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Wednesday, September 13, 2017

Where Are The Adults at Yale?

Where Are The Adults at Yale?

"Baraka’s assertions of Israeli complicity in the Sept. 11 attacks, which he reiterated after reading the poem with vague citations to Arab newspapers, were met with applause and a standing ovation from the assembled Yale students. When he noticed my skeptical expression from the back of the room, he diagnosed me as suffering from “constipation of the face” and being in need of “a brain enema,” to the uproarious laughter of my classmates.

I did not insist upon the establishment of a “safe space” to sulk in my humiliation. Instead, I retired to my dorm and wrote about the event, in my capacity as a budding columnist for the Yale Daily News. Baraka’s speech, and, more importantly, the rapturous response, I wrote, “was one of the most disturbing events in my entire life.” That this trial by fire was provoked not by the white skinheads or Muslim anti-Zionists I had naively assumed were the only purveyors of anti-Semitic hatred, but by blacks, who, because of our shared history of oppression, I had been brought up to believe, were supposed to be my allies, made it all the more distressing.

Today, I look back on the entire incident as a formative event in my evolution from teenager to adult. My experience at Yale of confronting painful ideas, emotionally vexing situations, and learning how to cope with them, informs my opinion about the events roiling the campus today... Free speech is all well and good, apparently, when the speaker is a bigoted lunatic from a “marginalized” group; not so good when the person in question is a Yale professor advocating for her students’ freedom to choose a Halloween costume...

A child developmental psychologist, Christakis shared her concern that a proscription on “objectionably ‘appropriative’ ” Halloween dress was not far removed from preventing “a blonde-haired child’s wanting to be Mulan for a day.”...

A student can be seen screaming at Christakis, calling him “disgusting” and asking, “Who the fuck hired you?” To the whoops and cheers of her peers, she decries his failure to create a “safe space” for students and informs him that he “should not sleep at night.”

With her bravura performance of both “victim and victor,” alternately denunciatory and self-pitying, this young woman is a sterling example of the “cry bully,” what British writer Julie Burchill classifies as one who “always explains to the point of demanding that one agrees with them and always complains to the point of insisting that one is persecuting them.” The following day, one of Christakis’ students published an op-ed in the Yale Herald stating that his stewardship of the college made her “feel that my home is being threatened” because he had failed to apologize for his wife’s email that “marginalized many students of color.”...

When I hear, in 2015, students complain about feeling “marginalized” at Yale due to their racial, ethnic, religious, sexual, or any other identity—and, on top of this, demanding institutional retribution against those who mildly express viewpoints they don’t agree with and sartorial injunctions on pagan bacchanal holiday garb—I can’t help but think of James Meredith. Meredith was the first black student to attend the segregated University of Mississippi and had to do so under the cover of heavily armed federal marshals...

50 years ago, young people manned barricades demanding the overthrow of the system; their watchword was personal freedom. Now they desperately appeal to the system, insisting that it exercise even more control over their already hyper-managed lives...

What we’re witnessing at Yale are the abysmal consequences of a decades-long inculcation of identity politics and grievance mongering, which hold that the relative virtue of an argument is directly proportional to the professed “marginalization” of its proponent, and it is destroying the ideal of a liberal education. Like the students who thought it entirely unobjectionable to hail an unhinged anti-Semite, (indeed, their joy at his defiance seemed inspired by an element of épater la bourgeoisie, precisely because he was unsettling their Jewish classmates), apparently no adults in these young peoples’ lives have informed them that shouting in the face of a professor, hurling imprecations at those who question their assumptions, and then demanding refuge from the tempestuous waves of intellectual discourse in the form of a “safe space” where their fatuous notions go unchallenged, is behavior befitting a toddler, not an undergraduate at one of America’s premier institutions of higher learning. No less a figure than President Barack Obama has assailed this rising tide of intolerance on university campuses, saying that “anybody who comes to speak to you and you disagree with, you should have an argument with them, but you shouldn’t silence them by saying you can’t come because I’m too sensitive to hear what you have to say.”

Unfortunately, Yale appears to be letting the inmates take over the asylum"
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