Alec Ward

I wish I could say that 53 were some significant number in my life — my home address, my lucky number, something like that — because that would be one hell of a lede.

2016 will not, I suspect, go down in the history books as one of humanity’s great success stories.

Writers like me get a lot of mileage out of poking fun at college students making big deals out of fairly minor ethical transgressions. Doing that with integrity, however, requires retaining the ability to tell the difference. The delivery of racialized threats to a number of black freshmen was no minor transgression.

In the question of how it should regard unaffiliated single-sex social clubs, Penn seems poised to “do a Harvard.” It shouldn’t. As anyone who has been following higher-education news for the past six months probably knows, the years-long conflict between Harvard College and the handful of independent single-sex social clubs to which many of its students belong reached a denouement last spring.

Now, we fight. Or at least, we prepare to. All decent people will hope and pray that Trump’s campaign promises to destroy the constitutional order, to violate the civil liberties of millions of Americans, to commit war crimes and retaliate against his political opponents were the kind of empty bluster we know he is capable of.

It’s got every element of the perfect 21st-century pop morality fable: a sympathetic band of marginalized heros; a sinister coalition of law enforcement and Big Oil colluding to oppress them; elements of racial and environmental activism topped off with a secret code that you — yes, you!

It was a rough year for the American social fabric. The existing political order was under deep strain.

Early last week, the University of Florida circulated a memo to its undergraduates, cautioning them not to wear offensive costumes on Halloween. The issuance of such statements has become something of an October tradition on many campuses, and kerfuffle of some kind nearly always attends.

This Monday, for the second time in less than a month, Brother Aden and his ragtag cadre of anti-gay “preachers” took up residence at the Button for a few hours to spew the noxious garbage that they confuse with theology. Don’t worry.

There’s a particular reaction that folks like me — who worry openly about the presence and spread of “trigger warnings” on American campuses — hear a lot.