The president of Emory University is the latest campus leader to grovel before narcissistic, delusional students, raising the question yet again: What do seemingly adult administrators so fear in their uneducated young charges?

Earlier this week, several dozen Emory students barged into the school’s administration building to demand protection from “Trump 2016” slogans that had been written in chalk on campus walkways. Acting out a by-now standardized psychodrama of oppression and vulnerability, the students claimed that seeing Trump’s name on the sidewalk confirmed that they were “unsafe” at Emory. College sophomore Jonathan Peraza led the allegedly traumatized students in a chant: “You are not listening! Come speak to us, we are in pain!” (This accusation of “not listening” was a thankfully toned-down version of the shriek “Be quiet!,” screamed by a Yale student last fall at her college master during an expletive-filled tirade.) As the Emory protesters entered the administration building, they drew on the Communist Manifesto(probably the only political theory they have even heard of) to express their pitiable plight: “It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love each other and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains.”

The order of the day was feelings. “What are we feeling?” protest leader Peraza asked his fellow sufferers, consistent with the neo-Victorian sentimentalism currently dominant on campuses. “Frustration” and “fear” were the answers. “I’m supposed to feel comfortable and safe [here],” a student told an Emory Wheel reporter. “I don’t deserve to feel afraid at my school.”

Showing the viral nature of student self-pity, the Emory protesters leveraged their Trump-induced “pain” and “unsafety” into the same demand for more diversity hires made last fall by Black Lives Matter student protesters on campuses across the country. The Emory students also picked up on an exculpatory meme most recently on display at Brown University: the claim that affirmative-action admits are not competitive scholastically because they are so burdened by the need to create safe spaces for themselves. An Emory student told President James Wagner that “people of color are struggling academically because they are so focused on trying to have a safe community.”

Put aside for a moment the students’ ignorant demand for protection from political speech. Their self-image as immiserated proletarians, huddled together for safety and support, is pure fantasy. In fact, they are the most privileged group of human beings in history, enjoying unfettered access to intellectual, scientific, and social resources that would have been the envy of every monarch in the age of absolutism. And any college adult who has any sense of his responsibility to fit his charges for an objective relationship to reality would seek to convey that truth. By contrast, rewarding students’ delusional self-pity only increases the likelihood that they will fail to take advantage of the enormous intellectual riches at their fingertips and go through life with self-defeating chips on their shoulders. But President Wagner followed slavishly in the footsteps of virtually every other college president confronted by student claims of “unsafety”—he rolled over completely.

[….]

Any college president who adopts the rhetoric of “safe spaces” is already lost….