It’s been a banner week for those eager to paint college students as the modern-day children of the corn, loyal to the great monster of Political Correctness, he who lives behind tidy campus rows.

It’s true that some of the kids today are a bit terrifying. Take the students at Yale University who are calling for the censure and ouster of a professor and his lecturer wife from their residential roles because she suggested that students, rather than university administrators, be left to decide for themselves which Halloween costumes are appropriate. The fracas, as documented in The Atlantic, has grown so heated, so literally hysterical, that students are screaming at and mobbing the professors in public and spitting on dissenters.

Or consider the University of Missouri, where student activists have successfully pushed the chancellor and system president to resign amid allegations of on-campus racism. According to the protestors, system president Tim Wolfe’s sin was in not taking their accusations seriously enough. But it wasn’t until the football team threatened to refuse to play — which would have cost the school $1 million — that the administrators were forced to step down.

The athletes also demanded a hand-written letter and press conference in which “Tim Wolfe must acknowledge his white privilege, recognize that systems of oppression exits, and provide a verbal commitment to fulfilling (student protestor) demands.”

This is hardly unique. Barely a week goes by in which a liberal arts professor doesn’t openly admit to being terrified of teaching students who demand to be coddled from viewpoints, ideas, scenes and material deemed “triggering” or offensive.

Instead of adding to the growing canon of this particular bête noir, though, I’d prefer to assuage some fears.

Recall: we are dealing with 20 year olds. Their intentions, to create more welcoming campus spaces for marginalized students, are perfectly welcome and just. But their tactics are under scrutiny in an era that ruthlessly documents and exploits bad behaviour.

We all said and did stupid things and fell in with weird notions at that age, which is why mainstream society has always stood a touch apart from campus life, half bemused. The campus renegades of today may be justly proud of some the reforms they espoused, but I suspect they’ll look back on much of this and cringe.

Like most radical ideologies, this one contains within it the seeds of its own undoing. The first seed is the most apparent: When students demand to be insulated from problematic viewpoints, they don’t learn how to debate. Ad hominem by appeals to race, gender or class pass for rebuttals. But if that doesn’t work, offending arguments aren’t considered, but rather dismissed as “trolling” or dissected for offending passages and phrases.

This is how Yale lecturer Erika Christakis’s infamous Halloween costume email can be misconstrued as “denying that cultural appropriation exists,” as one person on Twitter recently put it, even though her letter says nothing of the sort. When you are scanning the enemy’s missives for deviations from cant rather than trying to understand a fellow human’s point of view, misrepresentation is inevitable. This trick is hardly unique to the far left, but it does seem to be endemic there.

The second worrisome tactic is the subversion of intellect to emotion. Hence the phrase a Yale student criticized her residential professor via a column in the aforementioned confrontation: “I don’t want to debate. I want to talk about my pain.” (Imagine trying this line on a boss, if you can.)

There is, of course, room for feelings. When used to illustrate a larger point, emotion and experience can be a powerful tool in the service of rhetoric. When used to shout down an offending professor, on the other hand, not so much.

The degradation of their own critical capacities complete, the third tactic becomes the most terrifying: activists of this type take succor in the mob.

So why am I counselling us to avoid getting too drawn into campus culture wars? Well, largely because these controversies have a habit of fizzling in the face of their own internal contradictions.

The University of Missouri offered a perfect example this week when student photographer Tim Tai was filmed calmly trying to explain his First Amendment right to take pictures of protestors who had camped out in the university’s quad as they physically banded together and then, declaring their right to walk forward, forcibly pushed him out. On Twitter, the student protestors explained: “It’s typically white media who don’t understand the importance of respecting black spaces . ..We ask for no media in the parameters so the place where people live, fellowship, & sleep can be protected from twisted insincere narratives.”

This is patently insane. The photographer was Asian. Many of of the protestors removing him from the public space were white. Among them was a white mass media assistant professor who called for “muscle” to remove a student. (She later resigned one of her posts and apologized.)

Ironically, the incident undermined the reason the students were there to protest in the first place — to address racism on campus, itself a laudable goal.

It all may seem rather baffling, but it’s important to remember that these college kids don’t represent a majority culture. They probably don’t even represent a majority opinion on their own campuses. They sound dumb, at best, and act like bullies, at worst. Their ideals may be noble, but their tactics are self defeating. No matter how well intentioned, these plays will not survive matriculation in an adult society governed by the rule of law, performance reviews and the other indignities of barista life.

When ideology encourages soul searching and reform, it is to be commended: When it inculcates weakness, it is doomed.

National Post