THE COLLEGE THAT WANTS TO BAN ‘HISTORY:’ “Students at Western Washington University have reached a turning point in their campus’s hxstory. (For one thing, they’re now spelling it with an X—more on that later.),” Reason’s Robby Soave writes at the Daily Beast:

At the heart of this effort lies a bizarrely totalitarian ideology: Student-activists think they have all the answers—everything is settled, and people who dissent are not merely wrong, but actually guilty of something approaching a crime. If they persist in this wrongness, they are perpetuating violence, activists will claim.

The list of demands ends with a lengthy denunciation of WWU’s marginalization of “hxstorically oppressed students.” The misspelling is intentional: “hxstory,” I presume, was judged to be more PC than “history,” which is gendered, triggering, and perhaps violent. It’s easy for me to laugh at these clumsy attempts to make language obey the dictates of political correctness—but I laugh from a position of relative safety, since I am not a WWU professor.

On the other hand, if a member of campus were to insist on the proper spelling of the word, would he or she (or xe) have to answer to the Committee for Social Transformation?

Of course, Western Washington University banning history is on top of most colleges replacing traditional history courses with what Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey dubbed “Black Armband History,” where it’s nothing but grievances all the way down. But it sounds like Western Washington University has left that behind as it enters into “Starting From Zero” territory, as Tom Wolfe would say. At some point, the great relearning Wolfe promised will begin – and the longer it’s delayed, the more painful it’s going to be.