy’s Women’s Economic Agenda. The day before that, Ms. Warren went to the Senate floor to deliver her remarks about Syrian refugees. And, lest anyone doubt Ms. Warren’s ability to multitask, she sent out tweets both before her speech (“Heading to the Senate floor now…”) and after her speech (“…Today I spoke about what I saw”). Yet she could not spare even a character for the beautiful young boy with the sweet smile from her home state.

The Wall Street Journal of November 14-15 carried an astute article by Roger Kimball (editor of the New Criterion) entitled “The Rise of the College Crybullies.” The lethal mixture of trembling sensitivity and mob ruthlessness in these student insurrectionaries has turned the country’s universities into a vast bedlam with a thousand wards. He tells how “the crybully…has weaponized his coveted status as a victim” with two calling cards: race and gender. He uses these to exploit to the fullest extent what Joseph Epstein has called “the unassailable virtue of victims.”

The past month alone has seen the humiliation and forced resignation of assorted faculty members, deans, and even university presidents. Some schools have run up the white flag of surrender even before they were invaded, or tried what might be called preemptive action to ward off the wrath of the new brownshirts by appointing presidents and provosts who proclaim their unswerving devotion to diversity training; or to appointing (more) deans of equity; or to fighting “minoritization” and “marginalization”; or to celebrating gay marriage and transgenderism; or to requiring “trigger warnings” about dangerous books; or to implementing race quotas; or to realizing all the other countless desiderata of campus radicals.

At NYU, for example, “Students of Color” currently list no fewer than 28 “demands” but encouraged the submission of still more. Their counterparts at Brandeis (as of this writing) lag behind with only 13, but are more peremptory and menacing about deadlines by which their demands must be met. Yale’s revolutionaries complain that their uprising against the school’s administration has come “at great expense to our health and grades,” and expect to be compensated accordingly. UC Berkeley’s Black Student Union and its satellites want allocations of money, black faculty, and black psychologists to bring them up to the achievement levels of Asian students at that noble institution. So far Mitch Daniels of Purdue University seems to be the sole exception in the entire country to the rule of presidential surrender to these campus insurrectionaries.

By now you’ve heard that the insurrections at Yale University and the University of Missouri have spread to campuses from California to New Hampshire. The grievances and student demands for safe spaces vary, but the disease is the same: Faculty and administrators who elevate racial and gender diversity above all other values, including free speech.

The road trip begins at Yale, which erupted a few weeks ago after a faculty member suggested that the administration shouldn’t dictate what is an appropriate Halloween costume. In a better era she’d have won free beer at every party on campus, but this time the resulting ruckus featured a student cursing out a Yale sociologist on a lawn for being “insensitive.”

Last week’s response? “I have never been as simultaneously moved, challenged and encouraged by our community,” Yale President Peter Salovey said in a campus-wide letter. He promised a center exploring “race, ethnicity and other aspects of social identity”; more faculty digging into those topics; more training on spotting racism at what must surely be one of the most racially sensitive places on Earth. Mr. Salovey talked up Yale’s $50 million commitment to diversifying the faculty, and you can bet he doesn’t mean intellectual diversity.