These Times

I received a text Thursday morning from our youngest son, Ryan, a 19-year-old almost junior at the University of Washington in Seattle.

His text included a photograph of the Quad, a pastoral rectangle of stone and flora on the campus that’s hemmed in by Gothic academic buildings. The rectangle is filled with cherry trees, finely tended grass, and it’s segmented by several brick walkways, all precisely considered and precisely placed. You feel smarter just walking through it.

But the photograph our son sent Thursday showed scores of tents and canopied structures on those lawns, insulting, I’m s...