JAMES KIRCHICK: Growing Up At Yale: Where Are The Adults?
Upon reading about last week’s controversy, I originally felt irritation with the protesting students, as I did with my own classmates who cheered Baraka. And as was the case a dozen years ago, my initial anger eventually gave way to disappointment, as I realized that these students have not been equipped with the intellectual or emotional tools required for operating in a disputatious society. That inability to confront ideas one doesn’t like and engage respectfully with those whom one disagrees with is not only a failure on the part of the individual students, but of the society that has produced them.
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.”
