"America's Colleges and Universities: Where Our Future Leaders Take Hideously-Expensive Vacations from Reality, Common Sense and Adult Responsibility."

University's "weapons policy" bars fencing club from campus: 

[North Dakota State University's] Police and Safety Office Director Ray Boyer cited the school's policy manual and Code of Student Behavior, saying sabers and swords are prohibited on campus:

"They are deemed weapons, and as such, possession or use on University owned or controlled property is prohibited," he says.

Club members who are trained to properly use the equipment say they don't think an epee is much worse than a baseball bat. "In fact, I think it's less dangerous. If you look up like statistics, fencing is an incredibly safe sport," says the club's President Winfield Brand.

Glenn Reynolds puts the culture of academic idiocy into a handy nutshell:

 As Twitter wag IowaHawk japes: "If I understand college administrators correctly, colleges are hotbeds of racism and rape that everyone should be able to attend."

That sums it up pretty well. Though the claim that one in five women on campus is sexually assaulted is pretty clearly bogus — as Bloomberg's Megan McArdle notes, it includes things like sexual touching over clothes, which hardly constitute rape — it's widely repeated, and that surely makes young women a bit less enthusiastic about attending. Then all the responses — involving, basically, kangaroo courts that strip male students charged with sexual assault of all due process protection — don't make campuses more appealing to male students, who are already an under-represented minority on most campuses.

Then there's the race hysteria. Just last week, students at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota canceled a "Hump Day" celebration featuring a camel because someone thought the camel signified racism against Muslims. (Yes, Muslims aren't a race, but that doesn't matter, apparently.) We make fun of Victorians for substituting the term "limbs" for the too-racy word "legs," and for supposedly covering table legs with cloth, but our own era is prone to similar over-delicacy, and campuses — supposedly centers of critical thought — seem to be the worst offenders.

Dartmouth cancelled a charitable fund-raising "fiesta" because one student complained that the word "fiesta" was racist. And going beyond race, commencement speakers, ranging from Condi Rice at Rutgers to Christine LaGarde at Smith, have been turned away by rabid student protests, mocked here by Yale Law's Stephen Carter.

From the economics to the politics, colleges and universities are looking less like serious places to improve one's mind and one's prospects, and more like expensive islands of frivolity and, sometimes, viciousness. And that is likely to have consequences.

Can you say "bursting bubble"? 

I knew you could!

Well, maybe not after four years of college, but you get my drift.