The cult of "emotional well-being" explains why universities have become such a hotbed of permanently-offended students. Joshua Elder recounts the tale of his alma mater's reaction to an "affirmative action" bake sale.
The Northwestern University affirmative-action bake sale, held on October 31 and sponsored by members of the College Republicans and the Objectivist Club, lasted only two-and-a-half hours before its message was silenced in response to complaints from a few offended students. There was no threat of violence. No "hostile environment" was available to use as an excuse. But thanks to the "bias incident" clause recently added to the Northwestern Student Handbook, there need not have been. According to the handbook, "any action that threatens or endangers the emotional well-being, health or safety of any person" is enough to warrant intervention by campus authorities. Of course no university wants to come across as being against free speech and expression, so the officials who shut the event down claimed that they had procedural reasons for doing so.
Emphasis mine. Northwestern has made it illegal to injure anyone else's emotional well-being. For some reason, this doesn't stop anti-war protests, hunger strikes, and distribution of pro-Socialist literature from taking place in the same area where the bake sale was held; I suppose those capitalists and war supporters have much stronger emotional health.
Elder follows this ridiculous coddling to its logical conclusion:
Thrust out of their liberal cocoon and into the real world, post-graduate leftists find themselves lost and alone in a frightening and foreign land where their genius goes unrecognized by an uneducated populace filled with evolution-denying Bible Belt fundamentalists, confederate-flag-waving southern bigots, and profit-obsessed big businessmen. Pushed to the fringes of the liberal mainstream by their own radical beliefs and unable to compete successfully in the marketplace of ideas due to their inability to argue or articulate those beliefs, the post-graduates soon grow embittered to the point of irrationality. They see enemies on all sides and label whoever fails fully to support their agenda a racist, sexist, or fascist. Their political positions are no longer defined by what they want to accomplish, but rather by whom they want to destroy. They become the Angry Left.
For those college students who believe that emotional health is paramount, and for whom the feeling of being offended is a blunt object with which to trample the constitutional rights of others, the "real world" must be a scary place indeed.
Posted by kswygert at March 8, 2004 10:41 AM