Congratulations to all you Left Coast companies relocating to Texas, a much saner place to live and to do business. But don’t think you’re going to get away from the crazy. Look at what’s going on at the University of North Texas, in Denton, thanks to the school’s Division of Institutional Equity And Diversity:

Hey, it’s voluntary — but are you sure you don’t want to go, white professor? Live by lies — or live on unemployment.

Meanwhile, Jonathan Kay writes about racial panic at Haverford, in suburban Philadelphia. Excerpts:

It’s a long story, but also an important one, as the mania that swept Haverford College in late October and early November 2020 lays bare, with unusual clarity, the fervid atmosphere of grievance and self-entitlement that has made the administration of elite colleges and universities so difficult.

I cannot possibly do the story justice by quoting excerpts. Haverford is an ultraliberal campus. Seriously, there are about as many self-identified conservatives on campus as there are transsexuals (according to a student survey). Over 90 percent of the students identify as some form of leftist. Yet to read the absolutely screaming-meemie racial hysteria into which the activist students threw the entire campus, and how the left-wing mob intimidated everyone into backing down, is to confront a totally decadent culture that will probably destroy the university — unless the university’s leadership can destroy it first. Unfortunately, as Kay writes, that’s not likely to happen. The university surrendered to all the revolutionaries’ demands — but even that wasn’t enough. Kay:

When campus meltdowns of this type occur, you often see conservative culture warriors demand that administrators take a hard line, demonstrate backbone, “grow a spine,” and so forth. But what is their incentive for doing so? It was once the case that a university president was able to balance different constituencies against one another as a means to achieve some kind of policy equilibrium—liberal students versus more conservative professors, administrators against alumni, this department versus that. But that doesn’t happen anymore: Thanks to the homogenizing effects of social media, all of these constituencies tend to be drinking the same bathwater from the same troughs, and so get caught up in the same social panics at the same time.

One of my interviewees was a recent Haverford graduate who’d actually been thrown out of an online alumni group in early November for pushing back against strike cheerleading. He showed me a November 3rd letter, signed by no fewer than 202 alumni, instructing the administration to meet the strikers’ demands. Until such time as that happened, the alumni warned, they’d be “withholding donations to the Haverford College Annual Fund” and “speaking to other alumni of the college and urging them to take the same actions.”

More:

Not so long ago, one might have been able to count on the naturally oppositional reflexes of young adults as a counterbalance to this kind of crowdsourced social panic. But the social justice movement has narrowed the acceptable target set for acts of defiance, encouraging students to reflexively push upstream against both real institutional hierarchies and constructed intersectional hierarchies of race and sex. As I learned in my interviews, moreover, today’s college students have become desensitized to forms of surveillance that their civil-rights forebears would have found intolerable. During the strike, every Haverford student was being monitored by two separate surveillance regimes generating publicly reported data: (1) a COVID-19 testing regime administered by the school, and (2) a crowdsourced peer-to-peer ideological testing regime administered by students themselves. In this kind of environment, the cautionary tales contained in books such as Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World, which once figured prominently in discussions about intellectual conformity, have lost their power.

As for the administration, its leaders know that the best problems to have are the ones you solve with money—especially if that money belongs to the wealthy parents of privileged children. Haverford tuition, which currently stands at about $54,000, presumably will go up to pay for all those promised goodies Raymond agreed to. But having cleverly marketed her concessions as “equity advances,” the college now can claim that it’s simply upselling customers to a better product. And while the treatment of Raymond, Bylander, and Strong-Leek during that Zoom call was mortifying, the strike is now over, and they still have their high-paying jobs. All they traded for them was their dignity. And in a market economy, that’s their decision to make.

Read it all. You really need to — the details are genuinely shocking, even at this late date.

You have got to be out of your mind to want to send your kid to Haverford, or to go there. It is a complete radical nuthouse. Would you want your kid to be subject to this kind of pressure and abuse? Jonathan Kay writes:

The process of sifting through these events at Haverford has convinced me that the ideological crisis on American campuses can’t be solved by administrators—not because they are beholden to critical race theory, intersectionality, gender ideology, postmodernism, or any of the other bugbears of conservative culture critics, but because they simply have no practical inducements for doing so. Ultimately, this is a crisis that is going to have to be addressed, if at all, by students themselves.

An interesting observation. What do you readers who are faculty, administrators, or staff at colleges and universities think? I’m eager to hear.

Really, please do read Jonathan Kay’s amazing report from Haverford. These thuggish students and their collaborators within Haverford are really destroying that institution. It’s not hyperbole. And tell me this: who is going to draw and defend a line in the sand at the University of North Texas — and at every other college and university in this country?

Kay’s conclusion — that the only people who can stop this madness are students — seems to indicate that wokeness has become the standard ideology of middle class and professional America. Doesn’t it?

UPDATE: Related, this recent video from The Cut asks, “What are white people superior at?” All the respondents are black. The general answer is, to sum it up, “Not a damn thing.” The question itself is racist and provocative. The Cut, based in Seattle, has 10.2 million subscribers to its YouTube channel.

Do these smartypants progressives really think they’re going to get away with this? This is how you are going to get the future Donald Trump.