RUTHFULLY YOURS

The University of California system is encouraging its students to report everything from “unwanted jokes” to “teasing” using its online “intolerance report form.”

If you hover your mouse over a subsection of the form labeled “hostile climate,” it states that “examples include unwanted jokes or teasing, derogatory or disparaging comments, posters, cartoons, drawings, or pictures of a biased nature.”

It also has a section for “Other Campus Climate Issues,” which it defines as “any intolerant behavior not specified above.”

Of course, any student who is being harassed at school in a way that, as the form puts it, is “severe or pervasive enough to affect campus or academic life,” should be able to contact the administration for help.

But here’s the thing: Even without this form, students would still have plenty of ways to report these kinds of issues. You know, like, these things called “e-mails” and “phone calls,” for example. What’s more, you’d think that if a student was facing discriminatory behavior “severe or pervasive enough” to “affect campus or academic life,” he or she would want to use one of these more direct options for communication to get it handled rather than dump it into a system-wide mass portal.

So . . . why the form? Maybe UC is hell on earth, and these kinds of serious incidents are so common, and were making up so much of administrators’ received e-mails, that it was necessary to have an entire online space devoted to them — and there really should also be an entire staff to sort through them and a task force ready to be deployed to handle the tragedies. Or maybe the point is to encourage students to report incidents (and/or annoyances) that they would not have considered serious enough to report without this kind of prompting.

It must be the first one. I mean, it’s not like UC would want to teach these students that every one of their personal problems is so important that higher-ups will be interested in hearing about it. After all, they’re preparing these kids for the real world.

Keep in mind, however, that these are, of course, kids. Sure, people of this age may be mature enough to join the military and die for their country, but they definitely cannot be expected to handle getting the attention of their superiors when necessary through the same kind of standard means that basically every other adult in every other setting is expected to do.

This story was originally covered in an article by the College Fix.

— Katherine Timpf is a reporter for National Review Online.