"Shut up," They Explained

That old joke sums up these top eight campus censorship moments from 2015, as compiled by Robby Soave of Reason.

Colleges have gotten a lot of press recently as being places where spoiled little twits whinge about everything from faked hate crimes to insufficiently authentic ethnic dishes in the cafeteria. The rhetorical question usually follows a sad head shake at the silliness of the whole mess: Do these people learn anything in college?

But as Soave's list notes, it seems pretty apparent that the spoiled little twits learn quite well from the older twits who teach them and who run their colleges. We had something similar at the college where I used to work; the school newspaper ran an editorial cartoon that mocked claims that the Confederate battle flag was merely a sign of heritage. The cartoonist suggested that lynched African-Americans were just as much a symbol of that "heritage" as was the battle flag. The flag had too much blood and hate in its history to be anything else in the eyes of too many people; like the swastika it had become irredeemable.

The message was unsubtle and pretty unskillfully done. And as you might imagine, when it was tossed into a community where the majority of members were people just breaking out of concrete thinking, that message was missed pretty much entirely. The offense of representing the lynchings overwhelmed and completely obscured the intended anti-racist message the cartoonist wanted viewers to get. Turmoil and tumult followed, a diversity council was created and my boss had a title relating to diversity added to his portfolio. He and both of his successors are upper middle class and white, by the way.

We used the word diversity quite often in subsequent months and for all I know they still do. Whether or not more minority population students graduate from there was never determined.