Quotation of the Day…

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… is from page 319 of George Will’s 2021 book, American Happiness and Discontents: The Unruly Torrent, 2008-2020 – a splendid collection of many of his columns over these years; (the column from which the quotation below is drawn was originally published in the Washington Post on October 20th, 2016):

That purpose, as Hanna Holborn Gray, a former president of the University of Chicago, once said, is not to make young adults comfortable, it is to make them think. Since 1975, however, universities have embraced the doctrine that speech that offends people actually harms them, mentally and even physically. The decision to treat young adults as fragile and perpetually vulnerable to victimization coincided with academia’s turn away from the world: Fifty years ago, student assertiveness concerned momentous issues of war and civil rights. Today, students have macro tantrums about micro-aggressions (e.g., sombreros). Time was, students rebelled against universities acting in loco parentis. Today, they welcome having their sexual and other social interactions minutely subjected to government regulations administered by Pecksniffs with PhDs.