I dont think a republican hetero cis-white male of baby boomer age should be writing an op ed about cultural inclusion issues in colleges.....white men have lost the right to comment on anything at this point.
44
@Adam Ben-david
Excellent point. We can make this a much less racist, less sexist world - by doing exactly as you write. And we don't need to even do any interviews in this process. We can just LOOK at people - and if they have white skin - and are male - we just ban them from speaking...
193
Ah for those halcyon college days when we said what was on our minds and challenged others to convince us otherwise.
221
@Harry
Why not the halcyon days when the Ivies were all male so there was never any need to be challenged by the views of women?
57
Isn’t it fascinating that a white male NYT’s op-ed writer, Bret Stephens, quoting, maybe subconsciously, having fallen through the crack of a Freudian slip of the tongue, only other white men as authorities-- Mencken, de Tocqueville and Kronman—says American intelligence is assaulted because students (and other American citizens) insist on honoring, even respecting the feelings of others?
Think about this. Think on how Mr. Stephens’ “Times’”piece would have been invigorated if he’d asked a Black, a woman, Toni Morrison, along with Dean Kronman, to help him write it.
Toni Morrison, grinning a smoky toothy grin only a Baby Suggs could produce, would tell Kronman and Stephens—"You can come in and you can sit, and you can tell me what you think, and I’m glad you are here, but you should know that this house isn’t built for you or by you.”
Now, we’d begin to hear a good talk about feelings and inclusion and the “shibboleths of diversity.” In Baby Suggs, a Yale dean and a New York Times writer, would have come face to face with the white man’s curse that, of this moment, knows no cure.
39
Bret, I always remark how you NYT folk stash the essence of your column in the last or next-to-last paragraph…
To wit:
“…Would an untenured professor have the guts to say what he does…
Long before driving a NYC taxi or delivering a pizza anywhere in the US was a gig job…
So it was, teaching comparative French literature at elite American universities…
Especially so – the small-group sections that garner A’s from the US newsies and world reporters that rank them every year or so…
Look at every war around us today – it’s the adjunct and expendable and indebted rising up against the tenured and hallowed and endowed…
Si Valley director-levels passed over for Si Valley VP-level jobs by Si Valley founders…
Wall Street VP-levels passed over for Wall Street Managing Director-level jobs by Wall Street partners…
Massager-levels passed over for recruiter-level jobs by the over-massaged…
Everybody wants in, till they find out they’re not wanted…
Then, they want out…
And they want vengeance – and a book deal…
In no particular order…
5
What is the meaning of ' race', 'diversity' and ' inclusion'?
When the Space Shuttles Challenger and Columbia were destroyed there was a black African American astronaut who died on both vehicles.
Where and when else in America would that likely have been or has been true for blacks?
There is only one biological DNA genetic evolutionary fit human race species that began in Africa 300, 000 years ago.
What we call race aka color is an evolutionary fit pigmented response to varying levels of solar radiation at different altitudes and latitudes primarily related to producing Vitamin D and protecting genes from damaging mutations in ecologically isolated human populations over time and space.
What we call race is an evil malign socioeconomic political educational demographic historical white supremacist European American Judeo-Christian myth meant to legally and morally justify humanity denying black African American enslavement and equality defying separate and unequal black African American Jim Crow. Being black was defined as having one drop aka 1/32nd of black blood ancestry.
While race as a biological scientific fact is not real, racism in America is a historical fact. Dreply rooted in white European American Judeo-Christian demographic educational political socioeconomic majority control.
There are no Aryan nor Jewish not black nor white nor African nor American Asian nor European nor 'races'. But there is the possibility and reality of racism by a majority.
15
To quote the Zeus of modern conservatism:"There you go again". Here are some of the "excellent" few that are, like the former dean of Yale, to the left of Mr. Stephens. H.L. Mencken , cited by Stephens was an excellent" journalist who was also a racist and admirer of Nazi's. We also have the "excellent" party supported by Mr. Stephens until it reached its apotheosis in Mr. Trump. Excellent racists, starting in the sixties with Nixon and his "southern strategy"and followed to the T by Regan and the Bushes. Excellent intellectuals, including a Nobel prize winner, who "demonstrate that blacks are less intellectually capable than whites. Nicholas Wade, a former NYT science writer and Charles Murray have claimed that blacks have "demonstrably" lower IQ's than whites. All of these avatars of reason just happen to be white men of European decent. Mirable dictu. Perhaps Mr. Stephens is unfamiliar with Newtons third law: "For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction."
18
"Conservatives" are whiners.
Calhoun represented a "concurrent majority" of racist, bigoted traitors. In Calhoun's day, Mr. Stephens, people like us were excluded from Yale.
H.L. Menken was an anti-Semite who could not look past our genealogy. Referencing him to make your point, Mr. Stephens, is to undermine your own existence.
23
Mr Stephens, to claim that Kronman speaks for our entire university system is akin to claiming that Sharpton speaks for all people of color.
NYET! (As Moscow Mitch might say)
12
While the author raises some legitimate points about the narrow-mindedness of the Left, he undercuts his argument by refusing to engage the people he criticizes as serious or legitimate. He deploys a variety of rightwing topes to mock his subjects, without even considering the possible merits of their perspective. This is not an informed opinion piece. It is a journalistic travesty that easily could have been copied and pasted from Fox News. Can the Times find credible conservative columnists who have more to offer than mere anti-“snowflake” tirades, and who know how to address counter-arguments in their writing?
24
It simply stuns me that a columnist for The New York Times who purports to be concerned about the glorification of the mediocre over the excellent finds its most dangerous advocates among the current students of Yale.
May we remind the oblivious right-wing columnist that his party’s last two Presidents are:
First, an arrogant, shiftless drunk who would have been drummed out of any state college if his Daddy hadn’t been President, who dodged the draft and got himself elected Governor only after scamming poor taxpayers into subsidizing his baseball team; and
Second, a vile, bigoted bully who also dodged the draft and would have wound up as a third-rate mobster if his Klan-loving Daddy hadn’t left him $400 million.
Both attended Ivy League schools.
Are Ivy League schools worse now? Do they celebrate mediocrity now more than when they propelled these utterly undeserving scions of unimaginable privilege into the White House in all mockery of excellence?
Truly, shame in this great nation is dead.
58
While the author's observations may not cover the spectrum, we "ancient" progressives grow weary of the "victim" card being played out in the "Republic of Eugene" [Oregon]. University of Oregon's Planning, Public Policy and Management (3PM) Department teaches drivel and spews out students (even from the "Master's" program) that have bumper-sticker understanding of complex societal issues. Now the result is a bunch of naïve "YIMBY's" being duped by national real estate commodity investment groups to convince the Democratic legislators to do away entirely with single-family neighborhoods. The resulting bill (HB 2001) ignores the fact that this will most harm neighborhoods of color and poor neighborhoods where households have scraped together enough for a (usually) small and distressed single-family home as a crucial action in their climb up the economic ladder.
Ahh, but when you claim to battle for "victims", you can absolve yourself of your "white guilt" no matter that your actions really cost you nothing and do no good.
15
Bret Stephens cites "the renaming of Calhoun (as in, John C.) College" as an example of progressive political correctness gone too far.
John C. Calhoun led the pro-slavery faction in the Senate, opposing both total abolitionism and attempts such as the Wilmot Proviso to limit the expansion of slavery into the western territories. Calhoun was firmly convinced that slavery was the key to the success of the American dream. Whereas other Southern politicians had excused slavery as a "necessary evil," in a famous speech on the Senate floor on February 6, 1837, Calhoun asserted that slavery was a "positive good." Along with the college's name, the Yale building's dining hall sported stained glass windows depicting black slaves toiling in the fields.
I suspect that Bret Stephens might be more sympathetic of the college's name change if it had been named Adolph Eichmann College or Joseph Goebbels College with stained glass windows depicting Jews laboring in concentration camps during World War II.
26
Who, if not those in power, establishes the “standards” of any epoch? If I belong to a group that for the most ignoble reasons were not only excluded from establishing an epoch’s standard but was indeed victimized by them by what dint of self-abnegating insanity would I be amenable to judging someone by those standards!
The National Socialist established the standards of pre-war Germany! Did the Nuremberg Tribunal judge the Nazis by those standards? I don’t think so!
8
Just today there is a story of race riots reflecting a straight line from slavery to the South Side of Chicago. In the 1920 whites there felt threatened by blacks fleeing Jim Crow, murdered blacks in mobs joined by police, and burned blacks' houses down. Chicago then passed laws condemning blacks to certain neighborhoods and certain poverty which persists today. A straight line from slavery to the South Side of Chicago, but conservatives are contemptuous of African-American Studies in college, rage against affirmative action, and declare racism a thing of the past. While use of the word "master" is ambiguous and perhaps not necessarily racist, the conservative demand that racism not be studied and not be remedied reflects a deep ignorance of modern America and continued suffering from slavery. Conservatives only amplify the damage when they refuse to face the facts. Colleges are to be admired for shining some light on our dark history in which whites committed heinous crime long past the days of slavery that we did not learn in school. The truth of race relations is critical to understanding how to solve our problems today. But the snowflakes on the right just can't handle the truth.
13
We are a country that is forsaking our environment, with the possible result in our extinction. We routinely kill 10,000 of our fellow Americans via our lax restrictions on guns. Our bridges collapse under the daily commute of people heading to what our country virtues over everything, work.
I have a hard time getting upset over Jimmy at college figuring out the world, engaging in debates, deciding on what to read, who to follow, which career to pursue. If Jimmy wants to tell Alex Jones & Milo to go bark at some other corner (these morons need to be included in the "students are out of their minds" essays), they have done their simple homework. Are students wrong sometimes, yep, do good people get railroaded sometimes, yep (it's no Central Park 5 Brett, a former Yale professor can get another job, and walk in & out of his house as many times a day as he wants.) That's life!
Worrying about our "college" situation seems a bit absurd given the more acute serious problems we have at our doorstep.
12
The socialists are winning on campus and in politics. Achievements by whites are devalued as white privilege. Jobs, awards, judgeships, etc. MUST to given to certain ethnic and racial groups not because of talent but because of perceived injustices.
Our country is going down the toilet.
45
This is the regressive left. These souls are not liberals they are authoritarians.
They are mostly present in the gender studies, etc departments.
There will always be some lunatics on the edges of society.
36
Another boring attempt at stirring up a moral panic from a conservative losing his grip on cultural hegemony.
Where’s Bret Stephens’ article on the terrible affront to excellence that buying your way into college presents?
Expel all the wealthy dumb-dumbs before you have a leg to stand on.
34
Spoken like a true blue-blooded well-off White Male. Afraid of the competition, or just afraid ? This is hyperbole and/or male menopause. Chill out, get a Dog.
19
Right wingers like Bret who excuse fascist and racist white supremacists, use their pulpit to denounce any progress. Hey Bret how about some OP-Ed's about the deep ignorance and hate of the American White population in general? You never speak about how most white Americans love the fascist American President...all the while throwing water at progress and anti-fascism.
Also ain't like the 60's proved anything. Nothing ever changed or ever changes because white people love fascists and white supremacy so most the world needs to live underground and not totally involved with society.
10
You overlook a fundamental reason the aristocracy of excellence you so honor has failed the country and its citizens. The average guy knows in his gut that the elite have served themselves, promoting each other endlessly, and never, that is not ever, acknowledging mistakes. Yale and Harvard over the past several decades have provided leaders in all fields who have been little more than arrogant self promoters. Of course there are people of superior intellect, integrity and good will associated with these places but not as many as we would hope for or need . And a deferential "Master" means nothing if undeserved. Many among the masses are far more genuine and sound of reason than some we hold up as the cultural and intellectual elite. Truth seeking and real leadership require humility.
200
What’s really putting a lot of people over the edge is the affectation of persecution by extreme, media darling “conservatives” who say obnoxious things for sport but can’t think their way out of a paper bag. When objections are made that they may be given a platform at an institution of higher learning, they then say they are owed said platform lest somebody be censoring unpopular ideas.
It’s social and intellectual blackmail right up there with twisting arms to put “under God” in the pledge to prove we weren’t communists.
You want a thoughtful conservative economist or social scientist, go for it. Milo? Ann Coulter? The next white rights guy to come along? Nope sorry.
22
Excellence is still defined by too many people in academia and beyond as being a cisgender financially stable white male whose never experienced any significant type of trauma— whether child abuse, rape, etc. it’s so easy to mock others for being snowflakes while decrying their need from what those forementioned don’t understand or need. Safe places from people like them who are so full of hubris, unable to understand any other viewpoint and so grounded on their privilege while rejecting the idea they have privilege.
14
Just to clarify, very few campus protests in the late 1960’s were about race, as Mr. Stephens appears to think. I was at the University of Chicago from ‘68-‘73 when several intense protests took place. They were about leftist professors being denied tenure, the murder of students at Kent State by the Ohio National Guard, and the Vietnam War in general. Cornell DID have an anti-racist protest lead by Black students, but that was the exception and far from the rule.
15
This is the first generation of students who are living under the leadership of a president who openly stokes racial animus and leads his supporters in chants of “ send them back”.
And he decries these students’ reluctance to hear those chants on their own campuses?
I for one applaud them. I wouldn’t want my children to hear those chants and witness hate either.
10
Someone should tell these students of the 211th amendment.
1
Brett,
Contrast the article: “beyond responsibility to the general masses of men, and hence superior to both their degraded longings and their no less degraded aversions. It’s a revolt of the mediocre many against the excellent few. And it is being undertaken for the sake of a radical egalitarianism in which all are included, all are equal, all are special” with words that founded our nation: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights—-that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the people to alter or to abolish it”. Weren’t our founding fathers practicing some form of radical egalitarianism? Aren’t these students practicing a form of that spirit? Why the false choice of diversity and inclusion versus excellence? Surely our legal scholars can change the word “master” yet preserve excellence? Does keeping speakers exposing hate and separation from higher education reduce excellence? Or is it just a modern version of people with pigment in their skin are dumb, anti excellence (dare I say rapist and murderers from Mexico)? American exceptionalism should result in us ruling the world but you can’t do it by clinging to a past where only one group’s version of excellence matters. Growth, expansion, leadership, security comes from strength and strength begins in knowing who you are. That is what makes America great again.
7
I enjoyed this article!
Yale has emptied my daughter of all the enthousiasme I, among others, taught her to profess to high education ...
I have to say that she was studying in the Yale Art department which has the permanent self blessing of belonging to the extreme left (color, gender, and all) no matter what, no matter when, no matter how!...
And this is what she came out with in her student backpack:
I quote your lines :
"Before an idea can be evaluated on its intrinsic merits, it must first be considered in light of its political ramifications. Before a speaker can be invited to campus for the potential interest of what he might have to say, he must first pass the test of inoffensiveness. Before a student can think and talk for himself, he must first announce and represent his purported identity. Before a historical figure can be judged by the standards of his time, he must first be judged by the standards of our time."
This seems to be every day life now days and not only in the major American Universities, it happens everywhere, newspapers, most TV programs, even in regular social conversations. Words that use to be extremely precise describing ideas or facts, are changed for others that would have been risible in any common sense society...
Let's say like Stephen Fry whose kind of leftish thoughts I adhere to, that we are at this point because of the incommensurable failure of the left !
23
"In sports, this rebalancing was effected the other way, with the strong coming down to meet the weak. In horse racing, for example, since it wasn’t possible to make slower horses faster, the equalization would be carried out by adding a weights under the saddle of the faster horse to bring its skill level down to that of the others."
Snopes, Etymology of Handicap
5
This would be a lot more useful if directed toward the real world and not the artificial bubble of the elite private university. Unfortunately many who comprise this artificial world of elite academia never really have to enter the real world.
7
University campuses have become a caricature of what was supposed to be a haven for free speech and tolerance. The loudest voices run around accusing even the most liberal and decent campus authorities of racism, sexism, or other heinous acts - deserved or not. Liberal profs live in a state of fear and terror: when will someone inaccurately label them as racist, sexist, etc - simply by the misuse of a word?
Thank you for articulating this problem - I would bet most NYT readers have no real idea of this phenomenon.
36
Let's please make a clear distinction between private colleges pandering to their ever so delicate students, places like Yale and Evergreen, and public universities where the students have a lot more important things to do like get educated and get a job without incurring too much debt. The real world where most of us live.
What's that ridiculous term, "intersectionality"? Keep pandering to this absurd idea and you may as well shut down because there is literally no end to it and it's PC demands.
Safety?! By the time I was 10 I had realized the world wasn't a safe place and probably never will be. Want a safe place? Avoid being born.
43
@Lou Good: We all get infused with whatever we are born into.
1
Thank you Bret Stephens. Yesterday, there were many comments submitted in response to an article about Officer Pantaleo and Eric Garner. Commenters were explaining their thoughts on both sides (should the Officer be fired or not) in rational, decent posts. No matter how you "feel" about something, a liberal arts education should leave you prepared to explain your thinking in a rational way, to engage with others who disagree, and to occasionally change your mind if someone presents ideas with more validity than your own. Yet at progressive schools all over NYC, if a child voiced disagreement with the idea that Officer Pantaleo should be fired, what would result would not be a conversation. It would be other students' outraged crying, and some sort of disciplinary consequence. Freedom of ideas, speech, disagreement - all essential to a functioning and excellent democracy, and all being wiped out by the progressive far left.
