Wolff: The media's campus narrative

Among the silliest people many of us have ever known are our younger selves, perhaps most of all our politically absolute college selves. Who in hindsight isn’t embarrassed and appalled by his or her undergraduate certainty? Yet here we are, hardly for the first time, as various recent angry declarations by college students are among the most serious media topics.

The subject at the University of Missouri, Yale, Wesleyan, Smith. Ithaca College and Claremont McKenna is race, and virtue as well — that is, efforts to dispute the views that the protests represent are in turn a reason to protest.

“Protest” is itself a loaded word, implying great disruption on campus and a link between student issues and race-related police brutality in communities around America. More accurately, the university debate reflects less mass movement than a set of statements and positions from campus organizations that have managed to achieve media notice. More PR than protest. In fact, dissing the media as a form of protest — as in efforts at the University of Missouri to restrict journalists' access — has attracted more notice.

This is one of those complicated media moments — perhaps too complicated for the media itself to unravel — in which a story is almost entirely told by self-interested and unreliable narrators. In this case, teenagers.

“Systematic oppression affects us all,” said Tyahra Angus, a student at Smith, according to The New York Times, echoing a certain kind of classroom rhetoric. One of the issues at the University of Missouri, according to the Times, is “microaggression,” which the Times defined, with perhaps faint irony, as “tone-deaf slights directed toward minority students.”

True, the media did single out as ridiculous a teacher and protest promoter at the University of Missouri, Melissa Click, who had  called for the media to pay attention to the grievance of black students and faculty, then was caught trying to block  coverage. There was wide note and reasonable horror about the house master at Yale pilloried for doubting the intellectual basis of “safe spaces” free from argument demanded by the protesters.

But mostly the media have taken this story at face value. This is a race story, as much about not challenging the narrative — to challenge the narrative makes you part of the problem — as it is about racial conflict itself. And it’s a campus story, implying a certain zeitgeist-level meaning and demographic with-it-ness. (Campus stories have the virtue that wherever there are unreasonable students, there are witless administrators making students look reasonable.)

Not dissimilarly, campus rape has emerged in recent years as a largely don’t-challenge story, even as it was nuttily argued that college settings are among the most dangerous places for women in America. This was a story also largely narrated by its own adolescent proponents — here, too, not so much a mass protest movement but a set of agit-prop-type statements and declarations. At the University of Virginia, this resulted in Rolling Stone’s rapt coverage of a single, and now discredited, narrator’s elaborate description of her campus attack. At Columbia, a student carried a mattress to class to symbolize her anger at the university’s failure to prosecute her claim of rape, receiving wide media attention before her account was complicated by a set of solicitous and affectionate emails she wrote her alleged rapist after the purported attack.

The problem of unreliable narrators is hardly limited to the young. Donald Trump has built his business and reputation on an almost 40-year record of hyperbole. Yet through the early months of this campaign, despite his long history of exaggeration or even fantasy, he was given so much enthusiastic attention that preposterously he continues to dominate the presidential race.

Unreliable narrators may make news so much more compelling than reliable ones that taking them at face value for as long as possible might have become a certain sort of default media business strategy.

No doubt, racism exists at American universities, and black students might feel unwelcome even without overt acts of prejudice; some women surely have been raped, and others feel that fraught sexual experiences are the equivalent of rape. But the broader charge here, the widespread existence of a culture of depraved institutional indifference and cruelty at American campuses, is not just anecdotal and subjective (it’s rape/racism if I say it’s rape/racism!) but symbolic. We are oppressed because we feel oppressed — with all the great excitement that comes from being able to express feelings of oppression in college, indeed in a “safe space” free from arguments otherwise.

College students, as much as politicians, have  become quite savvy about, as the PR people put it, controlling the narrative. If you question the relative nature of the hostility of the hostile environment, you are an oppressor and microaggressor; if you qualify rape, you are part of the rape culture. Likewise for Trump, if you challenge his wall, you cannot be a true conservative — in fact, you’re a moron.

Supported by social media vigilance and fealty, unreliable narration becomes holy grail. As long as the news media are too politicized to be honest brokers of basic narratives, Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Marco Rubio and Carly Fiorina will prosper as selective fabulists, and a new generation of college students will enjoy its moment of righteous intensity and media attention.

At least we know that most college students will in the future look back at their absolute and uncompromising sense of what was right, necessary and due them and surely wonder, “What was I thinking?”