"They Took The BAR!"

Over at The Torch they have an interesting post on Colgate's attempt to basically dismantle the entire Greek system there.

Last Tuesday morning, I spoke at a rally protesting Colgate University's plans to force all fraternities and sororities to sell their houses and land to the university. While a transaction between two private parties is ordinarily not of great interest to FIRE, the terms of Colgate's "deal" are particularly outrageous. Essentially, the message of the university is: sell your land or we will prohibit any student from living in your houses.

I thought you had to put them on Double Secret Probation first?

Over the last five years, if there is one constant that I have observed in university life, it is the desire to create an all-consuming campus culture that completely remakes a person from the inside out. Schools are no longer content merely teaching political science, economics, mathematics, or sociology. They also want to create the New Tolerant Man (or woman), reminiscent of the mythical "New Communist Man" from the old Soviet Union. (Colgate, for example, wants to push students into so-called theme houses which divide students by race and sexual preference.) Greeks tend to be resistant to social engineering because of their own, independent labyrinth of social relationships and because of their independent culture.

Conservative or orthodox religious groups are also resistant to the totalitarian vision of the modern university, and they often pay a steep price for defying the prevailing campus ideology. When one understands universities' all-consuming vision for student life, then seemingly random and disparate strands of censorship come together to form a coherent whole. So, what does a Friday night worship service at a local chapter of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship have in common with the "White Trash Bash" at the PKA house down the street? Both events represent-in very different ways-a celebration of a life and culture that is wholly incompatible the university's vision of social utopia.

I agree generally with this account, but it ignores the trigger mechanism at work here; as usual another in a long line of stupidities perpetrated in the name of Prohibition. Can you imagine what they will have to do to the dorms when this doesn't stop the drinking? All they can do is crack down even more. This is far from over.

*sigh*

Are all colleges and universities really this inane?