National Review Online
Thursday, February 09, 2023
‘Our kids simply don’t know what an adult is anymore
— or how to become one,” wrote Ben Sasse, now president of the University of
Florida, in 2017’s The Vanishing American Adult. More evidence for
Sasse’s thesis emerged the first day of his tenure at the university. A hundred
protesters showed up at the door of Sasse’s office, pounding on
it and presenting a list of “demands.”
The behavior of this rabble is not surprising, rather all
too typical. The modern American college campus is replete with such behavior.
“We are sick and tired of having our rights and freedoms set aflame, and this
so-called president hasn’t even started work yet,” huffed a post from the
protesters on the Instagram page of the school’s chapter of Young Democratic
Socialists of America. Even though Sasse only started this week, this isn’t the
first time students have protested against him. Last year, during visits to
campus to finalize his hiring, sessions open to student questioning were repeatedly disrupted.
The protesters’ anger seems to derive largely from the
fact that, during his time as senator, he dared to voice conservative opinions
on matters such as abortion and same-sex marriage. Never mind that Sasse has
repeatedly said that he would not threaten those who disagreed with his views.
Last year, Sasse said of his new position that “one of the things
that’s appealing about this, frankly, is the opportunity to step back from
politics.”
Sasse served as president of Midland University in
Nebraska before entering the U.S. Senate, and has thought and written extensively
about how to improve colleges and universities. “We need higher education to
transform more lives by offering more accountability, more experimentation,
more institutional diversity, more intellectual curiosity, more adaptive
learning, and more degrees and certifications,” Sasse wrote in the Atlantic last year. “We
need a rethink, renewal, and expansion—tinkering around the edges won’t cut
it.” Frightening stuff, huh?
“America wasn’t built to enable perpetual adolescence,”
Sasse wrote in The Vanishing American Adult. It will be a stunning
achievement if he can somehow convince his adolescent critics of that.
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