Bolstered by a grievance culture that promotes victimhood, campus protesters demanded "safe spaces" from ideas they disagreed with and "trigger warnings" on readings that might make them uncomfortable. They accused those whose comments might seem slightly insensitive of committing "micro-aggressions."
They commanded their college administrations to change the names of buildings by judging past actions by today's standards. They protested speakers who they found controversial and they labeled as "hate speech" anything they found objectionable.
It was a year of humiliation for institutions of higher education, which found administrators giving in to the absurd and petty demands of the students they were supposed to be preparing for life as adults.
At Lebanon Valley College, students wanted to change the name of the "Lynch Memorial Building" because of the the word "lynch." It didn't matter that "Lynch" obviously referred to the name of a person — these special snowflakes couldn't handle seeing the word without his first name attached.
At Columbia, students requested a trigger warning to accompany Ovid's "Metamorphoses" because it contained a passage alluding to the rape of the Greek goddess Persephone.
The thinking, as it goes, is that anyone in the classroom who might have been raped (or a low-income student or student of color, according to the students who demanded the warning) would be traumatized if they were not adequately prepared for what they were about to read.
So how did we get here?
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