There's a happy ending to be had in the sorry story of Steve Sviggum's theorizing about the enrollment decline at the University of Minnesota's Morris campus. That would be a sudden surge in enrollment by students who actually seek the environment that the regent questioned as possibly "too diverse."
No doubt there are other possible happy endings, as well as a few silver linings. One of them is that a meeting of the University of Minnesota's Board of Regents has gotten the public's attention. Now that the clip of a regents meeting has gone viral, more people know there is a Board of Regents. And that it holds meetings. And that the university has a campus in a place called Morris.
Another silver lining is that a student named Dylan Young, president of the Morris Campus Student Association, has achieved what must be the ambition of any student leader: to have engaged publicly in a battle of wits with a regent (or trustee, dean, president or provost) and emerged on top. Young wrote an open letter to Sviggum that was everything Sviggum's original remarks were not: reasonable, levelheaded and cogent.
