Virtually everyone who writes opinion has taken a shot at the "safe spaces" cry-bully opposition to free speech on college campuses, for example this in American Thinker. Particularly puzzling to most of the commentariat has been the easy acquiescence of college administrators to whatever extreme demands the student groups present.
My goal today is to explain why they are so apparently spineless in the face of ridiculous demands. To understand, we have to go back to first principles. A university administrator's prime directive is to keep the campus operating and to hand it off to a successor in equal or better shape than when they took charge.
Two things keep the doors of a college open and keep it healthy: students and money. Money comes from three sources: tuition and fees, endowments (gifts), and government subsidies direct to the university and indirect via student aid (Pell grants, etc.), much of which pays tuition and fees.
Government tries to help minority kids by making its subsidies contingent on the school recruiting, retaining and graduating substantial numbers of minority students. A university which fails the minority "test" begins to die, from "starvation" of funds.
Minority kids prepared and motivated for college are scarce, with the exception of Asians who don't "count." Demand exceeds supply, making recruitment difficult.
Government refuses to listen to plaints of "We tried but were outbid by Stanford or Harvard." Perforce campuses admit underprepared minority kids in the hope they will do well in competition with prepared, motivated white and Asian kids. These are mostly vain hopes as the game is rigged against the minority kids, forcing them to compete with more qualified students who, as expected, win the competition.
Campuses then create majors like "***** Studies" in which minority kids mostly compete with each other. These become places into which to recruit minority faculty, also scarce and in demand. These Studies programs with minority faculty and students turn into "safe spaces" which cosset students and assure them of victim status, shared with the faculty.
Public universities have a particular probem, a decline in the population of middle class white and Asian kids from which they've historically drawn most of their enrollment. As voting populations in more states become minority majority, public college administrators fear a lack of state support. This can result from low minority enrollments and consequent lack of support by minority legislators who don't see many of their voters' kids in the state schools.
Eventually, failure to recruit, retain and graduate minority youngsters can lead to campus closings and lost jobs. This is already happening to small private liberal arts colleges.
Bottom line, when administrators see anger and agitation among minority student groups demanding whatever set of special privileges and protections, they are predisposed to give in to keep the minority enrollments up, free speech be damned.
The Federal government doesn't enforce free speech, it does enforce minority quotas, however much they deny it. State governments are almost as bad.
