It’s hard to keep up with the nonsense happening on college campuses lately. Just this week, Misryoum reported that Ms. Weiss’ speaking engagement at UCLA was quietly canceled—mostly because employees had been plotting behind her back since February. They were terrified of the consequences, apparently. I mean, 11,000 people actually signed a petition just to stop a speech. It feels like a bad April Fool’s joke, but sadly, it’s not.
Then you have the “No Kings” protests on March 28. Walking past the library, there was this sharp smell of damp pavement and stale coffee, and you could hear the shouting from blocks away. Professors were out there joining in, which is… a choice. They say it’s satire, aiming to poke fun at Trump, but it comes off as a bit repetitive. It feels like the same script we saw at the Cornell cry-ins years ago. Honestly, it’s all very “copy-paste,” isn’t it? Just the same protest, different day.
It’s a bit exhausting how predictable it all is.
Speaking of exhaustion, look at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. Joseph Willette, a doctoral student, put on a show called “Mass of Perpetual Indulgence” as his final thesis. He’s calling it satire, obviously. But just throwing in something dark or sacrilegious doesn’t automatically make you the next Dickens or Poe. Flannery O’Connor used weird stuff to lead characters toward grace; this just feels like it wants to be provocative for the sake of it.
The performance really rubbed a lot of people the wrong way, especially the local Catholic bishop. It’s that feeling of, wait—where is the line between artistic expression and just mocking someone’s faith? And the worst part is the lack of oversight. UNL supposedly had a meeting planned to talk about these anti-Catholic concerns, but that meeting? Never happened. There’s not even a paper trail.
It’s just strange that an institution of higher learning would have “no record” of addressing such a big controversy. The whole situation feels like it was swept under the rug, which is pretty typical these days, or maybe it’s just total administrative incompetence. I’m not sure which is worse, really.