They’re not asking. They’re demanding. And before you ask the obvious, “or what?”, their demands are being met, at least to some extent.

Students are protesting for official recognition of their identities, whether racial, ethnic, sexual, religious, first-generation, low-income or immigrant.

The new word for this is “intersectionalism.” A student can be black, female, gay, immigrant, pastafarian and the first in her family to go to college. All the boxes are checked.

Campuses that have prided themselves on increased diversity in admissions are now wrestling with students who want more control over the institutions they attend, including a say in hiring (even of visiting professors), housing (a theme house at the University of California, Santa Cruz, must be painted in Pan-African colors) and curriculum (among nearly 50 demands presented to the University of Chicago: the creation of courses on the Islamic golden age, sequences on Caribbean and Southeast Asian civilizations, and a required diversity/inclusion course).

What do you know about the Ethiopian empires? If you’re of a certain age, probably nothing. If you’re young, however, this was part of your high school world-history curriculum. Because why should history be limited to Europe?

When freshmen step onto campus, they aren’t necessarily assuming the mascot and identity of their future alma mater, said Dwaine Plaza, a sociology professor at Oregon State University. “O.S.U. is not what students are now embracing”; instead they are “seeing themselves as important being Jamaican-American, as being Indian-American.”

For some, this would seem to be of dubious value. When frosh go to an OSU football game, should they root for their school or the Indian-American players, regardless of team?

Dr. Plaza, who taught a course last winter called “African-American Resistance in the Era of Donald Trump,” sees that embrace as recognition that “no matter how hard they try — yes, they can go to Costco and buy a house in your neighborhood — they still feel like a perennial outsider even if they wear a baseball cap and eat a hot dog.” The new tone, he said, reflects “the consciousness raising that has taken place on campuses — it is O.K. to be different.”

Of course it’s okay to be different. And it’s okay to be part of something bigger than yourself, too. But if you don’t want to feel “like a perennial outsider,” then why make yourself a perennial outsider?

Dr. Oxtoby sees a generation of socially connected students for whom the personal becomes political: “If something happens to someone I know, I want to show my solidarity.” On campus, he said, students demand that leaders “appreciate me for all the dimensions of my identity.”

It’s flowery phrases like “appreciate me for all the dimensions of my identity” that appeal most easily to the budding intellectuals. No, it means nothing, but it sounds good, and isn’t that really good enough?

But the “show my solidarity” harkens back to the old days of ethnic street gangs, where the Jets and the Sharks held rumbles over turf. Except, of course, showing solidarity today means a Facebook like instead of a switchblade, because they can’t be bothered to put their phone down.

Last academic year he met with 10 student groups. “Each wanted a center, a room, staff.” One student came twice. “In one meeting they wanted to talk about their identity as a queer student and in another their identity as a Latino student.”

This is where the concept of intersectionalism falls down the rabbit hole. Can each identity group demand campus hegemony for its own identity? Sure, they can, but the cost is prohibitive and the result is exclusionary.

More to the point, if each group demands, say, that ten percent of the profs are of their required identity,* ten groups covers 100%. What of the 11th group? What of the unmarginalized majority, who are taught that their job is to shut up and do as the marginalized tell them? The numbers don’t work. Even if you want to cede control to the unduly passionate, it won’t work.

Mr. Gu, a sophomore, said each incoming class “is getting progressively more radical.” He recalled a panel discussion during orientation at which a student said, “We should burn down Pomona” because “elite colleges represented white supremacist patriarchy.” Mr. Gu found the idea absurd. “You are going to a $60,000-a-year school and you’re either there because your parents are wealthy or the school has given you a full ride and you are saying it’s a dangerous environment for you,” he said. “There is a strange sense of entitlement.”

It can be hard to separate intense advocacy from intolerance, particularly for students who, Dr. Plaza said, arrive “empowered to feel they should have their say.”

On the contrary, it’s not hard to separate at all, except to frightened, conflicted and deluded academics who realize that if they tell students the obvious, that every group can’t rule the roost, create their own special safe space and revise the physics curriculum to be all about them. The math isn’t hard. The numbers don’t add up. If you choose to attend Ohio State, you get to be a Buckeye, you are entitled to an education in whatever major you decide, you get to cheer for the team at football games.

If that’s not what you want, then why are you there?

How equipped are colleges and faculty to address all these student demands?

Some faculty members “want to hold onto curriculum and don’t want to do the work.” But, Dr. Plaza said, “we have to step up our game. Our campus is changing.”

Your campus is changing. For the worse. If you cared as much for students as you pretend, you would sit them down, explain to them that the college can’t reinvent itself to please the special interests of every identity group, and use your time teaching whatever it is these students came to learn.

Your job isn’t to pander to competing street gangs, all vying for control of the campus at the expense of the others’ gangs. There is no possible outcome of such a paradigm that doesn’t end in a rumble over some white girl wearing hoop earrings. It has nothing to do with “appreciating the dimensions of your identity,” but basic math. There are only so many demands to go around, but there is one place where they all intersect.

*Of course, one solution involves only hiring profs who check at least ten marginalized boxes, but they can be hard to find and, when the next wave of subatomic identitiarianism sweeps in, it will be hard to get rid of them because of tenure to replace them with profs who reflect tomorrow’s most vulnerable victim.