.........................Donald Trump’s substantial victory, when most progressives expected a Hillary Clinton landslide, came as a shock to many. That shock seems to have been multiplied in academe, where few people seem to know any Trump supporters — or, at least, any Trump supporters who’ll admit to it.

The response to the shock has been to turn campuses into kindergarten. The University of Michigan Law School announced a ”post-election self-care” event with “food" and "play,” including “coloring sheets, play dough (sic), positive card-making, Legos and bubbles with your fellow law students.” (Embarrassed by the attention, UM Law scrubbed the announcement from its website, perhaps concerned that people would wonder whether its graduates would require Legos and bubbles in the event of stressful litigation.)

Stanford emailed its students and faculty that psychological counseling was available for those experiencing “uncertainty, anger, anxiety and/or fear” following the election. So did the University of Michigan’s Flint campus.

Meanwhile, even the Ivy League wasn’t immune, with the University of Pennsylvania (Trump’s alma mater) creating a post-election safe space with puppies and coloring books:

    Student Daniel Tancredi reported that the people who attended were “fearful” about the results of the election.

    “For the most part, students just hung out and ate snacks and made small talk,” Tancredi told "The College Fix." “Of course, that was in addition to coloring and playing with the animals.”

Trumping the liberal elite: Kirsten Powers

At Cornell, The Fix reported, students held a "cry in."

    As the event took place, students — roughly 20 or so, according to The Cornell Daily Sun’s video — wrote their reactions and emotions on poster boards with colored markers, or with chalk on the ground. A chilly day on the Ithaca campus, at one point the demonstrators huddled together as what appeared to be a barista brought them warm drinks. Several adults, most likely professors, stood around the group. The event appeared to take on the atmosphere of a funeral wake.

Yale had a ”group scream.”

At Tufts, the university offered arts and crafts, while the University of Kansas reminded students that there were plenty of “therapy dogs” available.  At other schools, exams were canceled and professors expressed their sympathy to traumatized students.

It’s easy to mock this as juvenile silliness — because, well, it is juvenile silliness of the sort documented in Frank Furedi’s What's Happened To The University? But that’s not all it is. It’s also exactly what these schools purport to abhor:  an effort to marginalize and silence part of the university community.