Nov 19^th

Mona Charen is holding forth today unhappy with college administrations succumbing in the face of alleged absurd student demands. Before I get to Mona I will write a few words about Speaker Scott Walker’s efforts to derail any influx of Syrian refugees. Speaker Walker is offering a bill that would put a hold on the admission of any Syrian refugee until the government can absolutely, positively, guarantee that they pose no danger whatever to the country.  Senator Bob Casey tells us that the various agencies now involved in vetting these refugees, the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, etc., etc. will now take about two years before clearing any of them for entry into the country. This is not good enough for the Speaker.

I am curious about what vetting the Speaker thinks appropriate for the current crop of Presidential candidates. How about the checks on members of Congress and SCOTUS? Surely individuals holding these hyper-sensitive government positions should require equally careful scrutiny lest some miscreant bearing ill will toward our country be elected to high office. It is strange that the Speaker is totally unconcerned about such a possibility. (Personally, I would settle for a simple sanity test.)

And now to Mona Charen: Mona is very unhappy with college and university administrators for caving in to various student demands. It seems that according to Charen students have become hyper-sensitive to any perceived slight and are refusing to allow freedom of speech and association at their own protest meetings. She has a point: a faculty member participating in a protest at the University of Missouri is shown trying to block a journalist from photographing that student demonstration. The woman’s enthusiasm overcame her good sense which she recovered the next day when she resigned from the university.

Charen naively wanted the University of Missouri President to simply remove the scholarships from members of the football team if they refused to play on the upcoming Saturday. If they had not played the university would have been sued for one million dollars for breach of contract but that is of no consequence for Mona Charen. It costs her nothing to stick to her politically correct principles. The football team brings in altogether about 80 million dollars a year and so any administrator had better handle those boys with care.

There are other campus problems which Charen chooses to ignore, rape prominent among them. Many campuses prefer not to advertise this problem, bad for their image, but this problem unlike the simplistic student bellyaching about newly perceived racial slights gets little attention.

There have been much greater campus upsets in the past. The Students for a Democratic Society were far more disruptive that anything seen today, but Ms. Charen was only about ten years old when this movement was at its peak in the mid-1960s. If she is upset about the current campus problems she would have been apoplectic had she been a columnist in the 1960s.