28
@RE: Some ideas are inevitably discarded when decisions are reached.
1
Great column, Bret. Keep up the awesome work.
21
College profs, some of the most risk-adverse and insulated people around, hence their chosen employment which assures protection and isolation. Do the desert island test: stuck on an island and needing stuff to survive. Give me a plumber and a farmer and a carpenter any day. Once the house is built and dinner's over we can sit by the fire and read.
13
Just another column by a Right white male wailing and rending his clothes at the passing of his world of comfort and privilege, lacking any intrusion by challenging ideas or unfamiliar faces. Stephens, and the aging white male commenters also bemoaning the loss of their halcyon days, long to return to the time when women, people of color and the (openly) homosexual were furniture and wallpaper, to be sat on or glanced at only when it suited them. In their college years they didn't need protecting from triggering difference, they were the protected, and decades ago the only, class on campus. No invitations to speak on campus were ever extended to anyone who would seriously challenge their thinking, therefore no need to rescind. And those of us who remember the sixties and early seventies know how the uninvited challenging thinkers were met on campuses: with truncheons and tear gas.
It speaks volumes about Right white males that these supposed “real men” of letters can only argue their reactionary case by constructing and then bravely battling straw men slapped together from a limited bale of stretched-thin, worn caricatures.
14
I sometimes bitterly disagree with Bret Stephens, but the issues he raises here are in so many ways spread way beyond the college culture described here. This question of "inclusion" is everywhere, even in small towns in the interior of the country. The question of course entails what it is we are excluding and including. No sane person is able to include every value system, every feeling, every orientation into his or her own personality. That is simply delusional.
Do we include racism in our values and behavior? Only at our peril as a country and a culture.
But are we compelled to "include"--meaning to approve--every sexuality, every vagrant peculiarity so offensive to the traditional morality that is in fact common to the three great religions which in other respects exist in some degree of tension or conflict with each other? If so, how can anything common emerge from the enduring causes and issues of conflict that are not, in fact, resolved as among those religions and traditions?
This is the very large elephant in the room which these petty wars emanating from the college cosmos so utterly ignores. The whole thing is so totally disheartening, at least to me.
14
@David A. Lee: 21st Century liberalism comprehensively rejects all claims by anyone to know what any hypothetical deity thinks or does about human affairs, pursuant to "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion". Whatever such a claimant speaks is only their own opinion.
2
See “The Closing of the America Mind,” Allan Bloom, 1987. This process has been going on for a long time.
23
What we fail to realize is that all this political correctness on the part of students often occurs among conservative students seeking to stifle discussion about ideas that make them uncomfortable as well.
I was a member of the graduate faculty of education at a major public institution in my state prior to retirement. My assignment was teaching doctoral coursework in curriculum and instruction mostly to in-service K-12 teachers and directing their dissertations. While most students were open-minded, there was always a conservative, evangelical minority that sought to stifle any critique of religion or traditional social values. They were sitting in classes titled “the Advanced Study of Diversity & the Curriculum” and opposing church-state separation, evolution, and any discussion of abortion or homosexuality in the schools. (BTW, Title 43 of the SC Code of Regs. forbids the teaching of homosexuality as a legitimate “lifestyle,” or of birth control or abortion.)
Conservative evangelicals are aware they cannot openly teach their religion at public expense in the schools, so their strategy has been to silence their opposition. GSA’s, for instance, are very uncommon in southern high schools.
Young people worried about being offended by ideas they don’t like need to realize that the sword of censorship wielded to protect people’s feelings cuts both ways. Conservatives have taken notice and educators in conservative states often self-censor for fear of giving offense.
13
One could change every reference to "students" and "campuses" in this cookie-cutter anti-college rant to "Republicans" and "the Trump-McConnell political axis" and it would actually say something truthful and worthwhile. Or to "Red States" and "the Republican base." Which is to say that Bret has once again decided to wag his finger at progressives and young people rather than look his own party and his own plutocracy in the face and tell it to stop destroying American exceptionalism in the name of lies, lucre and smug ignorance.
14
So I guess Yale will no longer be awarding Masters degrees.
15
I would invite Mr. Stephens and Mr. Kronman to our community college in Tacoma, Washington, where students last year organized discussions on the Armenian genocide, the lack of student voice in college decision-making, and the school to prison pipeline, advocated for student representation on our board of trustees, invited during the month of Ramadan representatives from various faith groups to share their views, started non-profit organizations, worked full time and even ran their own small businesses. Many of our students are the first in their families to attend college; many are immigrants and refugees; many experience racism, homophobia, homelessness and don't have enough to eat. Last year, these students were accepted to Yale, Cornell, MIT and the University of Washington.
Romanticizing a past that privileges professors and an "excellent few" is unacceptable and immoral. It is our responsibility to do the hard work to examine with clear eyes our system of higher education that, nationally, graduates fewer than half of the students who enroll. We have to do better.
We are accountable to all students and their families and our communities. It is the job of a college to offer an excellent, relevant and affordable education that encourages all students to think deeply and critically, work with others, and focus on the greater good, and that prepares them to earn a good and interesting living. Until we can say we've achieved that, students should demand better.
15
As many have already posted, rigorous argument and debate, in which academic "standards" are cherished, happen routinely at the most "progressive" colleges and universities. I know first hand that Oberlin, even in their Comparative American Studies department (associated with identity politics and the like), demands a great deal of their students. And there is not a university in this country that instantiates the kind of excellence that Mr. Stephens seems to champion than UC Berkeley. So we need a much more nuanced discussion than that offered by Mr. Stephens, who ends up being more sloppy in his thinking than the colleges and universities he criticizes.
11
Much of America no longer believes that knowing their county's history, literature and philosophy has value. It is an anthem and a flag steeped in myth and superstition. just like Harvey's rest of the story it is allegorical "truth" based on a embellishment of a particularly white European American interpretation of good and evil, right and wrong and of merit and without merit.
I am not American so if I might use a non American analogy and use the words of Canadian theologian Tom Harpur and say if there is any history in the bible it is only by accident. Twenty five hundred years later my people are still looking for evidence that myth and legend has historical truth.
The legend of the six blind Brahmins and the elephant comes closest understanding the tragedy of trying to create a simple narrative out of the utmost complexity. It all depends whether you are touching the tail, the trunk, the body, the leg, the ear, or tusk.
Speaking of Yale and liberal and conservative I would be remiss if I didn't talk about William F Buckley Jr who wrote God and Man at Yale at about the same time the founder of the American school of Philosophy John Dewey died. Dewey was a pragmatist and Buckley was firmly grounded in the clouds.
While liberal and conservative are not opposites Buckley was an extreme conservative and an extreme liberal with a vocabulary that allowed him to give us today's Freedom Caucus of liberal extremists who believe themselves conservatives.
Good politics is pragmatic.
4
"Would an untenured professor have the guts to say what he does?" You mean there are tenured professors? I think the stat is something like 70% of classes these days are taught by adjunct professors, instructors and grad students...not even full-time "tenure-line" professors with benefits, let alone those who have tenure. In the real world of higher ed in the year 2019 Bret, as many Commenters have mentioned, students don't have time to think about rocking the boat in any way...they are just hoping to get the credits/classes they need, their degree, and then a job that pays enough to live and pay-down their student debt.
6
Diverse ideas can be presented without being offensive. What is the purpose of promoting hate speech? Conservatives like Stephens spend a lot of time bemoaning the fact that their views are unpopular. If you hold racist views such as our current president should you be given a platform to espouse them? How about promoting violence against those who disagree with conservatives? How about supporting the idea that the United States should split into two nations? That there should no longer be separation of church and state in America? That abortion should be a federal crime subject to the death penalty? How about the view that guns should be totally unregulated? That the U.S. should turn away all refugees? That the U.S. should support Israel in expelling all Palestinians and taking over all of their land? Some form of these ideas come out of conservative orthodoxy and are outside of conventional thinking. But these ideas can lead to violence and the breakup of the United States as we knew it. For proof of such just look at the impact that Trump has had with the platform given him.
Forgive me for not being sympathetic to supporting all ideas regardless of the potential harm they may cause to our way of life, a way of life that is based upon democracy and the freedom of the individual from the tyranny of the minority.
3
Classism masquerading as meritocracy. Dangerous territory for the New York Times.
2
Free speech is the cornerstone of our republic. Any University that discourages the freedom to speak, no matter how abhorrent the speaker and her/his ideas, is helping to undermine the underpinnings of our democracy.
The Universities are where we expect our children to debate everything that’s wrong with our society, the world, and how we their parents have managed to screw things up so badly. That is the age when the young are expected to solve all the world’s problems if only we, their parents would just listen.
Too soon those students will be out of that sequestered bubble and forced to make a living, raise a family, and try to meld their University held ideals with the entrenched policies that they will find everywhere they go in everything they do.
The Chancellor, The Dean, the Professors, and the rest of the staff, owe it to the students they are supposed to serve to make certain that all sides of an issue are heard, especially if it hurts some students or groups to hear it.
Those students have an obligation to listen and confront, without violence, those whose ideas and ideals they despise. Let them explain why, and let the rightness of their arguments carry the day.
8
BS rails against 'mediocre" students for their activism against various systems of oppression because this is visible even though they have little power to change the structures of inequality.
Will he at some point bring those 'masters' to account who manage and profit from the structures of power, but the reach of whose power allows them pull invisible strings to get what they want; they don't have protest.
3
Anytime a higher Institution of Learning gives into uninviting a speaker because students or faculty object they are not fulfilling their mission of Education. That mission includes exposure to ideas from all sources, teaching Critical Thinking skills and preparing students for a life of vigorous observations and decision making.
Universities and Colleges are falling down in their duties to the students who attend.
They need to step up to the bar and open students minds to many different opinions and experiences
13
People are a cooperative species. We‘re a bunch of snowflakes, and don’t need violence to be happy. You sound hysterical, saying “liberal professors are being bullied, denounced, demoted, threatened, sued and sometimes even assaulted by radical students.” They’re just overloaded with information and have no time for self-reflection. And the ones you see on social media are just the loudest. Try counting all of the students studying with their heads down. Try getting off Twitter. Young people are actually pretty nice.
7
I'm surprised that Bret hasn't been kicked out of the club of NYT opinion writers. The ideas he has expressed must certainly take them feel unsafe.
13
Best Stephens, did you really write “a revolt of mediocre many against the excellent few”? Really?
2
@Louise
Oops, Bret Stephens
This is some seriously elitist stuff Bret.
6
After reading a number of very knowledgeable comments by Times readers of Stephens’s op-Ed who are “in the trenches”, experienced college educators, it appears that a compelling case can be made that his broad condemnation of present day students is nothing but selectively “cherry picking” some opinions to fit a certain ideological perspective. Disingenuous at best, Fake News at worst.
8
The right indulges in campus political analysis in order to appear serious and intellectual, and to cover for the emptiness and selfishness of their usual drivel
5
"Above all, it deprives the young of the training for independent mindedness that schools like Yale are supposed to provide."
The operative phrase is "schools like Yale."
I attend an urban commuter university. I can assure you that most students are just trying to earn a useful degree while incurring the least amount of student debt.
The future masters at elite schools such as Yale have luxury of indulging their whims because they know that their posh degree will open unlock doors and power networks that those of us at state schools don't even know exist.
13
The bow tie, patriarchal WASP dispensation was not all bad.
4
Shorter Bret Stephens: Privileged wealthy white guy complains about poor and brown people being allowed into his privileged wealthy white guy institution.
6
This is a commentary on the jest of the book The Coddling of America, an incredibly important book for all lefties. Of course the meritocracy of our country was dealt a blow with Affirmative Action laws which was aimed at hiring practices. Don't hire for talent or skill but for diversity. This is the soul of the progressive leftists. Hopefully some will wake up.
11
This is pathetic. The dean of Yale’s law school knows little about the landscape of higher education in the US, at least from direct experience. I've taught for forty-plus years at a multi-campus public university with more than 250,000 students, and life on our campuses is nothing like the scenarios discussed here.
If you want to talk about what’s going on at a relative handful of elite institutions, go right ahead. But please don’t make the mistake of thinking that they’re even remotely representative of the whole of higher ed. Most college students these days are so concerned about finding jobs and about simply surviving that they're oblivious to the issues you’re combing through here.
357
@GP
Seems like the old aristocrats are feuding with the children of the NEW aristocrats, and just plain folks are in another universe.
28
@GP
Perhaps to a Yale professor a professor of students who are studying simply to find jobs is not among the elite.
11
@GP And that's why those "institutions of higher learning" are really not colleges or universities - they are diploma mills to check a box that helps you get a job.
It disgusts me that "college for all" is a thing. I went to interview some high school students for my Ivy League alma mater, and the guidance counselor told me that her principal wants "100% of their students to go on to college". That's probably why though a few of their students interviewed well, they didn't get into my alma mater. How can you create excellence when you define success by the average?
If you have more than 250,000 students at your college, you aren't a college, you are a factory.
25
"Would an untenured professor have the guts to say what he does? The answer to the question underscores the urgency of his warning."
"The answer" is assumed here but is not sufficiently substantiated in this article. Could have done without the last sentence...it overly colors an otherwise provocative piece.
What is said about academia must be said of the press which has, with some notable exceptions like Mr. Stephens, traded high standards for the cheapest common denominator. While funding for corrupt humanities and social science programs dries up in years to come, so will respect for and trust in the press. And rightly so.
8
“In endless pronouncements of tiresome sweetness, the faculty and administrators of America’s colleges and universities today insist on the overriding importance of creating a culture of inclusion on campus,” Kronman writes.”
Well, since inclusion hasn’t been a predominant feature of higher learning, starting with the admissions process in the more elite schools and those futilely striving for that designation, maybe more of it would contribute to the learning experience. This was not so much a problem until the resistance to a certain kind of extremist.
The exclusion of opposing ideas is central to places like Liberty University, a school that gained prominence with the W. Bush administration.
Mr. Stephens, you seem out of your depth here, stick to politics.
3
Can I use this article header in my forthcoming book?
It's titled:
"Clickbait Headlines: Theory and Practical Applications"
Thanks, Bret
3
Huzzah!
2
A superb column which will be deemed as elitist and racist by the chattering crowd.
12
Ah yes, another "campus speech is why fascists have taken over the government" column. Nice work, Master Stephens. Drinks on the patio at 4.
5
The Left have become insufferable totalitarians....precisely the thing that they feign to rage against.
13
Didn’t we get a rather anti-excellence op ed from Mr. Brooks this week? Being nice is more important than achievement: discuss.
4
Thank you.
2
WOW! Tucker Carlson could have written this.
3
@ognandent. ...and that's a pretty high compliment.
6
Who is John Galt?
3
Thanks.
1
Yale's namesake, Elihu Yale, was a "master" (president) of the East India Company station at Madras where he was a major slave trader as well as embezzler. He embezzled a huge fortune from the Company and made a small fortune as a slaver. He hanged a 10-year old native boy for stealing a pony.
6
too bad old Eli is dead, because with a resume like that he'd make a swell nominee for a position in the Trump Admimistration. plus, white and Protestant! (how tall was Eli, I wonder?) veritas.
5
I am loath to agree with Bret Stephens, but as someone involved in leftist circles, the anti-intellectualism seems to be rising. Better to be stupid and mediocre if you’re “woke” than to achieve excellence but have some ideas that might offend your less-talented peers. Puke!
19
@RJR: Isn't Trump the biggest role-model for anti-intellectuals in the US?
3
It boggles the mind that today's conservatives spend their time whining about small corners of the progressive sphere, given what their ilk has foisted upon our nation.
Even more baffling is why the NYT gives them oxygen.
14
I too am a Yale law grad. I take exception to anyone who chooses to stick up for a college named for one of America’s leading developers of racist thinking. How disgusting that People like Bret and evidently kronman don’t let holocaust deniers on campus, and restrict the number of antisemites but are gung ho for peddling the racism of the odious Charles Murray and Calhoun. Thank god Yale is better than that.
President Jackson famously responded to Calhoun’s nullification threats by promising to hang any nullifier who committed violence against the United States, and later said he regretted not hanging Calhoun. Perhaps Bret can endow a chair for such a man at Falwell’s school and fill it with Roy Moore. And kronman?
6
Anyone else notice that the examples Bret cites are the same cases he’s been harping about for the past few years?
Anyone else notice that Bret doesn’t talk to people involved in the academy for these columns?
As a graduate student and college instructor, I’ve been waiting for Bret’s “Maoist” boogeymen to come take me away for quite some time now. I guess I’ll keep waiting.
Seems to me that Bret wants a handful of anecdotes to constitute rigorous evidence for his argument.
5
I salute you Mr. Stephens for writing this piece. While I love the Times because of the broad spectrum of issues they delve in...I never expected to ever see a document that supports anything but extreme left politics. Lets hope that this nation does not get challenged by other hostile nations while we squabble about what so many of us in fly over America consider trivial and naive.
8
Thanks to the current liberal cult that worships weakness and victimhood - and constantly attacks hard-work and success - the students of today are fragile little snowflakes unable to handle any real frustrations or challenges.
