HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: University of Michigan Cancels American Sniper Screening to Protect Students’ Feelings, Will Show Paddington Instead. “College is daycare.”

The Center for Campus Involvement, an official university organization that hosts non-alcoholic events for students, had planned to screen American Sniper at a gathering on Friday night. But this plan drew outrage from a bunch of easily offended students, including the Muslim Students’ Association. . . .

To guard against the waves of anti-Islamic violence that would surely break across campus if American Sniper was screened, administrators substituted a different movie. Students will now be able to enjoy Paddington, which hopefully will not challenge any of their political or religious views, or inform them on culture or current affairs, in any way at all.

Though I’m surprised that Paddington isn’t drawing any protests of its own. After all, the film initially garnered a “PG” rating from the British Board of Film Classification for “dangerous behaviour, mild threat, mild sex references, [and] mild bad language,” according to BBC News. The producers complained that this judgment was extreme—apparently “mild bad language” referred to a single utterance of the word “bloody”—and the final warning changed “mild sex reference” to “innuendo.”

But do the students at UM possess the fortitude to sit through a movie containing “innuendo” and “dangerous behaviour”? Nothing about them suggests to me that they do.

Is it worth six figures to attend such a place? Is it worth tax dollars to support it? Why, exactly?