By Putting Feelings Before Truth, Universities Created a Time Bomb

There was a stunning video clip last week of a UCLA provost who came to meet with protesters at their encampment. He had come in good faith, wanting to discuss their grievances. What he got instead was sheer animosity, as students chased him away with insults.

We’ve been seeing this kind of chutzpah spread through college campuses in recent weeks, with demonstrators ransacking buildings and destroying university property. There seems to be no fear whatsoever of consequences.

How did college students get so brazen?

A good place to start is with a movement that started about ten years ago and revolved around protecting college students from “microaggressions.” Suddenly, any student with the smallest grievance became empowered– as long as they were part of an identity group considered “oppressed.”

“Something strange is happening at America’s colleges and universities,” Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt wrote in “The Coddling of the American Mind,” a seminal 2015 essay in The Atlantic. “A movement is arising, undirected and driven largely by students, to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense.”

This scrubbing has come at a price, as the movement to erase emotional discomfort, which culminated in the pervasive, victim-driven DEI bureaucracy, came to dominate the primary mission of a university—the pursuit of truth.

We’re seeing the inevitable result of this ticking time bomb with today’s rabid protesters: There is zero interest in pursuing truth and every expectation that they will be protected and their demands will be met.

Students have been taught by feckless college leaders that victimhood is where the power lies. Except for Jews, who have typically been put in the privileged “oppressor” group, self-proclaimed victims from marginalized groups know they’re always right.

“A lot of college students in this generation… there’s a lens they use to kind of evaluate the world,” New York Times columnist Frank Bruni said in a recent interview. “And it’s one in which people who have less money, people who have less power, sometimes people who have darker skin must inherently be wronged and are therefore most likely to be in the right.”

Yes, even terrorists.

We saw that play out right after the massacre of October 7, when, as Bruni says, “you saw a lot of young people not even take a moment to really acknowledge what had happened in Israel, and how horrific that was. They just kind of immediately applied this paradigm and began advocating not just for Palestinians, but in a perverse way, at times for Hamas.”

The same people obsessed with “microaggressions” against minority groups were indifferent to macroaggressions against Jewish students, while celebrating terrorism against those deemed “oppressors.”

Beyond this blatant double standard against Jews, scratch the surface of the campus rage and you’ll see a temper tantrum from whiny kids who are used to getting their way. Those entitled souls have been conditioned by universities who have consistently coddled them while indoctrinating them in anti-Israel bias and undermining the messy search for truth.

In another Atlantic essay titled, “American Universities are Post Truth,” Josh Barro argued that “A lot of the research coming out of [elite universities] does not seem to aim at truth, whether because it is politicized or for more venal reasons. The social-justice messaging they wrap themselves in is often insincere. Their public accountings of the reasons for their internal actions are often implausible. They deceive the public about the role that race plays in their admissions and hiring practices.”

As they were treating students with kid gloves in a grand show of virtue signaling, elite universities might have been hoping no one would notice. They must have known, deep down, that instead of nurturing curiosity, they were nurturing grievance and anger.

As that anger is turning more and more violent, college leaders are dazed and befuddled. Some are trying to appease the protesters with negotiations, while others are calling the police. But as commencement ceremonies are being cancelled left and right, hysterical protesters continue to make absurd and unrealistic demands.

The coddled generation has exploded in fury, and they have turned on the very institutions that coddled them and kept uncomfortable truths at bay.

On the surface, these protests are anti-Israel and anti-America and anti-Western, which is dangerous enough. But let’s not forget that at their root, the protests are also anti-truth.

On the surface, these protests are anti-Israel and anti-America and anti-Western, which is dangerous enough. But let’s not forget that at their root, the protests are also anti-truth.

This is what happens when you teach kids that they are the most important people in the world– as long as they represent a favored victim group— and that you will do everything you can to address their tiniest complaints to make sure they never get hurt.

Who’s getting hurt now?