PENN STATE: “Of course we’re going to riot,” Paul Howard, a 24-year-old aerospace-engineering student at Penn State University, told the New York Times. “What do they expect when they tell us at 10 o’clock that they fired our football coach?” Whatever people expected, it was too much, apparently. Plus this:

People keep saying the cover-up proves the corruption of college football. Maybe so. College football certainly has its myriad and manifest vices.

But what about the riots? These aren’t simply a product of football culture, they’re a product of a campus culture that teaches students they have an absolute right to whatever their hearts desire, starting with a fun-filled college experience and, afterwards, a rewarding career.

Imbued with a sense of victimhood, entitlement, and cultivated grievance that can only be taught, their preferred response to inconvenience is a temper tantrum. Sometimes, as with the Penn State riots, they are physical. Other times, they are intellectual or theatrical. But the tantrums are always self-justifying. Arguments are correct not if they conform to facts and reason, but if they are passionately held. Unfairness is measured by the intensity of one’s feelings.

Perhaps that’s why a “right to riot” has become a staple of campus culture across the country, particularly at big schools. Students riot when administrators take away their beer. They riot when they lose games. They riot when they win games. They riot when the cops try to break up parties. Inconvenience itself has become outrageous.

It is also why idiotic protests have come to be seen as “part of the college experience,” as if chanting inane slogans and spouting weepy canned platitudes is essential to a well-rounded education.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Reader Jon Miles writes: “I wonder how many of the Penn State rioters feel sorrier for Michael Vick’s victims?”