I'm a bit past college age these days but in the mid/late 90's when I was at university, there were plenty of "causes" that students took up (myself included) to various degrees and in retrospect, a lot of it came down to the newly-found freedom of adulthood combined with the idealism of youth and the lack of wider awareness that comes with a bit more exposure to the world at large.
I think it's a good thing that young people are able to see some of the real injustice in the world that some of us older folks have learned to accept (or at least take for granted) and have the drive to want to improve things. At the same time, cultural attitudes don't change through force or under threat. Additionally, there's still a bit of that youthful naivete where just because something is a huge deal for you, you may not realize the bigger issues at play or know which "battles" to choose yet.
I'm sure my attitudes will keep evolving over time but just between my college years and 20 years later, I think about how some things seemed so important and unfair back then but I've since found that there are usually bigger issues or at least more subtle and effective ways to address the problems you recognize in ways other than shouting matches or mob-mentality public shaming.
[0] http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/14/living-by-the-sword/
But I mean cancer mostly in the same way Scott Alexander used it - uncontrolled growth by "all means necessary", not an insult. Cancer happens when some cells eschew cooperation and start promoting their interests at the cost to everyone else. As it grows in size it grows in complexity, and given that it's made of components who tend to disregard cooperation, Scott argues that instead of self-organizing it tends to develop a cancer of its own, which slows the overall growth. Similarly, if the group gains voice by using every dirty trick in the book and then some because it's most effective, they should not be surprised that - as their movement grows in size - they end up fighting each other at some point.
I hear that phrase more on the left lately than right. Which says a lot ...
And do you think that's a random sampling of everyone who believes in similar causes? From where I sit, "the butthurt minority" are such a self-selecting group, and their rage is so completely independent of their actual cause, that they don't constitute evidence for or against any particular idea, cause, or proposition.
After all, the "Yale problem" refers mainly to a short confrontation where an immature student yelled at an administrator over something stupid. That's never been exactly unheard of at any college, the only difference is that it got captured on video and spread around the country.
Also white-trash Yankee hillbillies are rare enough at these sorts of places that I might as well give up any pretenses of online anonymity if I said specifically which one it was.
[1] http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2012...
[2] https://www.quora.com/Why-do-people-who-went-to-Harvard-some...
There might have been about a hundred people on campus that were actively interested in protesting things (what things?, all the things). For the most part, everybody else is there to go to class, learn, do their own thing, and drink too much beer on the weekends/Wednesdays/Mondays, etc. This vocal, seemingly-permanently-aggrieved small subset of the population seemed to stir up almost all of the controversy, and seemed hell-bent on ruining everybody else's good time at every opportunity. Increasingly, they seem to be succeeding; I'm glad I graduated when I did.