With their movie "Horse Feathers" in 1932 the Marx Brothers made fun of higher education. Groucho played a college president who scolded his resentful faculty: "This college is a failure. The trouble is we're neglecting football for education."

This week life imitated art as the president and chancellor of the University of Missouri resigned for having lost the confidence of the university football team, which refused to play unless the president was dismissed. The team thereby joined a protest by students from minority groups who felt that the university administration had not responded enough to offensive graffiti and fliers that occasionally appear on campus. The protesters even demanded that the university president acknowledge his "white male privilege" before resigning, harassed and shoved journalists reporting about the controversy, and designated what they called a "no-media safe space," as if the university weren't a public institution.

Maybe the university ISN'T a public institution anymore, since, rather than undertake a serious review of its administration and the incidents about which students had taken offense, it quickly capitulated, apparently to protect revenue from the football team. Now there will be all sorts of new "diversity" stuff to placate the protesting students — at least as long as the football team demands it too.

Of course the relationship between colleges and the "student athletes" who make money for them is fairly questioned. But if public colleges will not answer first to the public, they're not worth their tax expense — unless, of course, their main objective is just as Groucho suggested: not education but football.

Even so, the grievances of the students in Missouri were profound compared to the grievances expressed this week by students at Yale University in New Haven. Hundreds of them protested because of a disputed complaint that a nonwhite student had been excluded from a fraternity party and because a residence hall administrator questioned an appeal for students not to wear "culturally insensitive" Halloween costumes.

A few days earlier other protesting Yale students disrupted a campus forum on free speech. They are against free speech, as, it seems, most American university students are against it — at least when their own political views seem to be prevailing.

Some Yale students, recognizing that the specifics of their grievances might strike outsiders as trivial, complained of a broader racial and cultural oppression at Yale. While they offered no evidence of this, Yale President Peter Salovey humored them anyway, promising to strive for "greater inclusion, healing, mutual respect, and understanding" — all the politically correct boilerplate.

Of course far from being oppressed, students at Missouri and Yale are junior members of the country's elite, enjoying huge advantages over their peers. But they may be learning less from their studies than from the cowardice of college administrators, few of whom dare to talk back to all this contrived indignation.

At least Missouri saved football. It's not much but it is better than the political correctness, intellectual regimentation, and sense of entitlement that so much of higher education produces instead of teaching kids just to GROW UP.

Poor graduation rate

 So what if the men's basketball team at the University of Connecticut has a lousy graduation rate, just 20 percent, lowest among the country's top 25 college basketball teams?

Few players on those teams attend college to earn a degree. Instead they are seeking entrance to the minor leagues of professional basketball in pursuit of a basketball career, and many of them leave college short of graduation not because of failure but because of success — a lucrative contract with a big-league team.

In recent years the UConn men's basketball team probably has made many more multimillionaires than all other departments at the university combined.