Jonah Goldberg ponders in his latest column whether significant segments of American society suffer from a political version of the “hygiene hypothesis,” which holds that babies born in environments that are “too clean” are more likely to develop asthma and other autoimmune maladies.
If you think of bigotry as a germ or some other infectious disease vector, we live in an amazingly sanitized society. That’s not to say it doesn’t exist, of course. And we can all debate how prevalent it is later.
My point is that the institutions — the organs of the body politic — that are the most obsessed with eradicating bigotry (as liberals define it) tend to be the places that have to worry about it the least. …
… College campuses in particular are in a perpetual state of panic that rabid bigotry may break out at any moment. Indeed, you can pretty much major in bigotry panic at most top colleges and universities.
In March, Oberlin College staged the PC version of a Cold War–era duck-and-cover drill because a witness claimed to have seen a Ku Klux Klansmen near the school’s Afrikan Heritage House.
The president and his team of deans issued an emergency communiqué to the whole campus. Classes were canceled, effective immediately. Instead, a noontime “teach-in” led by the Africana Studies Department was convened. That was followed at 2 p.m. by an all-campus “demonstration of solidarity.” And on the off chance even more solidarity was needed, a “We Stand Together” community convocation was scheduled for 3:30.
Campus police later concluded that the robed and hooded “Klansman” was most likely a woman police found walking around campus while wrapped in a blanket. The witness was a half-mile away, and her first thought at seeing a figure wrapped in white cloth was, “The Klan is here!” And everyone thought that made sense.
