They are different from all the oligarchies of the past

College students know the kind of world they've created.

At New York University recently, a bunch of students got an organic chemistry professor fired because his class was too tough. Actually it sounds like the students were lazy and just didn’t really want to work hard. This is pretty familiar stuff for elite campuses, what Stephen King called “the unscrupulous taking cheerful advantage of the unwary.” Freddie deBoer, meanwhile, has some advice for these very privileged and very angry young men and women:

NYU students: the world is a hard, tragic place, and its pains will catch up to you sooner or later. Experience its inevitable hardships so that you grow resilient against them, or don’t, and suffer more later. It’s up to you.

I don’t really think that’s true, and most people who have followed campus politics for the last fifteen years or so will probably feel similarly, if only because we’ve been saying that for years: “Just wait until you graduate.” “The real world is going to give you a rude awakening.” “CEOs aren’t going to put up with this crap.” But that hasn’t really been the case, has it? Campus social justice activism over the past decade or so has transitioned to “the world” far more seamlessly than even its more devoted acolytes probably hoped. A significant portion of the business world now revolves around questions of woke social justice politics. CEOs can be ousted overnight if employees circulate the right petition within the company intranet. Major corporations give millions of dollars to useless social justice organizations for fear of their employees turning on them. This is life now.

Now, you might argue that all of this is merely delaying the “inevitable hardships” of life—that the people pushing this zeitgeist are just putting off the “hard, tragic” realities of the world for another few years after graduation, and that Freddie’s advice still obtains here. Maybe that’s the case, but then again it seems to me like these people have done a remarkably effective job at remaking a huge portion of the world into their own image. I mean, one of the premier educational institutions in the world bent over backwards for these students, probably risking an employment lawsuit and drumming up scads of negative publicity in the process, all in order to accommodate their own slothful academic petulance. And that’s normal these days. Lots of places do that.

So I’m not sure this rhetoric really cuts it anymore. For those of us who still retain a modicum of integrity and dignity—and there are more than a few of us, to be sure—it’s true that we are still afflicted by the “pains” of the world, at least as we’ve traditionally understood them. Yet there is a large and hugely influential portion of the population that has decided that they’re not really into that anymore, and they’re having no small amount of success in realizing their vision.

If we want to confront this problem head-on and deal with it and change its variables, we should stop pretending as if there’s some sort of hard reality lurking around the corner getting ready to waylay some sense into these young people. It’s a different world now and they know it.