This Is What Led to Post-Election Protests on College Campuses

As the university president who wrote the op-ed “This is Not a Day Care, It’s a University” that went viral a few months ago, I was asked to comment on the post-election protests now sweeping our college campuses. More specifically, I was asked to explain the Millennial Generation’s cry for “safe spaces,” their demands for “trigger warnings,” their repudiation of “micro-aggressions,” and now even their insistence that the results of this country’s presidential election be reversed, because they, our privileged progeny, don’t like it.

My response in brief: Why would you expect anything different?

This is what you get when you send your kids off to colleges and universities that teach politically correct pablum rather than the time-tested truths of a free people and civil society. This is what you get when you entrust your sons and daughters to sit under the tutelage of faculty who proudly pan a Judeo-Christian ethic and praise its antithesis. This is what you get after years of teaching our next generation “it doesn’t matter what you believe as long as it works for you.” This is what you get when you tell our youth that there is a “moral equivalency” between America and its enemies, and imply our nation is bad and the rest of the world is right to hate us.

This is what you get after years of instructing our students to laugh at those who warn of the loss of individual freedom and the rise of government largesse. This is what you get after instructing an entire generation that Marxism has its merits and that liberation theology is the only “good religion,” that socialism is better than free enterprise and that capitalism is the cause of crime. This is what you get when you foment class resentment and racial animus. This is what you get when you diminish excellence while extolling entitlement.

This is what you get when you trust your sons and daughters to professors who tell them their pastors and priests are stupid and that it’s more important to learn how to use a condom than it is to obey God’s commandments. This is what you get when you spend tens of thousands of dollars a year to enroll your kids in institutions that vaunt moral nihilism while vilifying their parents’ morals.

In 1948, Richard Weaver told us in his seminal publication that Ideas Have Consequences. A few short years earlier, Hitler said, “let me control the textbooks and I will control the State.” Huxley and Orwell followed and warned of dystopias where education would be used as a means to total power and total control. Education does matter. Ideas do have consequences and the lousy ideas we have been teaching in our universities for the past several decades are bearing themselves out daily before our eyes.

Why are we surprised by what we see in today’s news? When colleges lose their conscience, kids lose their character, and culture loses its soul. Why did you expect anything different?

This is what you get.

Dr. Everett Piper is president of Oklahoma Wesleyan University in Bartlesville, Oklahoma.

The views expressed in opinion articles are solely those of the author and are not necessarily either shared or endorsed by Black Community News.