(Mis)reading George Will - The Washington Post

(Mis)reading George Will - The Washington Post

Columnist George Will wrote a column recently that has attracted a tremendous amount of ire, including calls that the Washington Post fire him.  The St. Louis Dispatch has now announced that it’s replacing Will with Michael Gerson. The announcement reads in part: “The change has been under consideration for several months, but a column published June 5, in which Mr. Will suggested that sexual assault victims on college campuses enjoy a privileged status, made the decision easier. The column was offensive and inaccurate; we apologize for publishing it.”
Putting aside for the moment any other concerns that critics may have with Will’s column, the latter allegation, that he specifically suggested that sexual assault victims on college campuses enjoy a privileged status, is false.
What Will did write was the following:

Colleges and universities are being educated by Washington and are finding the experience excruciating. They are learning that when they say campus victimizations are ubiquitous (“micro-aggressions,” often not discernible to the untutored eye, are everywhere), and that when they make victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges, victims proliferate. And academia’s progressivism has rendered it intellectually defenseless now that progressivism’s achievement, the regulatory state, has decided it is academia’s turn to be broken to government’s saddle.

So Will is making two points here. First, that university culture encourages students to perceive themselves as victims, and those that can credibly claim victimhood are sometimes given higher status. I don’t think that’s reasonably debatable, as it’s exactly what the apparently common trope, “check your privilege” is about; students seen as “privileged” by dint of skin color, sex, wealth, etc., should shut up and let the more authentic and wise voices of members of societies’ victim classes proliferate. And the general rule is, if you subsidize something, you get more of it, and there’s  no reason to think this wouldn’t include self-perceptions of victimhood or self-identification as a victim. It’s notable that a recent well-circulated column by a Princeton student taking exception to the “check your privilege” meme took pains to note that the author himself is the grandchild of Holocaust survivors, the quintessential victims.