The College Fix reports that the University of Michigan canceled its plan to screen the Clint Eastwood-directed blockbuster American Sniper after student groups protested that the film “promotes anti-Muslim [rhetoric].”

Eastwood’s film, the highest-grossing war movie of all time and the highest-grossing movie of 2014, is about U.S. Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, a decorated Iraq War veteran.

A group of about 300 students signed a letter which stated that “Middle Eastern characters in the film are not lent an ounce of humanity and watching this movie is provocative and unsafe to [Middle Eastern and North African] and Muslim students who are too often reminded of how little the media and the world values their lives.”

University of Michigan officials caved: “While our intent was to show a film, the impact of the content was harmful, and made students feel unsafe and unwelcome at our program,” said the university’s Center for Campus Involvement in a statement. “We deeply regret causing harm to members of our community.”

Instead of screening American Sniper, the university will show Paddington, a movie based on a fictional character in a children’s book. Robby Soave, in a blog published today on Reason’s website, says the university’s decision to cancel the original screening is another example of the “infantilization” of American college students. Soave writes:

I’m surprised that Paddington isn’t drawing any protests of its own. After all, the film initially garnered a “PG” rating from the British Board of Film Classification for “dangerous behaviour, mild threat, mild sex references, [and] mild bad language,” according to BBC News. The producers complained that this judgment was extreme – apparently “mild language” referred to a single utterance of the word “bloody” – and the final warning changed “mild sex reference” to “innuendo.”
But do the students at UM possess the fortitude to sit through a movie containing “innuendo” and “dangerous behaviour”? Nothing about them suggests to me that they do.

Soave’s sarcasm points to the truth. The UM students who protested the American Sniper screening are thin-skinned and intellectually intolerant. Unfortunately, instead of rejecting that intolerance, the university has reinforced the disturbing and increasingly popular notion that the protection of students’ feelings (and ideological cocoons) should trump the free exchange of ideas on campus.