The New Civility, Ivy League Edition

Columbia University is debating whether to allow ROTC back on campus, now that the purported reason for its exclusion, don’t ask, don’t tell, no longer exists. The university held a public meeting on the issue, where most of the students who spoke opposed ROTC, on grounds like these:

“Transpeople are part of the Columbia community,” said senior Sean Udell at the meeting, referring to the military’s current ban on transgender soldiers.

No one booed that guy. But, to their great shame, the students did boo and hiss at former Army staff sergeant Anthony Maschek:

Columbia University students heckled a war hero during a town-hall meeting on whether ROTC should be allowed back on campus.
“Racist!” some students yelled at Anthony Maschek, a Columbia freshman and former Army staff sergeant awarded the Purple Heart after being shot 11 times in a firefight in northern Iraq in February 2008. Others hissed and booed the veteran.
Maschek, 28, had bravely stepped up to the mike Tuesday at the meeting to issue an impassioned challenge to fellow students on their perceptions of the military.
“It doesn’t matter how you feel about the war. It doesn’t matter how you feel about fighting,” said Maschek. “There are bad men out there plotting to kill you.”
Several students laughed and jeered the Idaho native, a 10th Mountain Division infantryman who spent two years at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington recovering from grievous wounds.

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Impenetrable ignorance such as that shown by the Columbia students is probably not worth analyzing, but I can’t resist. Apparently more than one student called Sergeant Maschek a “racist”–based, I guess, on the fact that he helped to liberate 25 million people of a different race. We have reached the point where the word “racist” has lost whatever meaning it once had, and is now a general term of abuse with no specific significance, indistinguishable from “a******.”
One group of students displayed this sign:
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These students have fallen victim to a false, lazy stereotype. In fact, volunteers who are accepted into the armed forces have more ability and are higher achievers than the average high school student. Many of them come from prosperous backgrounds, and when lower-income men and women are admitted into the armed forces, they are being offered an opportunity to serve their country and to advance themselves, not being preyed upon.
We have known for a long time that liberals are disproportionately mean-spirited, but laughing and booing at a young man who was shot eleven times in the service of his country, and spent two years in a hospital rehabilitating from his wounds, is disgusting behavior even by liberal standards.
Via Atlas Shrugs.

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