Nobody will be surprised to hear my opinion, but I'll throw it out there anyway.
These protests are absurd and their defenders are using ridiculously dishonest tactics. Nobody has yet given me any credibly examples of "institutional" or "systematic" racism, and in fact any incidents of racism at all are isolated incidents by people who are either very obvious trolls (frat boys looking for a reaction, anonymous trolls on YikYak) or one-off fools. The protestors and their defenders talk about how there's tons of racism under the surface that hasn't gotten media attention, and this gets repeated in columns by pundits trying to be even-handed as though it's fact, but nobody has given a single example. So David Brooks or whoever will go and write "to be fair, these students have legitimate grievances, and incidents of racism such as those that occur frequently at Mizzou are unacceptable", but there's absolutely no reason to believe that consistent racism exists in any greater capacity than violence, theft, or any other number of one-off crimes that occur in modern society. Liberal commentators have tried to make it all about their own agenda by claiming that the Mizzou protests are the end result of a litany of injustices by the conservative president of Mizzou, including fighting Planned Parenthood and Obamacare. There's no reason to believe this is the case, it's just a lame try to tie democratic talking points into the protests.
I'm sick of the wishy-washy even-handedness by moderates about this. These protests are ridiculous and should be universally condemned by anyone who's not a left-wing hack. The claimed grievances are absurd. At Mizzou and Yale, we've seen the same two or three minor, isolated racial incidents repeated ad nauseum, which begs the question of, if racism is so prevalent at these schools, why can't any incidents beyond these few minor ones be found? At other schools (the protests have spread like a virus to at least a dozen schools now) the grievances are even more trivial. For instance, all it took for the Ithaca College protestors to demand the head of their president was some girl who said that in a study group, she said she had "savage ambition" and then people made fun of her by calling her a "savage", which just sounds like a group of freshmen ribbing her to try to bring her and her savage ambition down to earth.
Their ubiquitous lists of demands exist in a completely different universe from that of wishy-washy even-handed moderates. In fact, these lists of demands exist in a world apart from conservatives, moderates, and liberals. Conservatives think the students want to be treated like babies and to be given safe spaces and have free speech banned. Moderates think the students want to defeat racism and to feel safe. Liberals think the students want whatever the liberal writing the column wants. In fact, what the students are almost uniformly demanding is a set of symbolic gestures designed to make them feel powerful, to humiliate the university and the other students, and to destroy the careers of their presidents and various targets who, across the board, were made into targets for entirely trivial and innocent reasons, such as Erika Christakis' email or that Mizzou professor who wouldn't cancel his exam for the protestors. In addition, they want power and recognition, as virtually all college protestors are demanding that tremendous resources be expended to create various multicultural centers and multicultural studies departments, mandatory racial education courses overseen by blacks, and quotas of black students and faculty. There's nothing in the students' experiences that justifies these demands, of course. They're just default templates of demands for modern-day social justice activists.
So why is this happening? Because a minority of students exist in a bubble of far-left racial and gender politics that exists primarily on the internet, although the mainstream media and the Democratic party have recklessly reinforced and encouraged its existence to further their political agenda. This has had the effect of radicalizing some of the students, who honestly break down in tears over microaggressions and buy into this neo-black-panther crap, but for the most part the students involved in this want attention, they want to feel important, they want to impress their left-wing friends, they want to be seen as "on the right side of history", and they're bullied into it by their social circles. There's a mentality of, if you're not joining the protests, you must not agree with us. Once these kids are completely surrounded by like-minded individuals and caught up in the zeal of flowery language and believing they're the new coming of the civil rights movement, they go around impersonating the people they've seen on TV and read about in their history books, relishing the power of bullying others on campus and shouting at the top of their lungs and acting impulsive and without consequences, pushing any scruples to the backs of their minds as they let themselves get caught up the energy of an anonymous mob.
So what's wrong with our generation, what's wrong with the college kids today, where are all these lunatics coming from? Well, most of them grew up on social media and have their primary social circles on the internet, so they've been completely saturated with this way of thinking most of their life. Once they get out in the real world and reality hits them like a load of bricks they'll shape up just like every generation inevitably has. Some of the students are bullies and assholes who are enjoying the chance to finally scream and shout and push people around and get in white girls' faces and act on their impulses. And at the core is a group of self-serving attention-seekers, like the Mizzou student president, and dangerously delusional true believers, like that kid who went on a hunger strike or the journalism professor who threatened a student reporter. It only takes a couple drops of arsenic to poison the whole well, though. With the attention-seekers and zealots taking on leadership roles and defining the movement's direction and strategy, and the bullies defining its culture and tactics, most of the kids who are there because they feel like they should be or because they want to be a part of the movement or because of peer pressure just go with the flow, and thus we get hundreds of students standing out in the cold November air for hours on Monday to form a ring around a tent city and prevent reporters from getting in.
Also, for the record, there's absolutely nothing wrong with naming a college after John C. Calhoun;
JFK led a Senate committee to determine the greatest Senators of all time and John C. Calhoun was in the top 5.
