In response to my post yesterday about the communal pleasure campuses derive from publicly staging outrage against "offensive" or "insensitive" expression, reader Bob F. suggests that perhaps college administrators would do well to read a little Dostoevsky:

In an early chapter of "The Brothers Karamazov" entitled "The Old Clown," Fyodor K's boorish antics elicit a wry, perceptiveÝlecture from the elder Zossima, who tells the old buffoon, "A man who lies to himself can be more easily offended than anyone else. For it is sometimes very pleasant to take offense, isn't it? And yet he knows that no one has offended him and that he has invented the offense himself ... that he has exaggerated just to make himself look big and important, that he has fastened on a phrase and made a mountain out of a molehill -- he knows it all and yet is the first to take offense, he finds pleasure in it and is mightily satisfied with himself, and so reaches the point of real enmity ..."

Then again, maybe it's hoping too much to expect thatÝuniversity administrators read Dostoyevsky anymore, or that they'dÝrecognize themselves in the elder's cautionary description if they did read it.

This is why I love nineteenth-century fiction. It is wiser than we are (not least because it is not afraid to be earnest), and far more humane.