Obama Gets It Right

It’s not often I can have a post title like that, but I agree with Glenn:

President Obama was perhaps inspired by a recent article in The Atlantic by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, “The Coddling of the American Mind.” Lukianoff and Haidt describe in some detail the way in which college sensitivities have undermined teaching, to the point that some criminal law professors — in law schools — are afraid to teach about rape, and where “trigger warnings” and concerns about “microaggressions” rule the day.

Rather than respond to such complaints with a suggestion that the complainers might be better off under professional psychological care than enrolled in institutions of higher learning, university administrations have tended to go along, even though the complainers represent a rather small fraction of the student body. The result has been a sort of arms-race of oversensitivity, in which each complaint is trumped by one still sillier, until we have reached the situation that Lukianoff, Haidt — and Obama — deplore, in which student mental health may actually suffer, and professors worry that they’ll be pilloried for saying that something “violates the law” because the word “violates” may trigger rape anxieties.

In Monty Python’s Holy Grail, the knights decide to skip a visit to Camelot because “it is a silly place.” With college costs (as President Obama has also noted) skyrocketing even as students seem to be learning less and finding greater difficulty obtaining suitable employment after graduation, higher education administrators should worry that more and more students will draw a similar conclusion. Perhaps President Obama’s warning will get their attention.

This might be the closest he’s ever come to a “Sister Souljah moment.”