The opposite of surprising

John Leo writes about dear darling Hamline:

Troy Scheffler, a graduate student at Hamline University in Minnesota, thinks that the Virginia Tech massacre might have been avoided if students had been allowed to carry concealed weapons. After e-mailing this opinion to the university president, he was suspended and ordered to undergo “mental health evaluation” before being allowed to return to school.

Punishment for expressing an opinion is not unusual on the modern campus.

Small Minnesota wannabe universities are among the worst for this sort of thing; when you’re number 202, you try a LOT harder. You haven’t met a true over-the-top left-wing would-be eurosophisticate until you’ve met a few of the sort that frequent Carlton, Hamline and Macalester.

They don’t speak anything but Midwestern English, have never been anywhere except a weekend trip to New York City, but the one thing they can achieve in their humble parochial environs is to out-angst the French Existentialists and out-PC the Ivy League.

And they do. One reason Pharyngula is so reliably deranged is that he suffers from the same disease, except that he’s at a community college in Morris, far from the bright lights and big city excitement of St. Paul.