This is one type of institution the recession should harm

I would love to see the recession cut America’s top universities, which have become intellectually polluted institutions that have nothing to do with education.  Heather MacDonald — in a larger article about how Yale, even as it tightens its belt panders more deeply to the LGBT community — sums up perfectly the expensive grievance culture for which parents pay when they send their kids to the nation’s premier schools:

If you’re tempted to ask why students require administration backing in order to form a “community,” [of LGBTQ students,] you don’t understand the codependent relationship between self-engrossed students and the adults whose career consists of catering to that self-involvement. Students in today’s university regularly act out little psychodramas of oppression before an appreciative audience of deans and provosts. The essence of those psychodramas is to force the university to recognize a student’s narrowly defined “identity” through ever more elaborate bureaucratic mechanisms. Rather than laugh the student players off the stage, the deans, provosts, and sundry other administrators willingly participate in their drama, intently negotiating with them and conferring additional benefits wherever possible.

UPDATE: Thanks, Earl, for the spelling correction. You’d think I’d know how to spell recession by know, but sometimes my brain just creates spelling chimeras.