So, was I unduly harsh yesterday in my impatience over Asian students' outrage about the Abercrombie & Fitch t-shirts? I don't think so. I don't doubt that the pain the protesters feel is real. I don't doubt that they really believe lasting, terrible damage is being done by the stereotypical images A&F slapped on their $25 shirts. I don't doubt their fear that the shirts will harm the self-esteem of Asian Americans and also send the message that racial stereotyping is hip and cool. And I don't doubt their fear that the images themselves bespeak a latent--or not so latent--racism in American culture, an ugly intolerant streak that is all-too reminiscent of xenophobic days gone by.

But just because their pain is real does not make it legitimate in the ways they want it to be. Personal anguish does not itself prove the existence of a wrong. Nor can it justify either the sort of censorship or the sort of reparation the protesters are demanding. These are controversial opinions in an era when feelings are being given the kind of credibility they currently enjoy, and when the bearers of institutionally inflicted wounds (women, gays and lesbians, people of color) have so much social power. But I stand by them. To privilege feelings as we have been doing is to consent to the utter degradation of our public and private lives. To teach students to privilege hurt feelings over knowledge, or reason, or tolerance, or broader purpose--as we are increasingly doing in the name of diversity--is to blaspheme the very idea of education.

In such campus-centered phenomena as speech codes and sensitivity training and boilerplate multicultural curricula, we are watching the profound anti-intellectualism that accompanies the cultivation of mass woundedness, and we are reaping the results. Instead of showing tolerance, these students demanded censorship. Worse, they smelled profit. A&F may be a "racist" company, but its money is apparently not sullied by its "racist" marketing practices or its checkered colonialist past (A&F were originally producers of safari gear). So a moral shakedown accompanies the demand that A&F be boycotted: A&F must now demonstrate its "commitment to diversity" in stacks of pretty green dollars. That we are capable, as a culture, of using our moral wounds as extortionate levers, that we are not only willing to be bought off, but demand to be bought off, should tell us something about ourselves. It should tell us just how damaging our emerging culture of injured one-up-manship has become. And it should make us ask what in God's name is happening on American campuses that instead of producing capable, qualified citizens, universities are becoming ever more efficient at transforming young adults into walking emotional wrecks who are utterly incapable of understanding, or even coping with, the world. Face it: if you can't handle an off-color T-shirt, what can you handle?

A case in point: the multiple meltdowns Harvard law students have had this year about the alleged racial insensitivity of their classmates and their professors. These students are supposedly the creme de la creme. They represent the nation's finest college graduates, and will become some of the most influential and powerful lawyers, judges, and law professors in the land. And yet they can't hear the "n" word without decompensating. So mortally bludgeoned are they by one professor's completely legitimate, if awkwardly phrased, comment that "feminists, Marxists, and the blacks" have done nothing to advance tort law that they can't physically attend his lectures for fear of further psychic injury (in fact, critical race theorists and feminist legal theorists such as Catharine MacKinnon have completely screwed tort law by eroding the crucial distinction between words and acts). Another law prof upset students so much that he has simply been removed from the classroom. The administration has promised to hold faculty workshops on diversity this summer (Blue Eyed, anyone?), and may even bless Harvard with a racial harassment policy.

How will these fragile young legal souls handle the gritty reality of professional life after law school? Will they sue disrespectful clients for harassment? Will they demand "time-outs" in court when they get ruffled by opposing counsel or hostile witnesses? Will they show no commitment whatever to the laws they are bound to uphold, and devote themselves instead to banning, censoring, and sanctioning everything and everyone that give them a bit of a twinge? These are neither idle nor paranoid questions. We should all be asking them. We should all be watching the anti-intellectual, hystericizing effects of universities' "commitment to diversity." And we should be extolling the virtues of thick skin, reasoned debate, and a sense of social purpose that does not get its energy from our narcissistic need to feed and feed and feed our ever so pleasurable, profitable pain.