11.27.2015

It's not insanity, it's hormones

The Daily 202: Backlash brews against erasing Woodrow Wilson’s name from Princeton - The Washington Post

"MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, a former GOP congressman from Florida, tweeted that the push to remove Wilson’s name is 'insanity.'"

At Berkeley, in the mid-60’s, students protested as part of a Free Speech Movement (sounds sort of contrary now, huh?). In ’66 they protested against the draft and in ’67, napalm.  

Civil rights protests were a standard feature of student life in the 60’s and 70’s.

At about the same time, in China,students calling themselves the “Red Guard” campaigned against "intellectual elitism" and "bourgeois” tendencies. destroyed “old” books and art, ransacked museums, knocked down statures and demanded re-education of their parents and teachers.

German university students merrily burned offending books in the late 1930’s. 

In 1766, Harvard students demonstrated against bad butter ("Behold, our butter stinketh!”) In 1229, students at the University of Paris struck for two years over issues of town and gown (you’ve gotta admire their persistence). 

Some of the protests led to good and worthy reforms, some not so much.

Adults in every case were suitably outraged, which is, after all, the point.

Time, as they used to say in those old movie newsreels—some of which undoubtedly documented students protesting—marches on. 

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