At both Harvard and Columbia this fall we’ve seen how students who dare to privately act out against PC standards are inspiring crazed nuclear strikes from campus administrators. This disproportionate punishment is, in turn, bound to create both more rebels flouting norms and more wusses and tattletales passive-aggressively seizing power by parading their phony wounds.
At Harvard, the administration vaporized the men’s soccer season this year because the guys privately commented on the sexual appeal of their female peers, in jokey and disparaging language, in a document shared on Google Groups. The six women they were talking about later wrote, in a melodramatic group op-ed, that they “brushed off the news as if it didn’t really matter” until the publicity hubbub trained them to be gravely offended — “hopeless,” “appalled,” “distraught” — just as toddlers who fall down at the playground tend not to cry unless their mothers fly over to make a fuss, in which case they reliably burst into tears.
At Columbia, a bunch of sour fruitcakes running a campus blog invaded the privacy of members of the wrestling team by publishing their private text messages, apparently leaked by a whistleblower who confused bro talk with the Pentagon Papers. I won’t defend the crass and juvenile messages. Some contained the N-word and others included derisive comments about women’s looks, though none of this was harassment. Standing outside someone’s window calling out rude names is harassment. Exchanging jibes with a friend about people who aren’t there is more like gossip.
Columbia’s immediate response was, like Harvard’s, as dumb as treating your toe fungus by sawing off your foot. The entire wrestling team was initially suspended. What about innocent athletes who had nothing to do with the texts? Sorry, as in the Red Queen’s court in “Alice in Wonderland,” Columbia went with punishment first, trial afterwards. The administration was taking its cues from the student blog, which screamed that the messages revealed a “Culture of Intolerance.”
If that sounds familiar, it should: Whenever you hear the words “culture of X,” it tends to indicate how hostility toward a group — flat-out intolerance — is inspiring the PC brigades to use their manufactured hurt as a weapon to bludgeon the despised perpetrators. They don’t want to single out misbehaving people, get the facts and quietly and responsibly handle a problem. They want to use anecdotes to take down an institution.
Because of an unproven, indeed preposterous, Rolling Stone story, which turned out to be a hoax, that supposedly revealed a “culture of rape” at a single fraternity in 2014, the University of Virginia simply shut down all social activities involving all fraternities. Because of a similarly supposed, and similarly unsubstantiated, claim of rape culture at off-campus Greek associations and “final clubs” frequented by Harvard students, the Ivy League college this year mandated punishment for all members — including sororities and other all-female clubs. Female-driven rape culture? Even in such a pitiably testosterone-challenged place such as Harvard, I do not believe young men need to be forced to have sex with young women.
Days after the wrestling-team leak, Columbia decided maybe it should sort out some facts and, after conducting an investigation, ruled that only the athletes who had made offensive comments should be suspended. That’s a little more sane, but did the university really need to get involved? Coaches of sports teams have been dealing with knucklehead behavior since Hermes made fun of Atalanta’s thighs (and Coach looked the other way in the locker room while Atalanta put fire ants in Hermes’ jock strap).
Not long ago Columbia participated in the destruction of the reputation of a young man by abetting the publicity campaign of “mattress girl,” Emma Sulkowicz, who effectively slandered a former sex partner by carrying a mattress around campus and telling everyone it was a symbol of his rape of her, an act that almost certainly did not occur.
So, Columbia, public slander bringing disgrace to an innocent man is fine, but nasty comments made in private conversations must be punished? Once you enter the campus PC fun house, everything is upside-down, backwards, bizarre.