Abolish the Ivy League?

Today’s sign of the apocalypse: Tampons Are Coming to the Men’s Room at Brown University.

The student body president at Brown University, Viet Nguyen, will personally be handing out free tampons and pads in men’s, women’s, and gender neutral restrooms on campus, Newsweek reported Tuesday.

“We wanted to set a tone of trans-inclusivity, and not forget that they’re an important part of the population,” Nguyen explained in an email announcing his bathroom project.

An important part of the population? No doubt every individual is important, but as far as I know, I have never met a “trans” person. Have you? But the fact that “trans” people, however defined, represent an infinitesimal percentage of the population isn’t the main point here.

“I’d be naïve to say there won’t be push back. I’ve had questions about why we’re implementing this in male bathrooms as well. It’s an initial confusion, but people generally understand when we explain it.”

Please, explain it to me!

How do you explain it? “Men can have periods, too.”

No, actually, men don’t have periods. They’re men. You can be a person who has periods and call yourself a man, but calling yourself a man doesn’t make you one. (Abraham Lincoln’s story of the dog’s legs comes to mind.) If you need a tampon, the proper place to look is the women’s rest room.

How on Earth does nonsense like this gain currency? I suppose one answer is that a lot of nonsense is gaining currency these days, especially in our allegedly elite institutions. Steve noted that yesterday’s Harvard-Yale football game was delayed for over an hour because student protesters “occupied” the field during halftime to stage a climate protest. Rather than clearing these goofs off the field, the authorities humored them and delayed the second half.

Roger Simon wonders whether it is time to abolish the Ivy League.

But the larger question is: why is there still an Ivy League? What’s so special about these particular colleges? Texas A&M certainly has a better football team and you can learn how to farm.

We live in an era when many of us are getting fed up with elites (unless, of course, they are former ambassadors to Ukraine, in which case they are sacrosanct). Nevertheless, we still live in a country where people are supposed to be impressed if you went to Harvard or Yale, as did so many of our most distinguished leaders…like Hunter Biden. It should be remembered that Harvard’s most famous and successful graduate of recent times—Bill Gates—quit. Possibly the greatest American writer of the Twentieth Century—F. Scott Fitzgerald—was thrown out of Princeton. (If you prefer Hemingway, he never went to college.)

Maybe the Ivy League isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. Maybe it’s an elitist habit we should all kick. Think of the benefits. You won’t feel bad if you didn’t get in and you won’t have to abide self-important eco-blowhards interrupting a football game.

My parents believed fervently in education, and I felt like one of the last defenders of the liberal arts, back when they still existed in America’s universities. But those days are long gone. Sadly, the rot is by no means confined to the Ivy League. Today, I think both our young people and our country would be better served if fewer of them went to college. There are plenty of excellent technical schools where young men and women can learn a useful trade. While they may not learn much about literature or history there, at least they won’t be misled by being required to read fraudsters like Howard Zinn and Ta-Nehisi Coates. Young people have a better shot at discovering truth on their own than by attending today’s corrupt and intellectually bankrupt universities.

Am I overstating the case? Feel free to disagree in the comments.

Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.

Responses