A Harvard student's open letter to the delicate flowers of the Ivy League

FILE -- Harvard University (AP)

So your candidate lost. You have a right to be upset, frustrated and angry, but you also have an obligation to be respectful to others and to the will of the American people. Intellectual hypocrisy continues every day on campuses, where opinions that are not the norm are vilified or silenced.

Imagine if you treated people of different races as you treat people with different opinions. There would be a tremendous outcry! But somehow it is fine to discriminate against those with different views.

Did it ever occur to you that this may be why people voted for Trump? That it might not have been the “racist proclivities” of the U.S. or the “dangerous nationalism” of the people, but that it was people who tell them not to think or speak the way they do.

Trump won, and he did not overthrow the government or kill people to silence them. He won in the standard fashion — by getting 270 votes in the Electoral College. As I said, you have a right to be upset, but what we have on our hands now is an embarrassment.

Trump won, and he did not overthrow the government or kill people to silence them. He won in the standard fashion — by getting 270 votes in the Electoral College. You have a right to be upset, but what we have on our hands now is an embarrassment.

And this does not lie only with the undergrads. Universities themselves are making all types of provisions to coddle those who have been traumatized by the will of the American people. At Harvard, the Introduction to Economics midterm was made optional; the reason provided was that the election results came in too late, but we all know it would have been mandatory if Clinton had won by 10 p.m., as expected.

If the faculty was worried about students not getting enough sleep the night before the exam, then the exam should have been scheduled for a different day. A note to all faculty: If you did not know, the election is the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. It was going to go one way or the other, and the undergrads and faculty should have known that and been prepared for any result. The Economics Department’s decision to make the midterm optional has set a bad precedent. Does this mean that whenever someone is upset, he/she can opt out of taking an exam? If you had the hubris to make the midterm the day after the election, you should have stuck with your decision instead of capitulating to the hysteria of the Flowers.

Now protests are popping up at universities all over America. What are you protesting … the democratic process? There are calls for changing the Electoral College to just a popular vote; but, of course, if Hillary had won the electoral vote and lost the popular vote, you would be reprimanding those who called it an injustice.

Protesting the orderly transfer of power under the Constitution is a head-scratcher. Maybe we can trace the root cause of this behavior to our generation receiving participation trophies while growing up. Many never learned how to be graceful in defeat, much less handle it.

The election is over. The people have made their decision. You can be angry, happy or indifferent, but above all you can be polite. have some etiquette. There is a difference between political correctness and politeness etiquette, and unfortunately one has taken over universities while the other has been lost.

It's time to put away your Play-Doh (yes, some universities are actually handing out Play-Doh to help students cope), move on and do what it takes to better our nation, because we are all on this ship together.