Having traveled throughout the world, it’s embarrassing to see how many of our students spend their days waiting to be offended and whining.
10
@John: We all take inspiration from the sadomasochist in chief, in our different ways.
1
Humorless, intolerant, pushy, little martyrs. We were made to include them and now they've ruined the place. Ah, well, there's always UConn.
8
It amuses me when people imply diversity automatically means settling for academic inferiority. The underlying assumption seems to be that if you are not white and male, you must be inferior.
So if you become editor of the Harvard Law Review and you’re black, you’re obviously the beneficiary of affirmative action, rather than deserving the job on your merits as a scholar.
Meanwhile, all those Trump appoints are the very definition of merit, education and intelligence. /s
11
You start with this, following standard New York Times columnist inability to distinguish "race" from "racism".
“Now, as then, race is a central issue.”
The concept of “race” as used in America is an issue (See Thomas Chatterton Williams) but the issue as represented by our all-reason racist is racism, not “race”.
You quickly leave “race” and move on to excellence” as the stated basis for the rest of the column. But you then seem to leave excellence to address political correctness as suggested by:
“Before a speaker can be invited to campus for the potential interest of what he might have to say, he must first pass the test of inoffensiveness.”
Wherever that is true, as at Middlebury College in Vermont, it must be dealt with.
I do not see that case as an assault on excellence, but I do see it as a deeply troubling assault on belief in freedom to present ideas. I was once a tenured professor but write now from the highly protected position of being emeritus and even more important being 87 years old.
At that age I may write and think whatever I like because doing so will not affect my chances of retaining or getting an academic position.
I share with you and Kronman a firm commitment to believing that every university should do its best to have faculty members displaying intellectual excellence in their fields. Diversity is a virtue, but diversity of intellect comes first, other forms should follow.
Only-NeverInSweden.blogspoy.com
4
Once in a while Mr. Stephens comes up with an article that justifies my formerly (pre-NYT) high opinion of his craft ... this is one.
Speaking of once in a while, Mr. Stephens, it matters who you associate with on a daily basis and what discourse you thus engage in - and perhaps you should consider that NYT is just one of those things for you that you deride - a safe space. Worth a thought.
10:20 Sat am
5
This just ensures the further polarization of our society- I will not permit my children to attend these Cultural Marxist facilities- they will only attend colleges that pass political muster- perhaps I will not permit them to attend college at all. Soon, a reckoning will come and we shall see who survives...
Time to rename the Master’s degree to something more palatable?
2
The colossal disservice to young people today is fantasy that there are any "safe places" in the world. In fact the world they will be entering post college is anything but safe. The single greatest lesson to be learned in college is how to think critically. To question everything, above all to perpetually question your own beliefs and assumptions. Today, on certain campuses, this is being flushed away. I'm reminded of the scenes in "The Last Emperor" where the Maoist mobs held sway, brandishing their little red books. It seems that the new imperative on campus is that to get along you'd better go along. This is fundamentally antithetical to higher education.
8
More welcomed and necessary thoughts on the diversity delusion and it's destructive attack on excellence.
6
About 45% of the incoming class at UC Berkeley this year are Asian heritage. The number of African-Americans admitted is tiny. You can scream and yell all you want about that. There is no racial bias in admissions to our top UC's.
But more important is how average kids are doing. I just don't understand why the Times won't do any reporting on the cause of the abysmal scores of African-American students in New York City public schools. 1.1 million students, equal resources for all of them, extra resources if you're in a poor school. Poor, English-learning Asian heritage students far outperform Caucasian-American students. African-American students are left in the dust.
Why is this happening? It isn't funding, it isn't racism, although that is what the social justice warriors always claim.
http://www.nysed.gov/news/2018/state-education-department-releases-spring-2018-grades-3-8-ela-math-assessment-results
I'm not worried about what's happening or not happening at Yale, or Stanford, or the top UC's. Why are Black kids doing so very, very poorly in New York schools?
Investigate, then report.
8
Ah, we long for the days of yore, so full of excellence. When Saint Ronnie could get on the 'phone with Nixon and call African diplomats monkeys, and the Best and the Brightest could lie us into a decade of war and expend 58,000 soldiers in Viet Nam - mostly middle and lower class kids who couldn't get college draft deferments or maybe a diagnosis bone spurs (they weren't excellent enough to do that so they had to go off to die). And who can forget the excellence of those who got filthy rich manufacturing the 2008 financial crises, without a one of them going to jail?
Oh, if only the white patriarchy could still steam along, unquestioned. Life would be so much more excellent.
8
This high-minded, theoretical argument might better hold water if Stephens could point to an example where a student group “no-platforming” a speaker actually did deprive the wider campus of a chance to engage with worthwhile speakers and ideas; largely, those excluded have been racist, sexist trolls like Milo Yiannopoulos, cut-rate provocateurs like Charlie Kirk, nazi-saluting Neanderthals like Richard Spencer or the eminence gris of race hustling dressed up in the robes of academia, Charles Murray. This sort of know-nothing penny-ante villainy has no meaningful place on a college campus, and given that there’s no protected right to free speech on private college campuses, universities are not obligated to give these louts room and time to speak. Stephens is right to note that there is no unpopular war to which this activism is attached; students are seeking merely to define the terms of the discourse of everyday life. Given that the “grownups” went ahead and used their votes to put in place a man who’s emboldened the use of language that disrespects, menaces, victimizes and in some cases incites actual violence against whole classes of people, I’d say these students are doing yeoman’s work in pushing back against them. The Klan may have a right to march in Skokie, but none of us are obligated to attend their parade, nor must we invite them into our homes, churches, schools and universities to give them fair hearing.
6
This sentence in Mr. Stephens' column is telling, "Before a student can think and talk for himself, he must first announce and represent his purported identity."
We know a little bit about how the brain works, how what we perceive is a mere shadow of the real world, how our thoughts, our opinions are sculpted not only through our own lives but through our social intercourse with everyone around us and in turn theirs with all of whom they interact. Given all this, I would suggest students, and everyone else for that matter, stop playing the identity hall-of-mirrors game of who you are, and focus instead on trying to figure out what you are. It's a task of infinite mysteries that if pursued relentlessly will cause you to perceive anew and re-think what exactly is your identity and that in this quantum like cloud of being there is more than one reality and that yours is no more sacrosanct as the other's.
1
I blame it on the NRA and bad parenting. No professors in their right mind would dare "hurt" a student's feeling as they could get shot by either the students (literally) or the parents (figuratively).
Can you say over simplified opinion. Bret, look at more Universities and get back to us with a real article
3
This entire narrative exists solely because Mr. Stephens and other high-profile columnists have been paid by the Koch Brothers to spread it.
This isn't exaggeration. Look at the weak, weak examples Mr. Stephens lists in his second paragraph. There's the one example from 2019, and then trusty ol' Middlebury and Evergreen from years ago. Then a case involving sexual assault that is not in any way clearly related to the issue at hand, and something about Camille Paglia getting criticized on social media and absolutely nothing else happening to her.
This is weak. It's frankly alarming that columnists can trot out the same column over and over again, using the same handful of examples, hoping that sheer repetition can convince people a problem exists.
Let me say it again as clearly as I can: Mr. Stephens, and almost everyone else who writes about this in high-profile spaces, has been paid by the Koch Brothers to do so. It's made up. It's two old men's self-serving disinformation campaign, and it's getting tiresome.
5
Even if the Libs ever succeeded in beating all us Americans into thought and language suppression acceptable to them, the rest of the world is not capitulating. Russia, China, Japan, Saudi Arabia, India, Brazil will Burt is as the bullies push our little wimps around and America will become a nostalgic thought of past greatness. People will ask, what went wrong? Answer: Liberals.
2
This is an electrifying column...and the year is 1987 and it’s about “The Closing of the American Mind” by Allan Bloom. Amazing how, after that great prophet predicted a leftist apocalypse, we got GHW Bush, Bill Clinton (who barked at Queen Latifa about this stuff), and W Bush...Stephens, get off the fainting couch.
2
Could we moving from an Arrogance of Excellence to an Arrogance of Ignorance?Just wondering
1
Master Stephens is right to be worried about his status. The conservative twaddle of using a few incidents of debatable significance is a tired cliche of nasty snots like his hero Mencken. It's an easy living sounding shocked at the young and being misty-eyed about the never never land of yore.
3
I wonder, though, whether on some level columnist Stephens does not pander to the Democratic Left in his unequivocal condemnation of President Trump. Surely the most pro-Israel voice on the NYT, such as I believe Stephens is, has some approval of the President's greater support for Israel than all other American presidents since President Truman. But readers would never know that from his columns. This lack of balance, which I think I detect correctly, reflects subservience to the views of his biased readership such as Alexis de Tocqueville alluded to.
Glad the NYT posted this article. The more the white male arrogance is exposed in public, the more obvious it is to the rest of us how irrelevant they have become. The Academic world is NOT the real world. Stop charging insane tuitions and let’s get back to teaching for the sake of learning.
1
Dead on correct.
4
Liberals and socialists are ruining this country and this world. It's easy for college professors to be liberal because they have zero interaction with the real world. This in turn is perpetuating the mediocrity of college students.
5
What proof or evidence does Mr. Kronman have for his assertion? I would say it's more logical to interpret it as, not "a revolt of the mediocre many against the excellent few. " but a revolt of the excellent few against a moronic president who appoints equally moronic assistants. I worked for an idiot supervisor for a year until my company wised up and fired him, so I can understand the feeling..
The author paints a broad brush stroke when it comes to diversity . Having been a Director of Diversity and inclusion at a community college ,i can state that those who do this work make of point of sending the message that everyone does not think the same . Diversity is about understanding and respecting the differences . More over, the least valuable conversation, is one where everyone has the same opinion . Those who do this work recognize that difference is precisely what you want . This is how you get innovation . We do not advocate for safe spaces. Can it get uncomfortable ? Yes but that how we learn. What i see too often is those who do not favor diversity, demonizing the whole concept as way of not dealing with some very real issues. They seek to remain comfortable and in a bubble . If Diversity works best it challenges the comfortable places and in the end it benefits all. Thats is my definition of excellence .
3
"Before a speaker can be invited to campus for the potential interest of what he might have to say, he must first pass the test of inoffensiveness"
That is only true if you are centrist or right wing; if you are espousing leftist values you are allowed to be as offensive as you want.
8
Too little too late. The fact that people are only realizing this now is sad. they created a monster and now I realize that the monster is turning against them.
3
I think the objection to "master" is wrong. Yale didn't lead the way there -- it followed Princeton and other schools.
But Pierson College, which is one of the fourteen residential colleges at Yale, did have an area the students called the "slave quarters" when I was an undergrad there. This was of course a joke response to the fact that the master's residence was not far away. But you can see that the term was always open to jokes that might be hurtful.
As for Calhoun? He's probably among the ten worst political figures in American history. I was one of many alumni who asked for the name change, and I am very glad that Yale acceded to our desires.
1
Mr. Stephens, I detect a bit of casuistry in your commentary. What sort of truth-seeking do you envision for blatant anti-semitism and swastika displays? Should this be welcomed on campuses? Is this the sort of thing that shouldn't be considered in light of its political ramifications, but, rather, for its intrinsic merits?
I certainly hope not ...
2
Even for an opinion piece, this is just bad writing. He supports his view with statements like "what it really means," and "but it's true,"...because....? He doesn't need any in-depth analysis or historical context to prove his point; it's true because he "feels" it to be.
4
Yup the bullies have taken over. Three cheers for mediocrity. George Orwell would have a lot of material from this campus world Free speech or new speak or do not speak until checked by the new piranhas of probity. Barry
3
‘Training for independent mindedness’? What a bunch of self-congratulatory hooey. That never has been the mission of Yale or any other Ivy League college. These stodgy institutions, with their billions in investments, legacy admissions and cloistered campuses exist to perpetuate an established social order, not to resist it. They may have opened their doors just a crack, to allow the ‘scholarship kids’ to rub shoulders with the offspring of the connected and well-heeled, but limousine liberalism doth not a revolution make.
If you wanna think independently, you don’t need to ace the SAT, pad your resumé of ‘extracurricular activities,’ ingratiate yourself with the admissions committee and cobble together $75,000 a year in tuition, room and board for the privilege of doing so.
For that matter, the very notion of ‘training for independent mindedness’ is akin to ‘training for spontaneity’ - each is a contradiction in terms. You wanna think independently? Stuff a few belongings in a knapsack, stick out your thumb, and see the world for a while.
6
If you wanted to portray Kronman as 'bracing,' you shouldn't have quoted Mencken. Just another prof saying 'emboldened.'
1
To all the gleefully indignant commenters - No one is arguing against diversity and inclusion. The point is that students are using the valid goals of diversity and inclusion as some kind of God-given right not be offended.
And anyone who dares to question whether one should be offended, for example, by the term "Master's degree", or a Halloween costume, is shamed as an out of touch privileged racist. That's the issue.
14
Bret didn’t have a idea for a column so he dragged this right wing talking point out.
Bret your true audience can only understand ideas that can be printed on a bumper sticker.
Who gets to define what is "excellence"? Seems to me like it's still mostly straight white men.
Straight white men seem to get very offended when other kinds of people express that their feelings are hurt. But say something that hurts the feelings of straight white men and they will howl louder than anyone. Worse, they still have the power to shut down anyone who does so.
2
I don't know about the rest of you, but I find the thin veneer of intellectualism Bret slaps onto worn-out Conservative arguments to be... pathetic. As a child of privilege, Bret is so far out of touch with real Americans that it's almost comical to hear him crying about how unfair $50,000/year elite academic institutions are.
2
I am so glad to be over 70. I feel distanced for all this nonsense ‘ yes I know over’70 people are generators of this nonsense as well as are the younger people. But for goodness´sake what is wrong with learning ¡ what could possibly be wrong with developing an independent mind, with having a personal opinion based on ¨true facts¨. Bah humbug.
1
Our nation is led by a government of recycled failures, grifters, liars, and frauds, who deny both basic science and obvious facts. Yet the threat to "excellence" in our country comes from a small group of powerless young people and their supposed sensitive feelings. Please. The so-called aristocrats wish to be free of criticism by the rest of us since they think they are superior, and Mr. Stevens apparently thinks we dumb enough to buy this dreck.
4
Did you see that ?!
No, really, did you see it?
A conservative pundit, deeply, decidedly, savagely conservative, saying The Sixties were good, man. Them hippies had integrity. They were fighting bravely against The Man, man, who would take their very lives, for nothing as it turns out.
Frame that paragraph, my fellows, and display it proudly.
Of course Bret uses the occasion to chastise today's flighty Ivy League snowflakes.
For some reason he goes after poor Yale. Which kind of makes sense, as the heroes of The Crimson are far more his type.
At the Pinnacle of Harvard achievement, these days (outside Trumpian politics of course) are sages of McKinsey. A gaggle of intellects and greedy maws that serially soiled themselves in public for a decade or two, pandering to big bucks murderers, plunderers, threatening anti-democratic autocrats, liars, and (their particular specialty) thieves.
An inspiration to rival Proud Boys in conservative lore.
McKinseys are Bret's kind of Americans: rich, educated, self-loving to fault, convinced no one and nothing else is worthy a legislator's time of day.
Oh God...lets go back to The Sixties. Bret loved them so.
1
The need to silence someone else's speech is a sign of intellectual weakness. Listening to dumb ideas opens many opportunities to indulge in wry humor.
6
Would an an untenured professor write like Professor Kronman? Ha! No way, unless maybe he taught at Trump U. Nevertheless, I am a liberal who believes Kronman is spot on. Why? Well, here’s an example: I have played out the unstated role of mean white Southern overseer to SOME—by no means all—black students who play the unstated role of po’ black plantation slaves. I, the professor, am the oppressor. They are the victims. I oppress them because I insist on high-quality work for high-quality grades. They, on the other hand, feel they deserve the highest accolades for being black and oppressed. They don’t have to come to class or do the work. If I insist, I get cold stares. Inevitably these students will skewer me on the stupid student evaluations of instruction. This scenario, played out too many times in my experience, is insane. I applaud Kronman for skewering diversity and inclusion, the root causes of the insanity in higher education today.
9
Radical egalitarianism can’t make everyone smart, but it sure does make everyone stupid.
Socialist economics can’t make everyone rich, but it sure can make everyone poor. That is, except for the super elites in Cuba, Venezuela,
North Korea.
Most of all, the people you write of pose as “weak”, yet use their weakness as a form of huge aggression to silence and destroy others.
And yes, those out there who will want to destroy me bc I write this, I challenge you to a duel anyway at high noon in Times Square.
The weapon of choice? Why the ultimate weapon of New York City circa 1956, water balloons!
3
Do college students all of a sudden become intolerant? Did they get transported to Yale from some distant planet that infused them with the inability to tolerate opposing and, perhaps to their thinking, offensive ways of thinking? Is it really any different at Liberty University? Are students there more enlightened? Why does this seem to happen once children become college students? What is happening in the secondary schools? Are their young minds being 'molded' in some way by grammar and secondary schools and then they are unleashed on the college campuses after the process is complete? One of the nice aspects of going to college is to take your adolescent psyche out for a test drive before you hit the real world. And to find out how fast you can drive it before you are pulled over for intolerance. We need to also consider what is happening in the non academic, post secondary part of America. You know....the part of America that finds liberal bastions like Yale offensive and then goes out and elects a p____grabber for president. Separate but equal branches of intolerant thinking you might say.
