This week, the Michigan State University campus was roiled by another sighting of a vile mark of racial intimidation on campus. A noose was reportedly found hanging in a campus dormitory. But upon closer inspection… make that a shoelace. Yes, a shoelace.
Juvenal is happy to report the other shoelace was found, and the pair can be happily reunited. But before the other shoelace dropped, Michigan State University President Lou Anna Simon followed the protocol common to “incidents” like this. She assumed the position – a position of subservience to the most childish in her community – and issued an immediate statement, before apparently any facts were collected, moralizing about how the noose “is a symbol of intimidation and threat that has a horrendous history in America.”
This is by no means the first such false report on a college campus, where such reports are now so common that the question must be raised: Do our college campus cause paranoia, or reward it?
Juvenal operates under the theory that these are knowingly false reports, called in as cynical but effective ploys on the part of certain groups of students for attention and additional campus resources. College administrators have their share in the cynical charade, finding it easier to respond immediately with platitudes that, of course, no right-thinking person could deny, than to counsel students to wait patiently for the results of an investigation. A good parent, of course, would help alleviate the child’s fear, showing them that there is no monster under the bed, and they can rest easy. But despite the return of the practice of in loco parentis on college campuses, administrators are not good parents. And if, as in the Michigan State case, it becomes clear that the university’s president has been made a fool of, well, that’s no matter, because university administrators are a shameless bunch.
But what if these students are not cynically manipulating spineless university administrators? What if they really believe they are seeing nooses where there are just shoelaces, klan robes where there is just lab equipment, a banana peel placed with ill intent where there is just litter? If this is the case, universities are not simply guilty of the coddling of the American mind, but either of somehow attracting a group of students who is mentally ill, or, more troublingly, of enabling or creating their mental illness.
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