why bureaucrats shouldn’t handle social activism

For those of you who haven’t read my post about social activism in the skeptical movement, or don’t remember it, I would recommend a quick refresher before proceeding. One of the biggest reasons why a pop sci blogger would be concerned with this topic is because such debates are spilling into college campuses at an alarming rate, and colleges is where we’re supposed to be, at least in theory, minting future scientists and public intellectuals. How ready and willing they’re going to be to challenge their minds, hear contradictory ideas, and tackle tough questions many find painful to discuss or that have no easy answers, will shape how and even if they’ll have any tangible impact on the world around them. Don’t get me wrong, I certainly don’t want to censor, discourage, or outright antagonize social justice activists, I want college students to hear what a passionate activist has to say about a topic. What I will advocate against, however, is making all of college so safe emotionally and potentially physically, that it borders on the absurd.

Here’s a prime example of this. In a bid to respond to the scandals surrounding colleges’ role in their students’ sex lives one university is seriously mulling imposing a ban on women entering a fraternity between 10 pm and 3 am. Sororities objected of course, and with good reason. You’ll never solve a problem by restricting people’s freedom of choice and movement and it’s such an amazingly tone-deaf and dehumanizing idea to think that it’s fine to basically punish women just to avoid bad PR instead of dealing with widespread binge drinking which contributes to most of the cases they’d like to avoid at all costs. But that’s how bureaucrats think. If drunken fraternity hookups cased trouble, let’s just ban events where such situations occur. Easy fix and no need to dig deeper, right? Wrong. It’s just one more a clear signal that colleges are dropping the ball and failing their students, morally and educationally. How exactly is a topic for several upcoming posts, but think of this as a taste of how college administrators “problem-solve.”