4
Only two words for the argument: Brett Kavanaugh
1
You lost me at "Anti-Excellence". Lumping Diversity and Inclusion OK--Anti-Excellence? Not OK
Ah, that old "aristocratic spirit!"
Miss you, baby. Ney, master.
The pontificators blathering about the neutering of intellectual discourse, so often seem to be so clueless about what actually is happening on our campuses and on what "intellectual discourse" actually is.
Those demanding political "correctness" (as they define it) in speakers and courses and professors, often seem misguided. But what are they doing? They're engaging in discourse. It is discourse they are initiating because they are impassioned about it. They may be wrong (I think they often are). But those demanding they be silent and, even more so, be silenced, have no idea what the meaning of "intellectual discourse" is. What is happening on our campuses today, is exactly what intellectual discourse is. Warts and all. Sometimes very big warts. But it is people (people from more varied backgrounds than have ever been present at our "elite" campuses) voicing opinions, acting and demanding action on the basis of their opinions.
Are these young men and women in places like Yale, total idiots, that they will be stuck in one opinion and one passion for life? The answer seems pretty obvious. Not much "intellectual discourse" is required to figure it out. You disagree with what some are doing? Voice it. Act on it. Don't demand it be silenced. Your demands of silence are the censorship that those with "aristocratic spirit" have demanded and imposed for too many years, centuries, millennia to count.
3
"What ['master'] really means is a person who embodies achievement, refinement, distinction — masterliness — and whose spirit is fundamentally aristocratic."
Yes Bret, and next week, you'll have to explain the true significance of the divine right of kings. Nowadays the mediocre many do so often misunderstand these finer distinctions.
"Master" can mean two very different things: mastery of a craft or subject of learning, or mastery over people. Ivy League schools have stopped granting their resident advisers titles like "Resident Master" because they're not scholars and therefore the implication is mastery over people. It's pompous, unegalitarian, and creepy - sorry, "fundamentally aristocratic."
The only shibboleths here are the same old exclusionary shibboleths of excellence you rally around, not those of inclusion and diversity. It's the same old tired privileges and status symbols weaponized against intelligent young people discussing ACTUAL problems - employed to silence them and make them the problem. It's classic conservative projection to imagine that it's others who can't handle contrary opinion.
What else is there to think when you approvingly cite Mencken at his snobbish worst, as if feeling "beyond responsibility to the general masses of men" is a mark of superiority rather than a sign of sullen and childish solipsism. I suppose it's nice to find you acknowledging the ultimate source of the sociopathic economic dogmas you regurgitate here twice a week.
2
This is a bit myopic for someone with a Pulitzer. Stephens discards all nuance here to take a stand in favor of the aristocracy and does so by holding up behind someone on the basis of his having been appointed to an Ivy League faculty 40 years ago. Forgive me, but while I hold many academics in high esteem, I take issue with saying he’s the guy to believe just because he’s a Yale Man. As a member of the aristocracy, a holder of three advanced degrees from prominent institutions, but also as a queer person, I’m keenly aware of the degree to which nuance is called for in these situations. I may agree on certain points - or not - but have some self-awareness here. Diversity abs inclusion are not really about feelings, and if you’re being so lazy as to think - much less publish - such an assessment, that’s not a great sign for your relevance. Perhaps pick up the latest study by McKinsey on this subject, or read Jennifer Brown’s new book. Then take a hard look in the mirror and realize just how far you are from being relevant with this article. Shame on you too, NYT, so letting such antiquated thinking mar your storied pages.
2
Sometimes the observations of right wingers are just mind-boggling.
"Master" does not "really" mean what Stephens/Kronman claim. It REALLY means both masterful AND the title bestowed upon owners of permanently indentured servants (slaves).
"Aristocratic spirit?" You mean, Mr. Stephens, we should replace democracy with an aristocracy having no responsibilities with respect to "the degraded longings" and "degraded aversions" of the mediocre masses? Mencken was a racist and supporter of Nazis. We should follow his advice Mr. Stephens?
Campus revolt "for the sake or radical egalitarianism...all are equal, all are special?" You mean we should not all be equal under the law? And you conflate "equal" with "special." That's wrong and you know it. The two words have completely different meanings.
It is right not to judge historical figures by current standards. But it is also right to judge contemporary figures by current standards. Is that OK with you Mr. Stephens?
The only valid point Stephens makes is the wrongness of vetting speakers (no matter how vile, disgusting, pigheaded, racist, bigoted, mendacious they may be). It's antithetical to one of the fundamental tenets of our nation. But suggesting all speakers engage in "the muscular exchange of honest views in the service of seeking truth" is wildly irresponsible. Some are very sick, very evil. Let them speak but defending them as engaging in "honest views" and "seekers of truth" is woefully disingenuous.
3
Once again the word insufferable comes to mind when I read a Stephens opinion screed against common sense and community.
And he enlists the mediocrity of American elite institutions as proof. Thanks.
Yale is the mediocrity of legacy boobs like the Bushes. And the legacy of wars, the legacy of the great man theory, the myth of the greatest nation in the history of the world. Haha!
Conformity regurgitated as new, trickle down for instance.
Get an education Brett!
2
After decades of failure at masking race quotas, "diversity and inclusion" finally took hold as a means of allowing unqualified students -- and later -- doctors, lawyers, consultants, accountants and other to be where they had no qualifications to be.
Yale -- which never bothered to atone for its near-century of anti-Jewish quotas, seems to have atoned by admitted thousands of unqualified students "of color." To what end?
The result is obvious: no one believes those faux credentials, those thousands of "black" oir "ethnic studies" credentials, and so their beneficiaries are angry because no one respects them and worse no one takes them seriously.
Surprise?
4
I also wanted to say that the recent moves to make “hate speech” not allowed on campus is the dumbest, most embarrassing things I have ever heard progressives say/implement, and I identify strongly as one. If free speech doesn’t reign on college campuses, where does it?! College campuses need to be places where someone can get a megaphone, raise a rabble, and call me a “crazy lesbo who is going to h_ll.” If not there, where? Don’t like the message? Raise your own rabble and overpower their message of hate, exclusion/anti-diversity out.
But to limit free speech by students on campus is a horrible idea and likely to someday backfire on us, similar to future consequences from the Reps getting rid of filibuster rules, McConnell not even having a hearing on Obama’s SCOTUS nominee as well as his efforts to block any legislation protecting our elections (at least any that are not voter suppression efforts in disguise ie voter ID, corrupting the US Census, etc.)
4
I think there's a bit of an agenda behind this storyline. Not pointing at anyone (coughdecadesofconservativeattacksoneducationcough) but somebody seems to really have it in for universities.
Since every college campus is awash with radical leftists getting their way in everything, it's hard to see any result but a brainwashed megaclass of ultra-liberal (gosh that L word gives me a dirty shiver) elites (oooh) who look down on the white working man.
Mr. Stephens, you constantly push for open borders in America but you support the militarization of the Israeli border and forced removal of all their African refugees. How do you square this circle?
If diversity is 'inevitable' and mass immigration 'desirable' why keep up the double standard?
2
"his politics, so far as I can tell, are to the left of mine."
I would wager they are also to the left of those of Atilla the Hun. too.
Those who are offended by hearing opposing views must be so because either they, 1) are 100% convinced they are right and that a position to the contrary would be 100% wrong/evil, in which case they are pompous ignorami, or 2) are 100% scared that they are wrong, in which case they are cowards.
3
Those who are offended by hearing opposing views must be so because either they, 1) are 100% convinced they are right and that a position to the contrary would be 0% wrong/evil, in which case they are pompous ignorami, or 2) are 100% scared that they are wrong, in which case they are cowards.
4
I have grown so tired of these simplistic conservative generalizations about American college students as the New Politically Correct Neo-Nazis who lack any excuse for their short tempers since they’re not being drafted.
Mr. Stephens, why don’t you come visit our out-of-the-way college town, Ithaca, NY, which houses both Cornell University and Ithaca College. Walk onto campus. Talk to some of the students who study in the International Labor Relations school at Cornell or the Southeast Asia Program. Or the Vet school, ag school, all the young men and women who study sheep, dogs, cows, and apples. Then head over to IC and saunter into the practice rooms for budding musicians or workshops for theatre professionals.
Then write to me. We’d be happy to give you a nice strong cup of good coffee to speed your trip home.
You like tofu too?
221
@Deborah I think you're on to something; "labor relations," international and environmental studies? These days, "excellence" for conservatives is not knowledge or analysis, it's "Did you build your own business and save on costs, i.e. labor and regulations? Are you a Federalist, a Christian when it's convenient, a states' rights advocate when it's right for us?"
24
@Gustav Aschenbach
Perhaps you are making Stephens' point. In what way are you refuting his point?
I wish you were correct in your assessment, but me thinks you are cherry-picking.
Too much evidence to support Stephens out there. Back in '15 I attended a scary faculty meeting at which we were encouraged to promote the safe spaces routine, complete with finger snapping at anyone with the 'wrong' opinion.
Cut to the "unconscious bias" workshop.
Just because you're not following these events doesn't mean they're not happening.
39
@Gustav Aschenbach, yes, they engage in their own coded identity politics.
4
What we see here is the journalistic power of the anecdote. Scandals are taken as the norm, which transforms the phony "norm" into something that enables the adults to moan. I attended a small, Catholic liberal arts college and a huge state university for graduate work. I have been teaching at a prestigious, private research university for 25 years. So my experiences are probably as reliable as those of Prof Kronman and Mr. Stephens. In my experience, the vast majority of students are hard-working, curious, relatively open-minded, and eager for a debate. They want to improve and become more knowledgeable and intellectually sophisticated. Yes, periodically a small number of students makes a fuss about something. Sometimes they have a point, sometimes they don't; sometimes they are keeping us on our toes morally and sometimes they are just obnoxious. These scandals do not reflect "mediocrity" in higher education. They don't even reflect the norm.
2
So, um, does Yale University no longer confer Master's degrees?
131
Well, both sides are wrong. I can say from my experience as a tenured faculty member that poor students of color are horrendously underserved by their high schools and counsellors. Some of the most brilliant people I know -- and they are absolutely brilliant -- were made to feel mediocre throughout their youth. It's a human tragedy.
But their allies among administrators at universities think the right answer is not to push them and help them achieve their potential, but to push against anyone pushing any students at all. And that's a tragedy too.
3
Mr. Stephens you have done a masterful job of using a one sided example to support your opinion.
I agree that "the everybody gets a trophy" generation of college student may lack a sense of balance about the world. However, Yale and the other elite colleges, where wealthy kids go to listen to people who never got their heads out of a book may not be the best places to gauge what is happening on most college campuses.
For example, are the campuses were Christians go to the learn how to advance the interests of conservative Christianity at the expense of minorities, the poor, immigrants and the LGBTQ+ communities churning with unrest? Are people with different views welcome to speak on christian campus? No and no.
Question? Are the non-wealthy college students at state and community colleges engaging in the revolt you call "...the mediocre many against the excellent few." They are not. The majority of college students work hard to get and education to help them navigate a rigged economy and the systemic injustice faced by majority. The lawlessness of Trump, Barr, Moscow Mitch, Leningrad Lindsey and conservatives in general is obvious to the most causal observer — including students.
Let's not forget that W. packed the courts, the DoJ and the government with graduates from christian colleges. From where this 70+ white guy sits our divided Nation is a strategy for conservatives to ensure christian white men remain in power. Enough said.
5
Further thoughts for those on the christian conservative right who are morally outraged by my comments.
I am looking forward to watching all the demonstrations at christian colleges on the nightly news about the immorality of kids in cages, hungry school kids, prisons packed with non-violent criminals while white collar criminals exploit predatory capitalism supported by conservatives, and on and on.
Where is all the moral outrage from christian colleges about Trump's racist behaviors, mistreatment of children and a lifetime of immoral behavior. Oh wait, I forgot according Mike Pence, Sarah Sanders and Jerry Falwell, to name a few, Trump was sent by god to save the poor abused evangelicals and the rest the Christian right from those who really embrace the Christian values.
1
Mr. Stephens worries about anti-excellence in US higher education. I worry about the anti-excellent, anti-science Republican Party. He should examine the lawyers that the Trump administration with the full assistance of "Moscow" Mitch has been putting on our Federal courts as lifetime Federal judges. Now, there is anti-excellence in spades. And this is but one, rather small example.
5
If Mr. Stephens really wants to see how offensive the smothering of diversity of ideas can be, he would do well to research the restrictions placed on a department at Florida State University (Business Administration, I think, but not sure) to which the Koch brothers gave a very large donation. It seems they even have the right to approve of faculty appointments.
3
' It’s a revolt of the mediocre many against the excellent few.'
Was this a reference to Trump's base?
3
The first loud complaints about this sort of thing date to the 1830s, and were very loud indeed back forty years ago when I started college.
I mean, hasn’t anybody ever heard of a “gentleman’s C?”
1
Equity is to excellence as fish are to bicycles.
1
The other day, I watched a 1970s episode of Saturday Night Live on youtube. I realized that, in today's terms, much of it would be considered racist, sexist, sizeist, homophobic, privileged -- in short, politically incorrect in every respect.
It struck me that the progressive puritanism of today's generation is to social issues what judgmental Victorianism was to sexual issues: highly neurotic.
5
My political ideology is typically more liberal than Bret Stephens'. But I agree with the point of this column. The concept of creating "safe spaces" are colleges and universities where students won't be offended is ridiculous. I recently received an email from Change.org asking me to sign a petition to have a professor at a major university fired for allegedly making a racist statement. I don't support anyone making racist statements but clearly the petitioner didn't understand a tenured professor can't be fired for making an "offensive" comment. That shows the dumbing down of college students today.
5
Given that conservatism ultimately means being better than others, I can see where Mr. Stephens is coming from.
You know what they say about those who would sacrifice liberty for a little bit of safety? They deserve neither.
Any student who would react to feelings of discomfort because of a speaker's ideas by trying to ban the speaker needs both history lessons and therapy sessions.
That kind of fragility is not healthy and not normal. Apparently it is ragingly politically incorrect to point this out, but it is a fact nonetheless. That type of hypersensitivity is a huge red flag that something is wrong. And from the prevalence of this kind of thinking - not just on college campuses but in society in general - it's pretty clear that we are regressing in terms of emotional maturity. We have become a nation of toddlers, who react to what we don't want to hear by clapping our hands over our ears and babbling nonsense.
9
Thank goodness for the brilliance and moral leadership of Yale grad "conservatives" George W. Bush, Brett Kavanaugh, and Yale drop-out Dick Cheney. How would the nation survive without such intellects and pillars of truth, competence, and morality?
3
@David Wallenstein - Even assuming that the "painful and humiliating" experience was actually so horrifying that the intensity of the emotion the person has attached to it is justified (and that's a big, big assumption), part of being an emotional grown up is processing what happens to you and moving on. If you find that you are still so traumatized by something in your past that you can't stand to be reminded of it, then you need to get help. Because that is not healthy. No matter how much of a bubble you keep yourself, nor to what lengths you go to to try to shut other people down so you don't feel triggered, you will never, ever be free of your pain until you face it directly.
Stifling others is never the answer.
8
True, students are coddled and more feared than ever. They need to engage in intellectualism, not feelings. They should be prepared for the real world and it’s very real disappointments. That requires grit and resilience, not snow flake mentality.
On the flip side though, in academia, white male privilege is well and truly alive. White men with CVs inferior to those of women or racial minorities still get jobs, promotions, and perks the others are denied. Department heads spout “diversity and inclusion”, empty words to pull wool over the inferior (almost always white) candidates who look like them that they preferably employ, throwing in a woman or a single person of color in the mix to prevent criticism. Meritocracy is almost a non-existent consideration in academia when one candidate is white and/or male and known to the dept head and the other is not.
When I was in college in the ‘80s, and law school in the early ‘90s, ideas were sacred. Speech was never to be silenced. In the “marketplace of ideas” good and right ideas would ripen into just actions and policies. Bad ideas would be left to die on the vine. We had come through the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, Watergrate and the Cold War a nation that had learned many important lessons. Through all of those struggles free speech lead to just action and to the triumph of fairness and prosperity. That’s what I remember thinking anyway. Since then, we have seen some bad and truly frightening ideas rise up to the top. A racist and nativist world view among a large section of Americans has resulted in the election of Donald Trump. His policies have resulted in asylum seeking children being locked in cages, to name but one of the atrocities committed by this president. Today’s college aged youth have seen bad ideas win the day. They have seen the marketplace of ideas, which was supposed to protect an educated and well-meaning society, fail. It is no wonder then that on college campuses there is increased fear of bad ideas. Today’s young people seem to appreciate that there are some ideas that need to be strangled at birth so as not to grow into devastating policies and actions. Who could blame them?
2
Feelings are figments of your imagination. So is racism. The academic left and political left reinforce your feelings, and grossly distort your view of others. Academic or business diversity should not be a goal even if it furthers your outrage against those you (unfairly) judge to be racist, sexist, religious, and xenophobic.
