Big-time colleges so rarely have attacks of momentary sanity these days that it’s highly newsworthy when one really does exercise good judgment.

Forgive, then, a few exuberant hosannas for Cornell University for rejecting a collegiate snowflake demand for mandatory “trigger warnings.” The school’s Student Assembly voted unanimously — doesn’t anyone think for herself anymore? — to “require instructors who present graphic traumatic content that may trigger the onset of symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) to provide advance notice to students and refrain from penalizing students who opt out of exposure to such content.”

The resolution so often repeats the phrase “triggering content” that it reads like a self-parody. The student solons want a warning on a class syllabus for any content that includes a long list of disturbing subjects, including “domestic violence, self-harm, suicide.” Does that mean there should be a “trigger warning” for Hamlet (suicide)? How about A Streetcar Named Desire (domestic violence)? Do students really need mandatory written warnings before being confronted with such topics? Are their psyches so delicate that they must be allowed to “opt-out of exposure to triggering content?”

Seriously?

Here’s the good news: Unlike so many other college administrations that cower before such foolishness, Cornell stood tall. It rejected the students’ demands.

“ Academic freedom , which is a fundamental principle in higher education, establishes the right of faculty members to determine what they teach in their classrooms and how they teach it,” an administration email explained, “provided that they behave in a manner consistent with professional ethics and competence.” Professors of course can choose to warn students, but a formal requirement that they do so could “have a chilling effect on faculty, who would naturally fear censure lest they bring a discussion spontaneously into new and challenging territory, or fail to accurately anticipate students’ reaction to a topic or idea.”

There once was a time when such good sense would be expected from college administrations. Now it is a rarity.

So here’s a tip of the hat to Cornell’s administration for doing the rare right thing. The students might be worried about being triggered, but they are the ones who are going off half-cocked .