L Z Granderson: Have Colleges Lost Their Way? Yes, But Don't Blame Wokeness

Yes, blame wokeness--or, rather, liberal/progressive/leftist bias more generally. There is other blame to go around. But let's not get concerned about that until the mind-virus of Woketarianism is stamped out--or at least driven into whatever the analog of Mirkwood is...

   I'm not sure what the point of the DeVos story is. Betsy DeVos was a very good Secretary of Education. I don't care much about whether her father withheld money from Grand Valley State U. to prevent them from offering benefits to same-sex "partners." I'm inclined to think that they probably should offer some such thing. You can disagree without being crazy. Now that same-sex marriage is available, this controversy is, presumably, over. So I'm not sure why this issue was raised. 

   The essay is pretty much a piece of crap. The problem with the responses by the three university presidents has little to do with them "putting institutions ahead of ideals." The problem, rather, is that, at universities where students and faculty can find themselves crossways with codes of conduct for saying, e.g., "women are female" or "all lives matter," it seems to be permissible for mobs to chant pro-Palestinian slogans that more-or-less mean "kill the Jews." The problem is hypocrisy. 

   None of this is to say that woke madness is he only problem universities face.

   So far as I can tell, "From the river to the sea" is protected speech. So I don't see any problem on public university campuses. As for private institutions--well, they can, in some sense, do what they want. But what they want...but what they do seems clearly biased/inconsistent--not to mention at odds with the very ideals of the university.