Douglas Murray Douglas Murray

The true cost of the Stepford Students

issue 23 June 2018

It has become abundantly clear in recent years that becoming a Social Justice Warrior (SJW) is bad for your health. But recent developments in north America suggest that it is also very bad for your bottom line.

It is now three years since the University of Missouri underwent a prominent bout of SJW-itis. On that occasion various students at the university demanded that the college President should resign, acknowledge his ‘white male privilege’ and henceforth organise both faculty and staff along strictly racialist lines. Instead of telling these students who the grown-ups were, and where to go, the university authorities repeatedly bowed to radical student pressure. During the ensuing protests, reporters were harassed by students and university employees. And in an incident that was soon seen around the world, assistant professor, Melissa Click memorably called for ‘some muscle over here’ to help her physically eject a reporter who was trying to report on the student and faculty temper-tantrum.

Clearly after seeing these scenes a lot of parents in the state of Missouri decided that it wasn’t worth re-mortgaging the house in order to make their children dumber. And so over the last two years the University of Missouri lost a third of its freshmen. It has had to shut down a number of dorms and has already had to lay off dozens of employees, with more redundancies likely to come. It turned out that the University of Missouri did indeed need some muscle, and that it was required to carry out the belongings of staff they were forced to let go.

Fast-forward to the spring of last year and it was another American campus – Evergreen State College – that was making international news. This was the campus that was meant to have a day when all white people were ordered off the university’s property, ostensibly to make some point about historic racism.

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