President Trump is a player that has always been two steps ahead of most of his business, legal, media, and political competitors. He tricks the media into accusing him of being bigoted because he wants the left to also unfairly accuse his supporters of the same thing. Mrs. Clinton created the basket of deplorables and strengthened the depth of support for Trump.
The objective, unfeeling facts show all of Mr. Trump’s policies to be legally sound and neutral when it comes to race, color, creed, national origin, sex, age, etc. Mr. Trump’s personal feelings expressed behind closed doors to friends and family are not important as long as his policy does not seek to get the government to take sides not clearly and legally chosen by the democratic majority.
Thee academic environment has become a sewer of feelings run by professors that get rated by the students. All student concerns matter, and all students start with a B. In truth, we all need to discriminate more (with any standards we learn to be viable) and we need to oppose affirmative action (based on standards that are unfair to some).
1
It is sad that many fine minds can participate in an institution of higher learning while spending a large amount of time on emotional issues. It seems to me that universities should be about exploration of reason, facts, and fine arts. I heard one professor put it, "you're here because you're smart, not because you're good."
By the way, has anyone noticed that politics today seems to be about schadenfreude versus arrogance. Both attitudes seem to lack merit.
2
A large number of reply comments recast and distort what someone says before criticizing the comment. The percentage of straw man arguments is distressingly high.
I don’t hang out with Hannity and Limbaugh but I imagine they do it too. “So what the liberals are really telling you is that ...”
But I doubt Hannity and Limbaugh are presenting themselves as enlightened or as scholars.
If the point of PC and being woke and identity politics is that we should be considerate of each other and that we’re all equal and entitled to dignity then just say so. Have a Copernican Revolution in your moral philosophy and put maxims like the Golden Rule and Kant’s categorical imperative at the center along with sayings like needing to walk a mile in another’s moccasins before criticizing them.
But then you won’t get to be the stage manager or the arbiter for these matters. We all get to weigh in as best we can.
1
I will no longer read any NY Times essays about the problems with American colleges (and college students) if Yale and Harvard are used as representative examples of what is going on in this country.
1
Mr. Stephens, if you think the word "master" denotes excellence and leadership, you are truly out of it. "Master" comes along with high control of the yes, feelings, of the underlings. Feelings do trump almost everything, including Trump who uses them without conscience. I'm 80, brought up in the Jim Crow South, and I know that feelings rule. And the way to keep them from sweeping away all reason and mercy is to explore them, honestly. I deplore "safe spaces" as a concept that shuts out thought, but the people who invented them were sorely wounded. We are human, and humans go from one extreme to the other, and briefly, alas, pause from time to time in the middle, where clear thought and generous feelings exist. Meanwhile, we need to get rid of the sexist, racist concept, "master," and open ourselves to what people feel and want and need. That way we may well find value in what they have to offer in a slightly or even greatly altered world.
Anti-excellence pervades our society, not just the colleges. This country was founded by men of the Enlightenment, men of science, reason, and education. With Andrew Jackson, the country took a turn to anti-intellectualism. This virulent anti-intellectualism and anti-educated elite disdain elected Trump, a Huey Long light.
2
Yes, yes, yes, it is now a race to the bottom where ignorance is celebrated, success is ridiculed and any attempt at achievement is thwarted. Losers rule, winners are shamed, they do know what they are missing and are happy with it, they want us all to share their place with envy, jealousy and resentment of anything good in the world.
1
"Would an untenured professor have the guts to say what he does? "
I haven't read Kronman's book, but judging by the summary here, didn't William Deresiewicz make the same point or get at similar ideas in Excellent Sheep? It was published in 2014, after he didn't get tenure (if I remember correctly) at Yale...
1
As the (long-ago) product of two Ivy universities, I remember how they utterly changed my life with their level of discourse, intellectual challenge, and (dare I say it?) mastery of fields.
As an alum who interviews prospective students, I am endlessly impressed by their quality as eager, curious human beings. I wonder how I ever got in. (It was not money, legacy, or finagling.)
And as a citizen appalled by the polarization of our society, I wonder: is the situation at universities the cause or the effect? I conclude the latter.
What "anyone who has followed the news from college campuses for the past few years" and beyond will know that, as dependably as ever, conservative columnists will trot out evidence for the moral rot at our best institutions of higher learning. For me, this goes back all the way to "The Closing of the American Mind" which was published in 1987.
These arguments not only have little intellectual weight (rock music as a potent, corrosive force in society etc.) they serve to divide and distract the political left: To the degree that we're busy arguing over whether or not our nation's young people are being corrupted by diluted standards and political correctness, we are not working to take down Trump and, yes, the conservatives who sold out to support him.
I say phooey.
Regardless of field it is necessary to pay attention to the subject matter experts. There is a growing mindset in the country that leads the intellectually lazy into thinking they know what they are talking about.
This leads to yet another go at trickle down economics, that climate change is a hoax and the press is enemies of the people.
As a recent graduate, I do worry about ID politics, PC culture, etc., but the prevalence is exaggerated to say the least. Mr. Stephens typifies this right-wing fear mongering. I remember once when Salman Rushdie was asked about the "free speech crisis" on campuses; his reaction was this (paraphrase): "I do worry about hostility to free speech, but I have literally never encountered any of this. I've lectured on dozens of campuses in the US and Canada, and I've only ever encountered students who want to hear more, who want to engage." This was after all the nonsense on UC Berkeley and all that.
Anti-intellectualism does indeed exist on the left -- I've shared classrooms with stereotypical liberal know-nothings (and I completely trounced them with reason, all without getting beaten up or called a racist). However, with an entire ideology and party committed to anti-intellectualism -- and an anti-intellectual president -- the last thing we need is for a reasonable center-right intellectual (Mr. Stephens, I'm talking to you) joining the far-right assault on higher education and reason itself.
Universities will never satisfy everyone's worldview. We live in a democratic society, however imperfect. This means ideas will, should, and must live in tension. Occasionally that tension will boil over. If you don't like what's happening at Yale, I'm sure their conservative students would be more than happy to host you for a speech.
2
Ah yes, speakers. The rigged game that tries to force students to listen and obey to media stars peddling loosely academic shtick and berates them when they object. When they brought celebrity speakers to my campus in the early 1990's, I skipped them because I had too much to study, and I'll bet it isn't any different now.
As pointed out in the comments, there are places where excellence in actual performance predominates. However it's hard to defend a situation in which places are reserved for "legacy" admissions or hiring is too obviously skewed according to criteria other than competence and achievement. Unfortunately, some institutions are more elite socially than academically.
1
How fine it is to struggle over the fate of the Yales and Harvards. But most of American higher education occurs on another planet. On that planet demographics and budgets drive many important decisions. In many places the decreasing number of white bread applicants drives an interest in inclusion even among administrators who are focused solely on meeting payroll and living to teach another year. In many red states, GOP politicians are driven to flog universities like Trump flogs Congresswomen of color. It is a Cultural Rite on the right. In purple and blue states, it is still difficult to tax people at the level required to support education at the level it would like. So students matter and if your mailing list only includes descendants of Trump's kind of immigrant, your entering class will be too small. Recruiting traditionally underrepresented populations is tough work if you look and think like Bret Stephens and some places are more successful than others. Most want full classrooms and believe that if the work force is well educated, good things will happen to the country. Not exactly the ideological motivation that Stephens believes is behind every professor and dean. Ever talk to a Dean of Engineering at State U, Brett?
Retiring Engineering Professor
4
Mr Stephens' opinion piece conflates a number of issues -- though I am sympathetic to one or two.
Diversity is primarily a good thing. Colleges have been dominated for generations by white men who have largely accepted white students with means -- until federal law demanded more inclusion.
Feelings are a separate issue. And it's ultimately not feelings -- but respect for each human being, a concept that college (and high school) profs have not always exemplified. The power dynamic of a typical classroom works against high regard -- feelings enter in but hardly dominate the issue.
Have colleges tilted too far in the direction of trigger warnings, limited high-controversy speakers who could generate productive dialogue? Yes, no doubt. But again, a separate matter.
And it is far from all colleges and universities that have given way to a hefty left stereotype Mr Stephens describes here. But students, despite the history of protest, have rarely had a significant voice in education at any level. I'm sure administrators and tenured profs resent the one some of them are gaining now.
As a retired educator, I'm far more sympathetic to student mandates than I am to administrator/conservative faculty anxiety and anger. The conflict going on in colleges is the conflict going on in the macro community of the country -- it's not pretty. Leaders in college do little good by whining about it.
2
What it really means is a person who embodies achievement, refinement, distinction — masterliness — and whose spirit is fundamentally aristocratic.
---------------------
This tussle between the aristocratic spirit and spirits of hoi polloi is an outcome of increased intra-societal communication, and is essential for raising median academic standards.
Think this tussle helps to maintain 'Goldilocks conditions' for a learning culture in campuses and a better society when students step out of campuses to real world.
It seems that the right puts too little emphasis on education (to the point of open hostility) while the left puts too much (in hopes it will solve all our problems).
2
Or the language that accompanies moving away from white male domination of higher education to something different is in its formative stage. Also, this is alarming to white men unaccustomed to sharing power and leaving the well worn path of their privileges. I don't think we need to be angry about Bret Stephens complaints, and he is not a villain or victim. I propose we just keep moving forward keeping our eyes toward a system that is fair and works for everyone.
1
Having recently graduated from an Ivy League college, I can attest that this piece grossly misrepresents campus culture. The purpose of the movement toward diversity and inclusion is to seek out and foster excellence in areas where it had previously been ignored. How many brilliant children growing up in unfortunate circumstances never got the chance even to dream of attending the Yales of the world? The ever-more diverse incoming classes at elite universities add important perspective to discussions that have previously been dominated by white male voices. I’m extraordinarily grateful for the programs in place at my school that allowed me to learn from the experiences of students of many different (racial, socioeconomic, cultural) backgrounds.
3
While I would agree that at times these radical students are moving too far (assault and harassment have no place on a college campus), I really have to wonder about this interpretation of it being a revolution of the average against the exceptional. After all, who is doing the rebellion? Largely students from poor backgrounds, students from different racial backgrounds, students who did not have the advantage of mummy and father having gone before them to Yale. Out of all the students, surely these are the ones most likely to have been admitted on their merits.
And the absurdity of claiming that the aristocratic norms of a place like Yale do not suffer from the degraded longings and aversions of the proles is laughable. How often have we heard of wealthy rapists traversing those halls? How often have we seen admission counselors accept bribes, even?
Perhaps the real problem here is not the radicals disrupting the daily affairs of the well-to-do, but the reality that Yale and other elite schools have a preference for establishing a ruling class, as opposed to creating an equitable and meritocratic society.
2
I suspect the truth of what intellectual atmosphere exists throughout colleges and universities lies somewhere in between. We are not talking white nationalists speakers on campus. We are talking about the local director of ACLU being surrounded by students and prevented from speaking. A professor being threatened and forced to leave because he disagreed with closing the campus to whites on a given day. My university years witnessed the richness of the head of the campus Communist Party debating the ranking ROTC student in the campus union. Such a debate today, sadly, far less likely. Universities are under threat from Republican legislatures, to be sure (eg. Wisconsin). Free speech, to be sure, is also under threat. Why would the American electorate vote for a candidates who proposes eliminating student debt-- courtesy of US taxpayers -- when those very colleges and universities allow students to suppress diversity of speech ?
3
What we’re creating is a culture of intolerance, where individualism is hailed as the primary value of society and anyone who is too misaligned with any single individual is overtly rejected. This is a very small-minded approach that hampers intellectual discovery and development, and fosters an environment where a victim mentality can grow.
Lost in all of this is any sense that individuals also have obligations to society in addition to benefiting from society.
3
i lived the '60s, and both protests and lifestyle experiments back then were not focused on "racism", as mr. stephens claims, but were an uprising of youthful sentiment against the military, industrial, corporate, governmental and cultural structures of power. the black panthers and the berkeley protesters were fellow travelers, nothing more.
i agree with many of mr. stephens' sentiments, but i am also wary of the human genius to argue from the wrong premise. the 60's were also a time of unraveling the "community of conversation," and i believe that disruption was deeply healthy.
i see a global trend toward the fragmentation of power structures and all national and cultural entities and identities. in that context, universities are struggling to unite a student base already at odds for many reasons. they also have to contend with a growing wealth inequality in student's families, political polarization, and continued climate complacency in the society at large.
excellence and "aristocratic values" will not be lost. they simply have a new field of battle on which to contend. don't believe they are so fragile that they require defense. excellence, and a noble spirit, historically are proven to prevail against the mob.
Most of the kids making a big fuss at these top tier universities are themselves from a pretty privileged class. That’s because top tier universities draw students disproportionately from privileged classes. I’d like to see a day when we do prize academic excellence, but we actually seek it out democratically, without such heavy bias toward the wealthy and the white, as is the case now. Stephens shouldn’t be worried—his side is still winning.
1
This piece does provide food for thought. I don't know if it applies across the board to all institutions of higher learning, but certainly seems to be an issue in a number of Ivy League colleges, if the news is an indicator; but, anti-excellence? Strange and troubling word choice when coupled with the other two.
1
So, let's see. I'm just an observer of the passing parade. What I see are too many examples of people who have been confused since birth about the nature of the world. They have been confused about the intellectual underpinning which have led to the USA being one of the most successful countries in the known history of the world. You have on one side a group that thinks that they should get rewards for just showing up. You have a second group that thinks inclusion means equal outcomes and not equal opportunity. When they take over the intellectual life at a university, we see the headlines and (most of us?) laugh at them. When these kids hit the real world they end up (slight exaggeration) working for the polarizing news outlets that provide fake news to us all. Again, all facts are "equal" - there is no truth and we only want to hear things that are comforting to us. That's what this innocent bystander reads about when it comes to universities. Pretty silly when you look at 18 year old people dictating university policies. Pretty silly.
5
The vetting of invited speakers can be a concern, but one that is not easily answered. While one could use a speech from a white nationalist, espousing bigotry and xenophobia, as a teaching moment, does giving these people a platform legitimize their point of view?
After witnessing academic excellence succumb to equality of outcome on my campus, not gradually but in a big hurry, I am attempting to convince my rising high school senior granddaughter that she can create an excellent life for herself without conscripting herself to four years of Stalinist/Alinsky dogma. Especially if it is "free."
5
Perfectly articulated. Five years too late.
2
This is yet another trend where "liberal" and "progressive" labels are used by a group of people, in this case arrogant students, to impose their will on the majority and punish anyone willing to stand up to them. To their core these people are anti-democratic and hateful. In today's America we are besieged by a right wing (with our president as their leader) and left-wing block of the population who hate everything that has to do with true diversity of opinion and open and honest discussion.
5
"Before an idea can be evaluated on its intrinsic merits, it must first be considered in light of its political ramifications."
This is so true. My daughter is attending an East Coast liberal arts college. I have been shocked at the efforts of students to shut down free speech. I also wonder if I am the only one who questions student demands that professors issue "trigger" warnings before they discuss subjects that might make student feel "unsafe."
3
I can’t even read this. If excellence determines who ends up in the Ivy League, why exactly did we just have a scandal about people who buy their children places at these universities?
Most universities are run by old white men. Yes, the “feelings”, thing has gone too far, but so did all of the bad behavior that built it. Students are discussing this nonsense because they don’t trust these universities, and given the behavior demonstrated in the past, their distrust is well earned.
223
@Covert Yes, the answer for nonsense is always more nonsense. That way we get layers and layers of nonsense.
13
@Covert
What’s wrong with old white men? Just because they are old and white, they are suspect? How ridiculous is that notion?
33
@Covert The recent scandal is not an admissions scandal, but an *athletics* scandal. These children of the wealthy could not, based on their academic records, have gotten into Yale or Stanford (the irony is that they probably could have gotten into USC). So their parents went looking for a workaround, the "soft underbelly," which are athletic admits.
8
I could begin by repeating my past comments that Stephens’ agenda makes him a poor spokesman for intellectual honesty and truth. American history has been filled with far too many barriers to social achievement to suppose that old traditions at colleges and universities can be maintained without continued harm. But let me say this differently.
If the goal is to bring out the best in students and faculty (and perhaps the rest of society), then addressing the social and intellectual barriers that stand in the way for many students and social groups must be high on the agenda. Hence the emphasis on diversity, inclusion, and encouragement, in place of the image of a battleground of ideas that has typically been mobilized against countless social groups. This includes the idea of meritocracy, which offered without adequate attention provides another obstacle to people struggling to improve their accomplishments and achievements.
Indeed the play of diverse ideas and opinions is critical to both a democratic society and a rich intellectual climate. That means being very critical toward every critique of the social and educational conditions fostering the diversity of the ideas and opinions.
Consider the possibility that the struggle in which the activist students are engaged is precisely to improve the quality of our thoughts and judgments, without limiting benefits to a historically small group of wealthy and privileged families.
1
Gosh, has Mr. Stephens even been to a regular college campus in the US? I’ve been teaching in the liberal arts at a regional midwestern campus for 20 years and his column describes a world completely unfamiliar to me and my hard-working, serious, working-and middle-class students.
