George Will Was Right: Victimhood Undeniably Confers Privilege on Campuses

Syndicated conservative columnist
George Will was widely condemned for an article he penned about
sexual assault and victimhood on college campuses. Critics have
signed petitions calling on news outlets to stop carrying his
column, and yesterday, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch

did just that.

What was the problem? Here is the section of the column that the
Dispatch cited in its decision to axe Will:

Colleges and universities are being educated by Washington and
are finding the experience excruciating. They are learning that
when they say campus victimizations are ubiquitous
(“micro-aggressions,” often not discernible to the untutored eye,
are everywhere), and that when they make victimhood a coveted
status that confers privileges, victims proliferate. And academia’s
progressivism has rendered it intellectually defenseless now that
progressivism’s achievement, the regulatory state, has decided it
is academia’s turn to be broken to government’s saddle.

The Volokh Conspiracy’s David Bernstein
writes that while other criticisms of Will’s
perspective may have merit, the above section—far from being
unsayable heresy—certainly rings true:

So Will is making two points here. First, that university
culture encourages students to perceive themselves as victims, and
those that can credibly claim victimhood are sometimes given higher
status. I don’t think that’s reasonably debatable, as it’s exactly
what the apparently common trope, “check your privilege” is about;
students seen as “privileged” by dint of skin color, sex, wealth,
etc., should shut up and let the more authentic and wise voices of
members of societies’ victim classes proliferate. And the general
rule is, if you subsidize something, you get more of it, and
there’s no reason to think this wouldn’t
include self-perceptions of victimhood
or self-identification as a victim. It’s notable
that a
recent well-circulated column by a Princeton student taking
exception to the “check your privilege” meme took pains to
note that the author himself is the grandchild of Holocaust
survivors, the quintessential victims.

Even back in my day, Yale Law School had a “student strike for
diversity,” at a rally for which students were encouraged to tell
their individual tales of woe. I thought it striking that one
student actually got up to discuss what a victim he was because he
was a “first-generation professional.” Thus, for example, while
seemingly everyone else knew how to dress for a job interview, he
did not. The horror of being on the cusp of a six-figure salary and
having to ask the clerk at Brooks Brothers for assistance! (I could
sympathize with the student–for my first “desk” job, I showed up,
on advice of my parents, in short sleeve dress shirts and a tie,
leading to subsequent teasing from co-workers–but a member of a
victim class? No.)

Is it really controversial to suggest that college campuses
encourage their students to see themselves as victims, given the
policies many universities enact to prevent their students’

delicate emotions from being shattered by
unfamiliar ideas and
troubling memories?