Two items in the news remind me of a short story I wrote a long time ago, proving that the politically correct cry-bully monster currently rampaging on American college campuses could be seen a long way off, even by the likes of me.  Consider:

• Tim Wolfe, the president of Missouri University, resigned his position potentially over fabricated incidents, but certainly over protests that no rational person could consider reasonable.
• Nicholas Christakis, the Yale resident master whom a student berated with tearful swears over an only slightly un-PC email that his wife had sent offered a pitiful apology for his not-sufficiently-abject capitulation to the extended-adolescence masters attending his university.

In a short story I wrote in December 2001, titled “Guest of Honor,” a monster is slithering around a dinner party for representatives of our cultural elite. With the attendees nearly all devoured:

The nearest man, a much applauded professor of English, with patches on his elbows, knelt and, with arms outstretched, said, “Though I personally railed against the imperialist oppressions, perpetrated by fascistic elitist capitalists, that incentivized the agitated reprisals for which we all now answer, I comprehend the perceptivities of the Other and, in cognitionation of the acts wherewith Mother Nature will only benefit by the extirpation of all humanity…” But he managed to say no more before the blunt maw of death left only the echo of his voice and the jingle of the keys to his Volvo as they fell.

Then a famous opinion writer, to whom the professor had recently been talking, shrugged his shoulders and said, “What’s to be done? His appetite is of our creation, after all.”

The safe money, at this time, would bet that higher education in the United States will not respond to the monster’s younger siblings as it would to a threat to its credibility, its mission, and its existence, but rather will continue to deteriorate, at least to the point that people with more sense than flavor realize it’s not worth the expense of tuition or taxpayer dollars.