NO LIMIT TO COLLEGIATE IDIOCIES.

Confound it, I'd still really rather post about shark attacks or railway preservation or the like.  Sometimes, though, the terminally stupid people who run higher education leave me with no alternative but to call attention.  You'd think, dear reader, that the recent brush with having funding and tenure protections nullified by the state legislature might have concentrated some minds in Madison.

Sorry, no.  "If ever there was a poster child for the absurdity of cancel culture, this is it."

What is it?  "Every time I think we’ve reached peak woke insanity, the idiocy, stupidity, and sheer, shocking lunacy of the left manifests itself in some other quiet corner of rationalism and reason while the rest of us are left gasping for air."

This time, it's using $50K in donated funds to move a rock deposited by a retreating glacier because of a colloquial reference to black rocks a century ago.

Chamberlin Rock, on the top of Observatory Hill, is named after Thomas Crowder Chamberlin, a geologist and former university president. Students of color on campus say the rock represents a history of discrimination. The boulder was referred to as a derogatory name for Black people in a Wisconsin State Journal story in 1925. The derogatory term was commonly used in the 1920s to describe any large dark rock. University historians have not found any other time that the term was used, but they said the Ku Klux Klan was active on campus at that time, the Wisconsin State Journal reported.

But ... intersectionality be praised ... long before Black Hawk and the Sauk Nation retreated through the area, pursued by Abraham Lincoln, other tribes buried their dead near the rock.  Thus the rock had to be moved in such a way as to not disturb the burial mounds.  (I know of a few other Indian mounds near the lake, some of them in secluded locations conducive to, er, getting acquainted.  Are those now being patrolled to prevent such problematic behavior?)

It's time for the adults to take charge, isn't it?  "This was a prime opportunity for a teachable moment, in which the grown-ups running the campus tell the young people that the answer is 'No!' But apparently at UW-Madison, the children are in charge." And they're more enabled than ever. "Don’t you wish they’d just wet their pants like other two-year-olds to get us to notice them?"

Well, no, the people currently running the universities are intellectual heirs to the spineless administrators of the mid-to-late 1960s, who praised their noisy protestors as the most involved and enlightened students ever.  Here's how the university flacks spin the action.

The University of Wisconsin–Madison moved the former Chamberlin Rock, an object that had become a painful symbol of racism to generations of students, to a site off the main campus on August 6.

The rock had sat at the crest of Observatory Hill since 1925. That same year, it was referred to in a newspaper headline by a deeply offensive nickname that included a racial slur. The derogatory nickname was commonly used at the time to refer to any large, dark rock.

The Wisconsin Black Student Union, in partnership with the Native American student organization Wunk Sheek, led an effort to remove the rock from campus. UW–Madison’s main campus is on ancestral Ho-Chunk land.

Some conscience-cowboy comes across the reference sometime in the last year, and that somehow becomes a "symbol of racism to generations????" Good grief. Why not convert one of the student unions or a residence hall into a Ho-Chunk casino, and reduce congestion at the Dells?

The rock itself is what geologists call a "glacial erratic," meaning it was picked up and pushed along by a glacier, and then tumbled out as a previous round of global warming melted the polar ice cap.  Does it now rate a special description, socially constructed glacial erratic? “Students and the general public will no longer casually encounter the rock, but it will remain available to those specifically seeking it out for teaching and learning purposes.”

So much for me writing any more checks to any operating units of the University of Wisconsin.