A new post from Mark Bauerlein at Minding The Campus looks at what the left has wrought on campus.

The University as Nursery

One of the implications of the shift of pressure against free speech from left-wing faculty and administrators to undergraduates is that the ideological framework of liberal bias doesn’t quite apply. Yes, we have language of “racism” and “sexism,” along with demands that relics of US history that fail the PC test be torn down. But the political thrust doesn’t gibe with talk about safe spaces and microaggressions. That’s an idiom of therapy, not politics (even while it is used as a tool of power).

One prominent critic of higher education discerned the difference at work way back in May 1992 in a commentary in TLS. The title was “The Nursery-School Campus,” and the author was Camille Paglia. Here is the relevant passage:

By the early 1970s, American universities had become top-heavy with full-time administrators who took to speaking of the campus as a “community,” which faculty soon discovered was governed by invisible codes of acceptable speech, opinions, and behavior. . . . Many of the students, neglected by their prosperous, professional parents, are pathetically grateful for these attentions. Such coddling has led, in my view, to the outrageous speech codes, which are designed to shield students from the realities of life. The campus is now not an arena of ideas but a nursery school where adulthood can be postponed. Faculty who are committed to the great principle of free speech are therefore at war with paternalistic administrators in league with misguided parents.

Paglia gets right at what stands out in the protests today: not the political content, but the childish demands. Grownups listen to them march, chant and think that it all looks more like a tantrum than a revolution.