This is the tale of two university presidents.

First – at Yale – Peter Salovey responded to student mob demonstrations with efforts to make students feel more “valued” rather than “disrespected” and in “pain.”

These students either have parents rich enough to pay the school’s $65,000-per-year tuition or are bright enough to benefit from the university’s massive endowment. But they’re offended, stating Yale is not an inclusive space for people of color and other minorities. This fall, a committee of students raised the possibility that somone might wear an insensitive Halloween costume, like a feathered headdress, or a turban, anything that might negatively impact someone’s sense of being in a safe space at the university. The committee warned against this.

One professor, Erika Christakis, thinking this a bit too PC, wrote a letter to students in which she wondered: “Have we lost faith in young people’s capacity – in your capacity – to exercise self-censure, through social norming, and also in your capacity to ignore or reject things that trouble you?” Seven hundred came out to protest.

President Salovey says he hears students’ “cries for help” saying “some students find life on our campus profoundly difficult.” He promised relief for their “great distress.”

A generation of coddling by university officials has helped create these perishable snowflakes which exist in great numbers at the nation’s progressive universities.

There are a few floating around even at Christian colleges. Dr. Everett Piper, President of Oklahoma Wesleyan University reports a student coming forward after a university chapel service complaining he felt “victimized” by the sermon because it was on I Corinthians 13, the love chapter. This student said the sermon made him feel bad for not showing love and therefore the speaker was wrong for causing him and his peers such discomfort.

Dr. Piper, unlike the presidents at Yale, Missou, and elsewhere is definitely not apologizing! In an open message to the offended student on the university’s blog, he wrote, “That feeling of discomfort you have after listening to a sermon is called a conscience.”

Dr. Piper explained that the goal in many sermons is to elicit confession of sin, not to coddle students in their selfishness. He stated that for students who want to “be enabled rather than confronted,” there are many universities across the land where that can happen, “but Oklahoma Wesleyan isn’t one of them.” He offered some strong advice including these words:

“We don’t believe that you have been victimized every time you feel guilty and we don’t issue ‘trigger warnings’ before alter calls.”

He ended the post with a statement to students of Oklahoma Wesleyan that’s obvious, but too often downplayed in the oversensitive environment at universities everywhere. He wrote:  “This is a place where you will quickly learn that you need to grow up. This is not day care. This is a university!”

It would be nice if more university presidents would treat students with such love.