Don’t worry: colleges are still insufferably woke post-COVID

Given the recent spate of “fuck Joe Biden” chants at college football games, you’d be forgiven for thinking that a year cooped up out of the classrooms might have had a transformative effect on America’s undergraduates. Perhaps the kids finally realized that wokeness isn’t the answer?

Alas, two recent case studies of campus craziness have arrived to bring Cockburn crashing down to reality.

The first comes courtesy of Oberlin College, a liberal arts school infamous for its overblown “sushi-is-cultural-appropriation” scandal in 2015, paying millions in damages after its students libeled a local bakery and for inflicting Lena Dunham on the world.

Last week, an undergrad called Peter Fray-Witzer wrote an op-ed in the Oberlin Review, the student paper, to express his discomfort at the prospect of contractors, “more than likely…cisgender men,” coming into Baldwin Cottage, a dormitory that is the “home of the Women and Trans Collective.”

“I was angry, scared, and confused,” Fray-Witzer writes. “Why didn’t the College complete the installation over the summer, when the building was empty? Why couldn’t they tell us precisely when the workers would be there? Why were they only notifying us the day before the installation was due to begin?”

He then describes his horror witnessing the cis male contractors going about their work — which Cockburn hastens to point out, was installing radiators to prevent the “women and trans” residents of Baldwin Cottage from freezing in the bitter Midwest winter months: “The workers began installing in common spaces, and I could see immediately that they were all men. It was clear that the College had not made a special request that male workers not be allowed onto the upper floors of Baldwin.”

Cockburn looked and was unable to find a conspicuously female or trans radiator installer in Lorain County, Ohio, where Oberlin is situated. Most of the Google reviews for Oberlin-based plumbers and contractors refer to traditionally male names like “Glen,” “Craig” or “Dave” — though of course some of these contractors may be trans men who would meet Fray-Witzer’s brief and prevent him from feeling “mildly violated and a little peeved.”

But it’s not just stereotypically haughty liberal arts schools experiencing fits of woke madness: in the Carolinas, a new type of victimhood has emerged.

You’ve heard of white privilege and male privilege: meet right-handed privilege. A picture from the meme account Old Row went viral this week, showing a woman giving a presentation to a class with a slide entitled “RIGHT-HANDED PRIVILEGE.”

The woman’s bullet points list how being right-handed is “easier; makes life easier” and how the “world is organized for Right-handers.”

It’s unclear whether the presentation took place at the University of North Carolina or Coastal Carolina University. The former would be disappointing as UNC is ostensibly one of the country’s top public universities. The latter would also be disappointing, as CCU were one of the first schools to kick off the “fuck Joe Biden” chorus at their football games. It’d be unfortunate if they inflicted “critical hand theory” on us just a month later.

Either way, Cockburn hates to say it — the kids are not alright.