I guess the elite can only recognize the concerns of the elite, therefore to him, the vast majority of us educators and students may as well live on another planet. Reminds me of the Titan gods’ regard for mortals.
4
@Shurl
So you're teaching your students to be resentful of "elites", and that an issue is only worth discussing if it affects them personally. Doesn't sound like a good preparation for real life.
This is my experience as well, but at a large “flagship” state university campus on the East Coast. Not top-tier, but admission isn’t easy. Hard-working, serious students, if anything more respectful of faculty than they were when I started teaching 35 years ago. And more diverse in background. Little ideological rigidity.
Perhaps the "unrest" you describe today is because your party, beginning with St. Ronnie, undid all the progress that resulted from the "unrest" of my generation.
And you dare pair diversity and inclusion with "anti-excellence?"
"Excellence" is only an artifact of Eurocentric, white intellectualism and culture in the conservative view.
As the head of a school I handed diplomas to hundreds of high school graduates in recent years. They are, by and large, more curious, more committed, more intellectual engaged than the students with whom I attended college in the late 60's
You're making an argument based on a phenomenon that doesn't exist.
6
It is not, “the faculty and administrators of America’s colleges and universities today [that] insist the overriding importance of creating a culture of inclusion on campus,” but the administrators specifically. As a professor, I cannot stress enough how much Administration has destroyed the university system. Somehow, decades ago and in
a time when universities were still filled with liberal professors that your conservative parents warned you about, we did not have the collapse of expertise and the distrust of intellectuals. Rather, this attitude has been nurtured by Administration who have in turn, jammed their disgusting uninformed policies down throat of the faculty teaching the students. In addition, faculty positions have been ravaged as more and more jobs are pushed towards adjunct professors. And no offense to adjuncts, but if these people are good enough to teach then universities should hire them as real professors. It’s insulting to all those hard-working graduate students, and in return for their efforts of becoming masters of their field, have been relegated to a subset of teaching with low pay, no benefits, and no future. Is it any wonder that they would rather throw up their hands and allow this culture of mediocrity rather than fight to make the system better? If you want a villain to blame, It’s called the master of business administration, and it is destroying every profession in this country
7
@Eric: The notion that MBAs can manage anything is the second most ridiculous faith in the US.
1
Mr. Stephens is partly right when he says today’s student activists want less freedom to act, speak, and think as they please. They evidently want less for*others*. They want their *own* groupthink to dominate. Isn’t that the essence of political correctness?
6
When Mr. Stephens argues for "...the muscular exchange of honest views in the service of seeking truth..." he fails to acknowledge that one person's "honest views" may be for another person deeply offensive, prejudice-laden sentiments calling to mind painful and humiliating life experiences. Stephen's choice of words - "muscular exchange" - calls to mind a physical confrontation rather than an exchange of "honest views" between equals, something I am unsure that he truly advocates given his references to de Toqueville and Menken. While a university classroom is not the place to "coddle ignorance" it is certainly not the place to "coddle" prejudice.
3
The question naturally arises whether inclusion and excellence are a zero sum game. This piece seems to assume that this is the case. Rather than cast aspersions at the desire for inclusion, perhaps look for ways to achieve it without sacrificing excellence.
I don't generally agree with most of what Mr. Stephens writes, but here he is right on the money. However, I think he leaves out a very important factor in this phenomenon: parents and schools that try to shield kids from anything unpleasant or unduly difficult, never grant them any real independence, and feed them the idea that every kid is a genius. i believe is was Sophocles who said that "we learn though suffering".
2
One of the few things I recall from my calculus course of more than 60 years ago was the Professor[a master of statistics] stating that it takes an IQ of at least 115 to obtain a college education. If true that would exclude about 2/3 of the population. However, going back a few more years when I was in HS taking Physics I recall the teacher, a Christian Brother, stating that we should all try at least to take a few college courses; that it would broaden our minds. [ The professor also stated that it takes an IQ of at least 120 to understand the binomial theorem whatever that is. ] That was then; this is now.
1
What these youngsters need is The Trinity: Love, Knowledge and an understanding of Infinity. Fulfilling one of these aims can lead to some good. Fulfilling two, better. Satisfying all 3? Now that’s The Trinity and the outcome is unmistakable.
1
@Dad W: Everyone's existence is finite.
The fundamental question is does one adapt to culture, or should culture adapt to you? The simple answer is likely both, to varying degrees, but to require that culture will adapt to you is to ignore all of human history, and thus human nature.
1
@Ask Better Questions: People desire to add things to culture as their legacy.
Brett's narrative of oppression of even liberals by bigger liberals, while it has happened in some super-promoted cases, presents no evidence this is the norm. I tell my students that anything could be put on the microscope, but discussions should be civil and those brave enough to speak in class should be respected. I particularly encourage conservative students to speak as the rest of us need to hear what they have to say. At the same time, their views are subject to the same inspection (and the same courtesy) as anyone else. Yes, it can be hard when a conservative speaker comes on campus with views most of us don't like. Human nature can tempt us in ways inconsistent with our academic values. But professors are models for their students, too. What's more, I tell students, societal cohesion is so bad now that they are going to have to be models of civil discussion. So this is the time to practice. When a speaker came on campus two years ago with a contrarian climate change message, yes, we had to remind ourselves about this. While there were many disagreements, there was nothing clip-worthy for Fox News. The also-conservative moderator did a nice job letting us liberals ask questions. In a post-lecture discussion with my students, they said they learned some things from the conservative speaker. I was not unhappy to hear that. Further, we speculated that the speaker, if he was paying attention, might have learned some things from us. Academia passed the test that day!
4
Humility is required to achieve excellence. Humility is not a conservative trait or a liberal trait, but sadly, on college campuses, it appears to be a rare trait. One has to be willing to admit the possibility of being wrong or ignorant in order to be open to learning. Inclusiveness does not stand in the way of excellence if humility is present.
4
@Retired From The Academy: Absent instruction, trial and error is how we learn.
1
@Matt Polsky
What did your students learn from conservatives? That they can hog-tie responsible efforts to curb or even put a price on carbon pollution by injecting doubt into settled climate science? Nearly 70% of Fox News airtime on global warming has been given to deniers, studies show, even though the climate "debate" was over long ago. Now, it's too late. Academia passed no tests that day by giving voice to dangerous ignorance.
If universities are truly obsessed with diversity and feeling safe, then why are there so few conservative professors and ideas being studied on these campuses ? Why is it ok for conservative minded students to be ridiculed and judged by professors and other students who call themselves ‘liberal’ but are anything but... And why is it ok for THESE students to feel unsafe in these institutions but not ok for an African American or LGBT student to feel unsafe in them ? Selective diversity is NOT diversity at all.
12
@Malone Cooper
Yes, conservatives are discriminated against terribly in this country.
They only have big business, the Chamber of Commerce, the military, the police, their own mass-market radio, TV and newspaper outlets, most of America's billionaires, the Supreme Court, the Senate, the Presidency and numerous state legislatures. Plus they've neutered Democratic presidents, thanks to the non-democratic structure of the Senate -- we New Yorkers have a fraction of the voting power of people in Idaho or Kansas.
So why in the world are America's universities still holding out? "Conservative" students are simply terrified! They don't even dare raise their hands.
What we truly need is Trump University -- everywhere!
4
@jrd
Excellent comment. Wish it was an NYT pick.
1
I believe this article is accurate, but my opinion about colleges is based on second hand information--reading lots of press reports. However, I have first-hand knowledge from work and life experiences (I am 75.) I believe the roots of this phenomenon go back many years, but really don't have a solid theory as to why. Just that I have seen it's starkness. I beleive it is based on the shift from experiental learning to academic post-high school learning. Simplifying, experiential leanring is, for example, an apprentice carpenter learning the trade from "masters." In post high school instituions, once you have the paper document, whether it is from a 2 or 4 year sesstins, or Masters or Phd program, you then become a designated "expert." Just show the paper. Here is one anecdote: Once I had a younger (by 12 or so years) girlfriend who was getting her Masters in animal behavior. We went to Yellowstone Park to enjoy the excellent fly fishing in its many streams. She had never handled a fly rod before. Learning the initial skill of getting the line out there is relatively easy, and she learned quickly. But rolling out the tippet properly, handling wind, avoiding bushes....not so easy. But when I tried to help her with the more difficult things, she became very angry with me, insisting she knew what she was doing. (The relationship ended badly, btw.) I can list many other somewhat similar situations.....So, a societal change, and a complex one, in my opinion.
2
A major flaw in these rather tired diatribes against liberal takeovers of colleges, is that for the most part, the writers assume that the term "College" applies only to Ivies, Stanford, Berkeley, and a couple liberal arts schools like Oberlin and Amherst. The vast majority of college students go to state schools or small non-profit schools that are remarkably diverse in their missions, the type of student they serve, and the level of activism on campus. Most students are hard-working people with integrity who firmly support free speech while also supporting being respectful. In fact, if anything, the problem with many students is political apathy, not activism.
9
Sure takes a lot of nerve to criticize the atmosphere of intellectual freedom at colleges while conservatives march in lock-step with whatever Fox News tells them. In another article the NYT reports that only recently has it been "safe" for Republicans to admit that global warming is happening at all --- while scientists and responsible politicians like Al Gore have warned us about it for decades. It's still not safe to criticize Trump for anything, evidently, but only to criticize the FBI for investigating his ties to Russia. At least colleges are seeking the truth,. Conservatives have tied their entire party to a raft of lies, ignorance, and irresponsibility that will sink us all.
7
Your blind spot is you see considering the “feelings” of the historically disadvantaged as affronts to truth and excellence, without seeing that the generations of privileging the feelings of the “master” class actually did the same thing. Your assumption that the perspective and identity of white men has no political valence is itself a hidden bias that should be acknowledged and addressed.
5
The most memorable day I spent in college (Hamilton College, graduated 1968) was attending a lecture given to all the students by George Lincoln Rockwell of the American Nazi Party. No, we did not all wear Klan hoods on campus or go around giving stiff armed salutes. And yes, this was the same college which rescinded an invitation to speak to Ward Churchill who espoused clearly controversial views about 9/11.
The lecture was Rockwell's standard stump speech but every man sitting there (we were then not a co-ed school) had a riveting glimpse at the power of demagoguery. We could understand how Rockwell could draw in followers if he could just get them over the threshold of his first premise even though it was invalid. For me, he presaged the rise of Donald Trump.
Centers of learning should be a true marketplace of ideas, including those which might even be deranged or fundamentally dangerous. Our campus teachers understood such ideas were regularly flowing throughout the larger world off "the Hill". Isolating us in a protective bubble would not help us in navigating in a later life in such turbulence.
I thank Hamilton (1968) and weep for Hamilton (1995) and for all the politically correct institutions which "protect" us with trigger warnings and such today.
271
@Douglas McNeill
Thank you for your comments on this column. The idea that colleges and universities need to provide a "safe place" for students is ridiculous. You learn by engaging in debate even with people who have opposing points of view. I am a liberal but the practice of banning certain conservative speakers from college campuses due to student opposition angers me. How can you stand up to your opponent if you don't know the views they represent? Also, once a person leaves college, there are no safe places in the real world.
45
@Douglas McNeill: Free speech only works where criticizing it is equally free.
12
@Frank
Instead of forbidding speakers maybe these Institutions should concentrate on going after rapists on
Campus
4
This argument is not correct. So called "elite" universities have only recently become meritocratic institutions. Until the 1970s, most of the Ivy League were male only institutions. Until the 1960s, not a single Jew had been granted tenure in the humanities at Harvard, Princeton, or Yale. Few Asians, few African Americans -- indeed few non-Wasps attended any of these schools. To be a "Master of the House" was no especially heavily lift given that roughly three quarters of American-born men and women were not even eligible to trim the hedges let alone enter the classroom.
6
Mr Stephens
I looked up the book in question after reading your article and this is the first link that came up:
https://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/book/assault-on-american-excellence
What makes prof. Kronman's book "Jewish". and how does that square with its purported attack on "diversity and inclusion"? Maybe the ceaseless barrage of political correctness to which we've all been subjected makes me cynical, but I hope someone here will take the time to explain, especially in view of the "open-borders" HIAS-supporting policies promoted by practically all American rabbis - a group which at one time included the good professor's father.
1
Inasmuch as 95 percent of the non-asian students (mostly white, making up 60 percent in total) of my college computer science class are in dire need of remedial education and struggling far far behind students of Asian (East and South) origin, I would have to agree that anti-excellence is alive and thriving on campus.
6
What the college crybabies and most of them seem to be professors, although I use that term loosely indeed seem to be saying confirms the article.
Freedom to offend is something the leftists do regularly but scream bloody murder if anyone else opens their mouth.
They also don't really understand equality because they don't deal with reality all that often. Equality as they want to see it does not and will never exist in the real world. We are not all equal in ability, ambition, intelligence and many other things that determine how life eventually turns out.
As far as offending these people,someone should, every day. It will prepare them for after college. You know, a place where you don't get a trophy for showing up and no one cares if you have a means of support. Where you have to prove yourself every day and your having done so today only means you have to do it again tomorrow.
2
@mikem: I don't learn anything from others by projecting myself onto them, but I do learn much about others by what they project onto straw-men.
4
It is unclear to me the context of which the word "master" was used.
1
FYI- there are 6 definitions listed for the noun “master.” The first is a man who has servants or slaves working for him. #3 is an exceptionally skilled person.
So much for your true meaning.
3
Excellence in an academic setting would include a student body accepted on the basis of merit. Yale like other prestigious universities has admission standards that disfavor Asians by requiring much higher prior academic achievement than for other racial groups. This practice is similar to procedures in the past that limited the number of Jews to these prestigious schools. A student body not chosen on the basis of excellence cannot perform with excellence.
8
This seems to make you nervous and defensive, Bret. Wonder why ? Care to elaborate ?
4
Haha! This article is hilarious as it reeks of the stench of an elitist parent who did everything to give their child the advantage over the poor and unfortunate “them” only to have their children hate their own very boring and carefully curated existence. I agree wholeheartedly that universities are on an intellectual downtrend. This is not “a revolt of the mediocre many against the excellent few”, as the writer self-righteously states, but a revolt of the mediocre many against their mediocre parents who could have better used their intellect to do something meaningful for society instead of seeking only to secure a seat at the table for those who look like themselves. Excessive diversity and inclusion is the problem? No it’s the lack of it. The author calls it “strange”, that these students who have no real foes (those have all been unfairly eliminated in the path toward "excellence") rail against the very system designed to protect their own progeny. Your children don’t want to evaluate your ideas on their “intrinsic merits” because they know it only leads to an endless, boring path of intellectual discussion, rather than meaningful action. Again, I agree wholeheartedly that universities are profoundly lacking in excellence. But, unlike the author, I have a solution: more diversity and inclusion. Give young children the opportunity of a good education, early rather than late, and you will see intellect abound as never before.
1
The era of divisiveness must end: the nastiness of Trump and
McConnell and their tribe of swamp rats must be swept out
of the House; the Senate; the Oval Office; and that goes for
Attorney General Barr as well..
Clear out the mess of amorality; and do not fight with the
swamp rats;
Who is going to call out the swamp rats and at the same time
not beat up on their contenders for President...well not
those that attacked Joe Biden for no good reason.
That leaves perhaps smarter, kinder, contenders; like...
Elizabeth Warren; Bernie Sanders; Amy Klobuchar and
others....but the attack artists like Kamala Harris belongs
in a court room ...not the White House.
Several weeks ago a group of Yale employees went on a public hunger strike over an issue of wages. A group of five pro-excellence Yale students brought in a barbeque and began grilling in front of them to mock them.
I'd fix your own broken house first.
5
It is truly a Gordian Knot in the making!!
1
The real issue is our denial of common sense. Our political screeds tout the premise that "all people are equal" which flies in the face of the obvious. Various political systems; the circumstances of where and when a given individual takes birth; the development (or not) of basic character traits that are conducive (or not) to the ability to function in and contribute to the betterment of the society we're in, what to speak of the greater world at large; all of these and more are the real barometer by which "equality" is measured. As Orwell so famously opined in "Animal Farm," "All animals are equal. But some are more equal than others."
It is true that liberal institutions trip over themselves in "political correctness," which is itself a tyranny as fascist as anything in late 1930's Germany. Or the former Soviet Union, for that matter. What motivates PC? Fear. Fear that someone with an opposing view may undercut the foundations upon which all of your assumptions rest. If THAT happens, you lose your moral foundation to stand on. Then what? No, better to prevent the conversation from ever happening in the first place. Then your view goes unchallenged. Hardly a worthy goal for institutions that purport to offer "higher learning."
7
Epictetus, Seneca, Musonius Rufus, and Marcus Aurelius should be required reading not only of all students but all professors and university administrators. In short, how to grow a spine, how to endure "painful" feelings, and how to be a virtuous person (which authoritarians of the left and right definitely are not).
5
Stringing the words diversity, inclusion and anti excellence in one heading implies that they cannot coexist. Why is that? Is excellence therefore only reserved to a non diverse, non inclusive cohort? Repeated studies have shown that women and underrepresented minorities are lagging behind compared to white males in academic promotions. Seems like there will always be some at the top who want to preserve the status quo of sameness to avoid difficult, but much needed, discourse on race, gender, and other social determinants with those who do not look like them.
