I’ve gotten some pushback on my piece yesterday describing the leftist power play at the University of Missouri. Apparently I underestimated the awesome power of Mizzou’s terrible football team. The Missouri controversy wasn’t about the power of campus radicals. Rather it was about the distorting effect of big-time college sports on higher education.
Sorry, but no. If you think football players are suddenly all-powerful, imagine a counter-factual — like a “strike” by a few players in solidarity with an athlete wrongfully convicted by a campus sex assault tribunal, or a stand in solidarity with a team chaplain under fire for allegedly offending the LGBT community. Would ESPN fawn all over them, celebrating their courage? Would faculty and radical students extol them as heroes? Would a university president and chancellor step down within 48 hours in response to an athletic cry for religious liberty? Student-athletes can’t even figure out a way to be fairly compensated for the billions in revenue they bring to college athletics. Powerful? Only when weaponized by the campus Left.
The story at Mizzou is the same old story we’ve reading and watching since the Sixties. Radicals rule.