A friend of mine in Pennsylvania sent me this news story. “I want to believe this is some kind of off-season April Fools’ joke,” he wrote, “but apparently not.” The article is about Lebanon Valley College, in Annville. On that campus is Lynch Memorial Hall, named after Dr. Clyde A. Lynch, who was president of the college from 1932 to 1950. From what we learn in the article, he was a stand-up guy. But his name … Yes, they — “they,” the nutcases and brats — are demanding the removal of his name.
The attorney general of the United States is a black woman named Lynch. Should the president fire her? (Maybe, but not for that reason.) As a music critic, I sometimes cover a baritone named Lester Lynch. He’s black, but that’s no excuse: Should I boycott his performances?
TOO DUMB FOR COLLEGE: Ashe Schow: Student protesters jump the shark: Can’t even handle the name ‘Lynch.’
Student protesters at Lebanon Valley College have managed to encapsulate everything outsiders see as wrong with the current campus “revolution”: privileged students finding outrage in mundane things.
Students are demanding that (among other things) LVC administrators remove or modify the name of the “Lynch Memorial Hall” — not because the man it was named after was a racist, but because these students cannot handle the word “lynch.” Lynch, of course, is a term that means to put to death (as by hanging) by mob action without legal sanction. Thousands of African-Americans were lynched over three centuries.
But it is also the last name of about 130,000 people in the United States. Do these students faint when they come across “Twin Peaks” on Netflix (directed by David Lynch)? Do they have a panic attack whenever the U.S. attorney general (Loretta Lynch, who is also African-American) makes a statement? Do they crash their cars when they see a sign for a town named Lynchburg?
We mock the Victorians for their delicate sensibilities, but this is worse. And stupider.