3
I would have to agree with Mr. Stephens for a change! While I have 40 years away from my own college experience and 10 years out with my 3 children's, I do not recognize the campuses he writes about. My 3 avoided any campus politics like the plague and I do not recall their colleges as having to struggle with student demands for emotional safety at the expense of robust learning.
It might have something to do with the (past?) trend of helicopter parenting. The needs of the child became all with parents insisting every child get a ribbon after the race lest Tommy starts to cry. Parents berating teachers to give their child a better grade.
That kind of excessive coddling and protection has left young adults with out any tools to manage life's disappointments. And with a self selective iPhone screen, these kids don't have to look anywhere they don't like.
I would like to see colleges resist but I imagine the money factor is lurking not far behind and keeping Tommy happy means his parents are happy and donations will keep coming.
142
@Elizabeth - I suspect the reason it bears no resemblance to your or your children’s campuses is that it also bears no resemblance to today’s campuses. I am a college lecturer, and have spent the last 17 years of my life on college campuses. This article is in reaction to a straw-man terror that has little grounding in reality. Yes, I do tell my students when we will be dealing with sensitive material, so they can make the time and space to read it quietly and thoughtfully, not so they can not read it. The result is that students who were previously cowed into silence or skipped class that day now speak up, to all our collective good.
23
Kronman is saying that smart elites should have more say than common folk. I remember soon after 9/11 when Kronman (my former Yale Law professor) endorsed war with Iraq. At the time, I thought it was a bad idea, but Kronman’s status had an impact. I’ve since learned to have greater confidence in my own views.
4
"The word 'master' may remind some students of slavery. What it really means is a person who embodies achievement, refinement, distinction — masterliness — and whose spirit is fundamentally aristocratic."
A Yale freshman might call this a tautology.
Kronman—and Stephens—is a recognizable type, an academic who has enjoyed a rarefied career and no doubt misapprehends his own abilities and societal status while shutting out the knowledge that there are iconoclasts like Simone Weil, Susan Sontag, and Malcolm Gladwell who are far more intellectually talented and operate outside of academia.
Rather than take narcissistic delight in their self-anointed and delusional “aristocracy,” Kronman and Stephens might experience the life of factory workers—like Weil—to better understand the stresses and anxieties of the working class.
“Would an untenured professor have the guts to say what he does? The answer to the question underscores the urgency of his warning.”
There was a time when tenured and untenured professors were exclusively white men. As such, untenured professors were readily inducted into the system and probably experienced little difficulty in speaking out on behalf of the status quo.
Kronman and Stephens are simply airing recognizable conservative views without acknowledging the historical institutional ossification that the newly emergent “culture of grievances” is challenging.
We have heard it before. It is Allan Bloom and Dinesh D’Souza redux.
1
"So why all the rage?" Please! It is Trump and Trumpism! Students are reacting to the destruction of our democracy, our morals, and our sense of decency by a mentally ill authoritarian wannabe.
1
Hey, who was responsible for World War Two, the Lincoln Assassination, the Fall of Rome, and our expulsion from the Garden of Eden? Not sure there’s a connection? Just ask a conservative, because the answer with always be — wait for it — young, politically engaged, Ivy Leaguers!
Now if you want to lay the mediocritization of America at their feet, I have a two word answer: Jared Kushner. What causes mediocrity is dynastic wealth. Money replaces intellect as a measure of achievement. Our lack of a robust inheritance tax is currently creating a generation of hapless, clueless, little princelings that are every bit as competent as a 20th Century Habsburg. Let’s face it, the only words that Ivanka Trump should ever say to Christine Lagarde are, “May I freshen that drink for you, Ma’am?”
3
@Walter Bruckner: what political office does Ivanka hold? is she a tenured college professor? or published author? lawyer or physician?
Lagarde is President of the World Bank! Ivanka is just the pampered daughter of a rich real estate mogul, and married to an even richer hedge fundie.
Ivanka has no power or position, except being related to the US President.
Did you think Chelsea Clinton held any power? or Tricia Nixon? or the Bush daughters?
The root of all this is our narcissistic society that we live in.
2
What "coddles" ignorance is laziness-not researching the facts. . It's got nothing to do with diversity. And judging a historical figure by today's standards rather than 200 years ago? Slave owners had Bibles. They knew of Jesus Teachings, they knew slavery was wrong but who changes the wrong that's in "their favor" just ask Republicans today. Mediocrity revolts Excellence--that is Trump's Story....
1
who would have thought 25 years ago or so, that we were seeding the eventual downfall of critical thinking. replaced by "feelings". what a snowflake revolution we have nurtured. as a 6 year active duty seabee vet--i say enough is enough with these perpetually hurt pre adolescents demands. No sense of the real world.
1
Seems that colleges are at least making the effort to counter the overt racism , raw hate and stunning hypocrisy of Brett’s Republican Party and their master in the Oval Office.
Students represent the future ; frankly the greater threat is they grow up to be Republicans rather than demonstrate sensitivity to rabid nationalism .
Brooks is the same way: moralizing behind a false equivalence .
Stevens and his fellow conservative columnists weaponize the First Amendment to defend the indefensible. At least they take a position even if it’s their job.
It’s the cowardly silence of the Republican Party that poses the greatest danger . I sure hope colleges teach students that democracy is far more fragile than we would like to think.
2
“Progressive orthodoxy”? Please. Don’t confuse orthodoxy with enlightenment, reason, and facts fighting in the face of “conservatives” that have gone completely off the rails. I will take progressives over Fox and Trump apologists any day. Please stop the concern trolling.
1
Ah, another screed about those crazy college kids by Stephens.
People tend to forget (or deliberately ignore) that back in the 1990's there was considerable conservative hand-wringing about "PC running amok" on college campuses. The result of such PC frenzy was basically....nothing. Most of those who graduated college at that time are safely ensconced in middle-management jobs at Amazon, Raytheon, Citibank etc. Consider for a moment the American system might not collapse because some kids at Oberlin thought serving sushi for dinner was 'cultural appropriation' or whatever.
You know what the bigger threat to American excellence is, however? The stagnant system of patronage that has rendered our federal government a cesspool of legalized bribery (or that has turned two of the most essential institutions in New York - the MTA and the NYPD - into corrupt and unaccountable messes). Or the amoral focus on short-term profit that crashed our economy back in 08. Or the way our fourth estate has prioritized drama and entertainment over informing the citizenry. I could go on - point is, wacky college kids are pretty far down the ladder when it comes to threats to the 'excellence' of this country.
2
Brett, you are better than this. Dowd was doing the same thing last Sunday. There is this nutty extreme, of course. But you spend so much time calling it out, as if it mattered. It seems to me it is more useful to you than anything else. It inflates something you hate to a grand proportion. And, by the way, let's not forget that this is exactly what happens everywhere on the right. All corners want their safe space.
1
@SWB
oops. Bret!
You have to distinguish between harassment of campus speakers and literal media censorship at the behest of fascist public figures. It's only when the media acquiesces to the latter that the former seems really threatening.
It's columns like this about books like this that lead people to conclude that the term "conservative intellectual" is an oxymoron.
5
40 years teaching at Yale may be “impeccable academic credentials” in Mr Stephens’ Allan Bloomesque mind, but that those years have produced yet another tired old man’s jeremiad against cultural change is unsurprising. It is hardly “brave” to make pronouncements from such a privileged and sheltered position. Try teaching for 40 years as an adjunct or at a community college in NYC and then show me the book you’d write.
3
I’m grateful when you attack the tyranny of political correctness, the evils of conformity. Your column reminds me of C.S. Lewis’ famous article published in the Saturday Evening Post in the 60’s, now included as an epilogue in his “The Screwtape Letters.” I’m sure you remember the article. Lewis condemned the trend on college campuses that every student must receive an “A” or else “their feelings would be hurt.” Here’s hoping more teachers today find a spine.
3
Steven is brilliant. So is Kronman. We need more of them. Desperately.
1
diversity, inclusion and excellence are not mutually exclusive
1
Wow. An attack on democracy in favor of aristocracy, presumably made safe by the fascism that governs us. You mock "all are equal," the proposition to which this country is dedicated. Why not rather insist on it? The students' feelings do not trump the professor's equality, so long as he is not oppressing others. He should not be kicked out, just as Sarah Sanders should not be kicked out of a restaurant, not because they are aristocrats but because they are equal human beings. I am far to the left of you, but I usually consider you reasonable and learn from you. Now I see that you are no better than the bigots of my youth who genuinely believed that the world should be ruled by (white) aristocrats. Equality is for everyone. Aristocracy is for "my" class.
2
Fascists love to exploit democracy and it’s freedom to take over and then dismantle those very freedoms.
Loudly refusing to give fascism a platform, isn’t “protesting the right to free speech”.
It is in fact exercising that right to protest hate speech, and ensuring that right continues to exist.
2
"The word “master” may remind some students of slavery. What it really means is..."
You're just not listening, Bret. You don't get to decide what words "really" mean. I suspect the inkling of your powerlessness stirs up great anxiety in you, hence your reaching for the vocabulary of hysteria: "doublethink", "unrest", "bullied", "Maoist".
But the true challenge to freedom is not coming from students on the left asking for wider social courtesies and inclusion. As always, it's coming from the social and religious right trying to erase the teaching of "negative" American history like slavery and the use of the atomic bomb.
And the bad behavior of people who think there are some types of Americans who do not deserve a place or a force is STILL having a significant and underappreciated effect on minorities. Black students are silenced and ridiculed, transgender people are threatened and assaulted, women live every day with actual harassment and the possibility of sexual assault.
And yet, for mainstream commentators like you, it's the center and the dominant voices that are under threat or being squeezed out.
You're right that the minority voices are becoming more strident. We've learned that power and privilege don't yield without a fight. We tried asking nicely and waiting our turn, but that was all a ruse. Time's up now. You'll just have to deal with it.
2
Absolutely right. The snowflake is alive and well in our academic world. The use of the word “triggered” is nonsense. How can a word “trigger” a violent inner reaction? This is the end result of parents protecting teens from the world in which they live.
Universities are liberal havens. But they shouldn’t be forced to protect people from ideas that challenge their beliefs. Ideas are the currency of academia. Learning ideas that aren’t your own are the way to a strong intellect.
Stop coddling the easily offended. You’re doing them no favors.
1
This is one of the many, many reasons why I abandoned leftist politics around obama's second reign--the preaching, the preening, the intolerance, the smugness.....
3
The ultimate shibboleth: the privileged wealthy and their defenders. Celebrating and memorializing the traitors of the slavery loving Confederacy is a profound example of “elite” disdain for all non-elites. That professors and administrators are liberal is not an indictment but a recognition that conservatives and conservatism is grounded in racist, male supremacist, parasitic self serving biases. It should be uncomfortable for “conservatives” who think that racism and inequality and male supremacy are supportable “opinions” rather than pathological. Persons who think that racism, using racism are acceptable political “strategies” or who rationalize the failure to pay women and non whites the same as whites are not offering an opinion but instead are corrupting reason itself for personal gain and self delusion.That climate change denial, denial of evolution, denial of human genetic origins in Africa, and refusing equal rights to women in favor of fetuses are positions that cannot be defended in any rational discussion and they are all “opinions” upon which “conservatives” rely to win elections. Forebodings about the decline of excellence with the disappearance of elitist conservatives on campuses is a false sentiment like “the cotton fields back home”. In fact, what conservativism has morphed into is a false equivalence to liberalism. Sentimentality for racists and male supremacists is unhealthy and evokes hatred and fear. Intellectual elites are in no danger. Conservatism?
Oh, come on Bret. We went through this in the 1960’s, which you probably too young to remember, if you were even alive. And, surprise, we surprise, we survived. I think your credibility went out the door when you mentioned only Jeremy Corbyn, Nigel Farage, and that calculating buffoon, Boris Johnson as the choices for Great Britain’s Prime Minister. But true to form for an American conservative, you left out Jo Swinson, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, a party for some Conservative political “refugees.” The right’s fear of the middle is obvious because a legitimate candidate from the center, whether a Democrat or even a Republican in the US, would relegate the right to the I margin. The right’s objective (and your’s maybe as well) is to split the middle between a polarized left and right, knowing that a larger fraction of middle will move to the right.
1
Does anyone see the irony of Bret Stephens invoking the elevated status of a Yale Law School Dean to denounce the lack of adequate levels of elitism at Yale? I don't mind a good conservative argument, despite the fact that I am likely to disagree with its assumptions and conclusions. What I object to in this piece is its lazy thinking. That it recycles the central arguments of Allan Bloom's "Closing of the American Mind" without attribution. That would get Mr. Stephens kicked out of any American university for plagiarism. But the rest of the argument, based on false assumptions about the student body at Yale, which is then sleight- of- hand generalized to all current college students, isn'y worthy of the space it takes up on the Op-Ed page of the NYT. Trust me, any (conservative) Yale student could do better than this hit job. Mutual respect, civility, and open-mindedness are the qualities that are modeled in Yale's classrooms. It would be great if those same qualities could be modeled in Mr. Stephen's snarky, cranky and unoriginial OP-Ed essays.
3
I get tired of columns like this that offer veiled criticism of the predominance of politically left faculty at universities. Universities are left of center because they employ people who are educated. Education does not mean indoctrination. It means having the background to put things in context and make decisions accordingly. Expecting universities to represent equally the values the Republican Party has embraced for the past forty years is unrealistic. It’s as unrealistic as complaining that PhD’s are vastly underrepresented at Trump rallies.
To listen to the GOP, higher education brainwashes students into progressive zombies, just as it has been extraordinarily successful at indoctrinating scientists and Nobel Laureates to falsify climate change findings for reasons that I cannot understand.
It’s regrettable that some universities have acceded to the protests of small groups of activists and cancelled speakers. Student idealism is nothing new. Shouting down opponents will not continue or prevail for higher education because it is basically illogical.
1
Interesting discussion. I suppose that most students at Universities are trying to either find "truth" and "knowledge" or things that help their future career. Those that become leaders are sharpening their teeth in a crucible of surrounding walls, trying to practice "leadership" or whatever, with out much danger, like some "Lord of the Flies" island experiment. So they could say "we (the students, well, some of the students) refuse to listen to demagogues" because of blah, blah, blah. But that makes the speaker a demagogue. Such as it always was and always will be. The professor, bound by his/her own biases, feckless, naive, inexperienced in the real world, and likely not a "leader" is either awed or repulsed by the proto-leaders. Academia is a separate universe. In the movie "the Dead Poets Society" there is a scene where one of the cloistered boys, goes to the town carnival to see a girl, and this contrast of real people at play with the musty leather library is an epiphany. But we need both, as we have always.
1
I couldn't;t agree more. Safe spaces and trigger warnings are not safe. They are harmful. . How does a child learn to confront adversity if (s)he has never faced it or is shielded from it? How do we come to a reasoned point of view if we cannot hear all sides to an argument/issues? Why would we listen to students who demand courses they feel are relevant? What is happening now is a surrender to bullies who want everyone to conform to their way of thinking. And the people who are most courageous and willing to stand up to these bullies are pilloried. Think of the Christakis couple at Yale.
4
Articles like this make me wonder whether Bret Stephens, or most other commentators on academia have ever spent a meaningful time on a college campus. There have always been political fringe groups on the left and right that make noise and attract attention but these sideshows have virtually nothing to do with the daily life of students or faculty. I spent more than 30 years on the faculties of both public and private universities, and virtually everything these authors write about is inconsequential fluff that happens at the margins.
6
Wait until those college graduates get to the corporate world. There is nothing egalitarian about it; a few who have the right skills or connections will be paid lavishly and the rest will be treated like commodities to be used up and discarded when the few on the top decide that it is profitable to do so.
Many of them are in for a rude awakening.
4
Outstanding. Lucid and succinct. And I must say, with sadness for the state of our increasingly oppressive progressivism, also Brave.
3
Liberals eat their own like Piranhas. And that's why they keep losing, and are going to keep on losing. Bannon was right when he said as long as libs keep focusing on diversity politics they're going to keep losing because they don't understand who the silent majority really are. That's the problem with the liberal elite. Liberal groupthink. Doubleplus good, eh comrade?
1
@Sparky
What is going on with all this right wing projection?
Everything the right actually does they accuse the left of falsely.
There are examples big and small, but it is certainly a pattern.
3
the assumption that the white men who have run everything forever are the best and the brightest is as stupid as it is false
open the gates. let in the women and the people, women and men, who are not white and christian
3
Between Brooks’ most recent column and this one of Bret’s, it’s quite apparent — that with this bland and mildly awful type of hokum — the NYT’s conservatives are still trying to resuscitate the putrid zombie corpse of “respectable GOP ideology.” Give it up, fellas — it’s embarrassing.
Marianne and “meritocracy” and Donald John Trump, oh my!
3
@TreyP
Trump kind of trolled the right wing academics with his overt racism. Sneaky coded language and spurious logic are their bread and butter, what to do now the cat is out of the bag?
I let academia just when this trend began. I place that in the mid- to late 1980s when professor's performance reviews were first tied to how popular their classes were. NOT how well they were taught, but how much the students liked them. The message was clear then, and never contradicted by our leadership, that if you give students higher grades, you'll be more popular, and your job will be safe. Each student was , and is seen as a revenue source, and they are pandered to in the most appalling fashion by university leadership in order to maximize that revenue.
