TERMINAL STUPIDITY IN THE MID-AMERICAN CONFERENCE.

With most of the sports done for the year, now it's time to call the roll of politically correct follies in the West Division.

Take Central Michigan.  (Please?)  The former head of the journalism department, who worked as an actual journalist at one time, made the mistake of bringing in people who were newsworthy because of their notoriety.

Professor Timothy Boudreau sat at a table in a Mexican restaurant just off Central Michigan University’s campus. He looked around at his dinner guests. Munching on tortilla chips was a group not often seen at La Señorita restaurant, or anywhere, really.

Joining Boudreau were a handful of his students, an outspoken Detroit Satanist — and five members of the controversial Westboro Baptist Church.

The unconventional bunch was refueling after a 2018 panel for Boudreau’s journalism law class. His goal: teach students about the importance of the First Amendment, using firsthand experiences from people whose speech is threatened.

“I think students, college students in particular, should be challenged on their beliefs,” he told me last month from his home in Holland, Mich. “That’s why I brought in controversial speakers. I wanted to give them an opportunity to challenge those speakers. I firmly believe the answer to bad speech is better speech, or more speech.”

For his troubles, he was invited to step out of line and disappear.

Administrators bristled when Boudreau invited to campus the matriarch of “the most hated family in America,” Shirley Phelps-Roper. They set restrictive parameters, barring media, making attendees show I.D., and forbidding students from recording the panel — all in the name of safety.

“We have to balance the pedagogy, the exchange of free thought, with figuring out how to keep people safe,” CMU administrator Dennis Armistead told a local newspaper.

Apparently, only the most politically reliable of Chippewas get to encounter the most challenging ideas.

Moving onward, a department head at Western Michigan decided that graffiti vandalism was an outrage only a little bit less triggering than the Reichstag Fire.  "WMU administrator reportedly calls 'Back the Blue' and 'All Lives Matter' slogans 'white supremacist'."  I wonder who she reported the defacing of a theater to.  When you report vandalism "as a crime," you're probably not calling the dog-catcher.

In Toledo, which at one time you could reach by train from Kalamazoo, a law professor earned a university-wide award for "inclusive excellence."  You guessed it, dear reader, wrong kind of diversity, wrong kind of inclusiveness.  "The university's diversity officer in essence promised reforms to ensure that such a mistake won't recur."

Demonstrating that your institutions are as foolish as Evergreen State doesn't look like a good value proposition, Central, Western, or Toledo.