… is from page 305 of George Will’s 2021 book, American Happiness and Discontents: The Unruly Torrent, 2008-2020 – a collection of many of Will’s columns over these years; (the essay – now titled “Salutary Ludicrousness” – from which the quotation below is drawn originally appeared in the Washington Post on June 5th, 2014):
It is salutary that academia, with its adversarial stance toward limited government and cultural common sense, is making itself ludicrous. Academia is learning that its attempts to create victim-free campuses – by making everyone hypersensitive, even delusional, about victimizations – brings increasing supervision by the regulatory state that progressivism celebrates.
DBx: Indeed so.
One cannot insist that everything is political without inviting politics – meaning, in practice, politicians of all persuasions and parties – to interfere with everything. This reality is especially difficult to escape for those working for, or enrolled as students in, schools owned and operated by government. Nothing is more ludicrous than to insist, with one breath, on the marvels and indispensability of education paid for and supplied by the state – and that everything is political – and then with the next breath bemoan the intrusion into education of politics.