4
I don't think the nonsense Mr. Stephens is describing is typical of the experience of most college students. I suspect for most, like it was for me, college is one more chore that has to be completed in order to get a piece of paper that makes it easier to find a job. After learning the basics of reading, writing, and math in elementary school, the class I used the most over the years was my high school typing class.
2
Professor Stephens, I’ve attended multiple community colleges, a private, small liberal arts college, a big ten public university, and an ivy league institution and I've taught at community colleges and big ten public universities. Your description of campus culture is fictitious at best, and grossly negligent at worst - what you quote and Kronman describes as “credence to the idea that feelings are trumps” is in actuality establishing terms of engagement, and placing proper value on respect and dignity for all people.
How are you defining quality of intellectual engagement?
In my classroom, I definite quality of intellectual engagement by the number of students who speak substantively on our topic of discussion for the day (many in third or fourth languages they are still striving to master). In a classroom that does not establish basic principles of equality, that does not honor the differences in lived experiences of all in conversation, this is impossible to do.
469
@Vero Perhaps the classrooms Stephens describes are not at the school you have taught at, but others?
9
@Vero You have used the word "master". What if your students find that insensitive? The challenge lies in striking the right balance. Being insensitive is different from discussing uncomfortable issues.
12
@Vero
Your function is to prepare students, equally, to “honor the differences” in future experiences of all in conversation - this is easy to do. Teach the past, and all its good and bad, but move forward and teach/prepare students, equally, for the future. That’s your job Mr Vero, not complaining about what happened - that’s all in the past.
2
Kids today . . . blah, blah, blah. Same as it ever was.
6
Yes, there is too much sheltering of students who want “safe spaces” in college that include barring of speakers, including comedians, such as Maher and Seinfeld. However, I think we are now using this crutch “too many coddled rich college kids” to mask some of the real issues that result in thoughtful protests. If I were graduating from any college, where I worked my butt off to succeed, I would be furious to have the likes of Condoleeza Rice or Ben Carson be my keynote speaker. I think about my BA and MA graduations and remember the joy I had in my accomplishments, despite huge challenges that could have prevented me from receiving the degree at hand.
The graduation ceremony should be filled with excitement and anticipation of what the next chapter of life will bring, not being aggravated and upset by who the speaker is. Condoleeza Rice is not someone to be looked up to, no matter that she is a successful woman of color. She was, minimally, a willing tool for an administration out of control. She spent her entire career in Washington dedicated to separating so-called enemies of the US from their civil and human rights and was an apologist and supporter of unjust war. As far as torture, she became one of the first White House officials to go on record supporting any form of torture. My blood would be boiling by the end of her speech. Why should I need to sit through the lies and hypocrisy? Students should decide about the keynotes. And Bret, grow up.
1
Wow! Go figure. A bunch of 17 and 18 year olds questioning the status quo and pushing for change. Should have seen that one coming. When I was that age my dad pushed my hot buttons and I responded as any well intentioned 17 year old with full knowledge of the world would do (sarcasm intended), by taking an opposing extreme position. I guess it's ok when it's an Arab Spring and the young radicals are half way around the world. Heaven help us when it's the leafy quadrangles of higher education in the West. Today's young people are simply fulfilling a universal truth that has them pushing back against what they see as a structured society they find limiting for themselves and others. Me thinks that someone just doesn't like the tone of the conversation. Hopefully these young people will not be like my generation and ditch their radicalism for a world view that can't see any further than their own backyard - although hopefully they will temper the delivery.
9
Read the history of German universities in the 1920's and 1930's. What we're seeing is the brownshirts. It's all sickeningly familiar.
5
Riiiight. . . the Brownshirts were lefties concerned with radical equality and respect for all. They were terribly worried about other people’s feelings and strives mightily to avoid offending people, especially the oppressed. Oh, and they were primarily to be found on college campuses.
@James Ribe What we’re seeing is brownshirts guided by the Kantian nihilism taught in the Weimar Republic and today’s America. See _DIM Hypothesis_ by Leonard Peikoff for the disintegration of the American mind. And when it’s sufficiently disintegrated, religion will rule.
Bret I promised myself not to read your drivel, but I read this and regret it. What are you babbling about? The fact that people don’t want a Neo Nazi on their place of leaning? Those “very fine people” that you apparently support, regardless of your feeble attempts to portray yourself for what you are, a facist enabling trump booster.
7
@Paulie
Couldn’t have said it better!
Maybe he will resurrect his plan for a “pre-emptive strike” on North Korea that he used to write about at the WSJ.
Bret loves his bad ideas!
If "a muscular exchange of honest views" includes, in Stephens' mind, women being called "whores," "dykes," "sluts," "Feminazis," and worse -- for example, threatened with rape and/or murder if a man's opinion is defied -- then I'd say that this "exchange" remains "muscular" to the point of testosterone abuse.
6
Finding the right balance between excellence and equality is a tricky undertaking at best of times. Stephens is correct to point out that the left oftentimes skews the balance too far in favor of egalitarianism. Unfortunately, they are all too often assisted in this by those using excellence as the basis for justifying our huge income inequality. The way corporate America distributes the enormous wealth our economy generates is totally disproportionate to the wealth generation attributable to the alleged excellence of our CEOs. Conservatives, who propagate this talent myth, therefore contribute in their own way to the shifting away from excellence to more equality.
5
Anyone who thinks universities are diverse should look at the political profiles of their professors.
4
This essay implies that American higher education has always been about advancing and rewarding merit, until now. This is ludicrous. Higher education has historically been about social status, especially in the Ivy League, but elsewhere, too. It’s always been about advancing the interests of the economic elites. The press for diversity won’t be a hindrance to the gifted. But it might be an obstacle to the undeserving, entitled aristocrats among us. The future Nobel laureates have nothing to worry about. I hope the future Donald Trumps do, though.
6
@Joshua Krause >Higher education has historically been about social status
Note clearly the explicit Leftist contempt for the mind.
Where does it say University students have to be exposed to every idea anyone has?
Should the physics department be forced to host speakers advocating flat earth theory?
Is it “left wing censorship” if they do not?
Stephens howls about egalitarianism. And yet he wants all ideas to be treated equally.
Why isn’t it considered an exercise of free speech when students protest a speaker? Or when they decline to hear someone’s thinly veiled hate-speech?
Why are right-wing pundits only interested in the “free speech” of right wing hate mongers?
8
Current thinking does seem like the logical outcome of a generation raised by “everyone gets a trophy” kind of parenting.
1
Legacy applicants to Harvard have an exponentially greater chance of admission than those whose parents are not Harvard graduates. That’s your participation trophy; it’s based on birth status.
6
Bret needs to put his emotions on hold and do a little critical thinking. He might then realize his case here rests on a flat self-contradiction. He claims to want robust argument. Yet he begins his essay by insisting we need to defer to our masters whose excellence guarantees they know more than we do. Which is it you want, Bret: bowing to authority or a true marketplace of ideas?
If the latter, then you need to acknowledge that some ideas are garbage. Are you going to decry the biology department that refuses to invite a creationist to speak on the ground that we need a robust exchange of views? Or maybe we all need to listen politely to the expert white supremacist tell us why dark-skinned people are inferior? The fact of the matter is that there are plenty of ideas that are utter nonsense despite being held by some people. There are plenty of places those people can promote themselves. The only reason these people want to be heard in universities is the cachet they get from being there, and the disruption they want to cause. It's not about "robust intellectual exchange;" it's about bomb-throwing. You, however, mostly just seem like your feelings are hurt because young people dislike your ideas and don't want to waste their time being forced to listen to you.
6
@Gary
Right wing “intellectuals” have this problem constantly. Their very existence is a contradiction, because when you actually start thinking...turns out your ideas don’t hold water.
1
I am employed at perhaps the most liberal Ivy Institution. This article’s arguments are accurate. So accurate, in fact, that I refuse to share this article with my colleagues out of fear of being blacklisted.
345
@Corbin >My grandfather was actually blacklisted in the 50s and 60s for his pacifist beliefs.
Pacifist or communist?
7
@TK
Brown enrolls many different student constituencies--liberal, conservative, over-the-top activist, reactionary.
Yes, there is pressure among freshmen to conform to a reflexively liberal view, but the administrative structure still remains quite conservative, and College Hill still shields its students and employees from the bracing currents of the real world.
Stephens's piece would be a good subject for classroom discussion, but if he ever showed up on campus they would probably rip him up, just as with D'Souza two decades ago.
18
@TK
My grandfather was actually blacklisted in the 50s and 60s for his pacifist beliefs. The FBI would show up after a few days on the new job to speak with the boss, and then he would be fired.
Please don’t trivialize real peoples’ experience with your false sense of persecution.
27
Elite colleges have been loaded with egotistic, privileged brats, trained from early childhood to assert a sense of superiority. Those faux aristocrats somehow failing admittance into the Ivy League have spilled over into the land grant institutions of many states in the past to overshadow the modest student residents therein.
This new radicalism to insure inclusion & "safety" for those put upon by the forces of competition, fair & unfair, will dumb down the quality of graduates as surely as the practitioners of one form of aggression will replace the former.
2
"...each college has a master, typically drawn from the school’s faculty, who lives in a special house allotted to them on campus."
Corporations change job titles all the time. Changing the title from master to baby sitter would see more appropriate.
3
Please also see William A. Henry, III’s 1994 book titled In Defense of Elitism.
Great column, Mr. Stephens.
2
This country has a lot of philosophical problems, one of which being that too many Americans can't grasp the notion of a philosophical basis for an argument. My degree is in philosophy, and that information is routinely met with derision and laughter. I was disgusted by what happened at Harvard last year, where female students of a dormitory demanded that a law professor be removed from his dorm advisor position because he was defending the odious Jeffrey Epstein. I wanted to smack the student who said she felt unsafe with him in the dormitory. Dumb and ignorant has now reached even the Ivy League. My experience is that many non-American understand American civics better than most Americans now. That Harvard capitulated to these students is repugnant. They are a generation whose emotions have been catered to from a very young age. Everyone, even the most vile, is entitled to legal representation which one would think Harvard students would understand is a fundamental pillar of our justice system. What they did was further the chipping away at our democracy, so these students have their nerve accusing Trump of doing so (which he is). It's infecting even the pointy-headed left now. The right wing has long had a campaign against intellect. Conservative laypeople say, "I want a president who talks like me." The left always said, "I want a president who is smarter than me." Now it's, I want a president who is just like me.
5
These fears are completely exaggerated.
3
Mr. Stephens point is well-taken. It is one that he has made before. Perhaps it is time for him to acknowledge that the same trend exists at conservative colleges.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/07/24/inside-liberty-universitys-culture-fear-how-jerry-falwell-jr-silences-students-professors-who-reject-his-pro-trump-politics/?utm_term=.5abbd5e2b7be
1
I loathe the inference that diversity and excellence are incompatible.
4
@Celeste
That inference is entirely a product of your own creative reading. The article makes no such implication.
See what he means?
Mr. Stephens continues to dish out high fallutin nonsense on the ills of a liberal America whilst he hasn’t a clue how to solve the real threats from an emerging cohort of Americans that are increasingly displaying nationalistic and fascist leanings. In a nation with more than two hundred accredited law schools, he appears to be solely focused on the handful of elite institutions who are finally recognizing the pitfalls of elitism. Why does he do this? It may be one of the countless attempts at making a false equivalency in the Age of Trump. As a Never Trumper, Mr. Stephens has intellectually suffered at the hands of an ignorant right wing mob. His thinking in this piece may represent a balm that soothes his suffering ego.
3
A breakdown of classroom discipline does not constitute an assault on American excellence!
University students are young adults. When thrust together they are expected to be noisy and rowdy, dismissive of the wisdom and foolishness of the ages, receptive to ideas that are ahead of the time, and suspicious of demagogues who have answers to questions that haven’t been asked. Such are the responsibilities of youth.
King Henry considered them nuisances, and put them at arms’ length by moving the universities out of the capital to Oxford and Cambridge.
American students tend to be a passive lot of wusses until their own situation is under threat. We haven't seen sincere unrest on college campuses since the Vietnam War. The Yale disturbances are mere tempests in a shot glass.
Where's the youthful passion we expect and our country needs? Where are the deans and professors who can bring their sheltered, privileged students to life?
1
Fund all our public schools equally, get rid of legacy admissions, the old boys club, gender bias, etc then talk to me about excellence.
What a ridiculously oversimplified piece.
2
This is what happens when everyone gets a trophy.
5
I admire your intellect and courage. Your column today carries a warning that, alas, will be ignored.
I believe students at Yale, and other universities, are of the same ilk
Jim, Illinois
2
Setting aside the unfortunate conflation of two distinct concerns (freedom of expression and diversity), the article ignores the hard work many universities have begun to undertake to address the censorship of unpopular or even offensive ideas.
I recommend reviewing the University of Chicago’s “Report of the Committee on Freedom of Expression”, drafted by a committee “appointed in July 2014 by President Robert J. Zimmer and Provost Eric D. Isaacs”.
Is it not reasonable to respect everyone's feelings without giving any such sway that they can become forces of brutality themselves? Is it not reasonable to say this information can and must be shared, but we will not give forum to lies and propaganda? These things seem not too hard as long as we look at and believe in facts.
1
@Anthony, Was it a graduate level course on medieval literature you’re citing? Be assured there is a plethora of right wing conservatives with both Masters and Doctorates! I find liberals to be extremely aggressive and unwilling to listen to facts, and devoid of the ability to engage in a civil discourse. They would rather just scream at you. Let’s not forget the riots, assaults, and destruction of property that occurred after Trump was elected . These acts of violence were perpetrated by the liberal left not the conservatives right!
3
"It’s a revolt of the mediocre many against the excellent few. And it is being undertaken for the sake of a radical egalitarianism in which all are included, all are equal, all are special."
Are the "excellent few" mostly white men? Kronman's book sounds like sour grapes. You won't find many women or people of color, who have been consistenly shut out of academia until recently, longing for some imaginary era of "excellence" that, in the past, was possessed by only by white men. Kronman's book is far from "brave", it's absolutely tone-deaf.
1
@msd Agree completely. I’m sure Mr. Stephens counts himself among them, so there’s one for a start.
1
Let's have completely blind admissions (no names or other identifying information) and see who the real "meritocratic" folks are! As for snowflakery, it's not just liberal who are responsible. "Send her back" is not them complaining about open discussions. Don't conflate between hate speech and free speech. You want those "others" to be aware of your sensitivities when they talk with you, but you don't have to do the same for them. Hypocrisy thy name is ...
2
A conservative Republican who denies climate change bemoans the loss of scientific and intellectual rigor on college campuses. If it wasn't so pathetic it would be funny.
3
Entirely true and brilliantly written. I am one of the academics who is disgusted by this trend. The dumbest disciplines have taken over, led by faculty who encourage non-thought over thought; conformity over dissent; emotion over reason; foot-stomping outrage over intelligent debate; punishment over persuasion; and ideology over rationality.
And they don't value inclusion at all. They want to exclude everyone who challenges them.
3
I am sick of hearing conservatives whine about left wing liberal professors. Why don't conservatives become academics, become teachers , become professors? Maybe because it's easier and more profitable to join the private sector and sit on the sidelines and complain than it is to have your tired old ideas exposed to critical thought and debate.
1
Removing the term “master” from today’s diplomas strikes me as apt, actually. I meet fewer and fewer recent master’s degree recipients who can, in fact, boast a mastery of anything.
2
It is a sign of insecurity when the listener of a speech or the reader of a book cannot take a stand on the ideas expressed by the speaker or writer until knowing to what group or school of thought the person with the ideas belongs.
Students with such timidity have never learned to think and never will learn. They hide their intellectual limitations by becoming intolerant, and they bully anyone from outside their own group.
It is interesting that Bret Stephens quotes admiringly from H.L. Mencken of Baltimore. Almost four decades after the witty and wise Mencken died, he was revealed as a virulent anti-Semite with pro-Nazi views.
Does the inclusion of Mencken prove the greater wisdom of the intolerant students of today and demonstrate an error in Professor Anthony Kronman’s warning?
Let us hope that Kronman of Yale is correct. Perhaps some of us who were in college just a few years after Mencken died and unaware of his repugnant bigotry were overly impressed by the old man’s flashy wit and irreverence. Students often make such mistakes.
So Samuel Lipman was the child of socialist parents. Does that mean that what he did as a concert pianist and the publisher of the New Criterion was somehow anti-intellectual because his views on capitalism and religion were primitive? Should we say that Music after Modernism is really a lack of understanding of the roots of a learning organization ala Donald Schoen and therefore he couldn't possible understand the theories and structure of an orchestra? Silly. Perhaps. But the results of his thinking sits in the White House at the moment. Perhaps the idea of Aristocracy has less to do with excellence than simple good luck at where you were born. That's a good thing to rebel against as one would think of Calhoun and his Acolyte, James McGill Buchanan who would classify me as a slave since I am a musician and not a "creator of wealth" merely quality of life in one of a kind products. Once again you disappoint me. Pompous you are as was my dear coach Sam.
According to Mr Stephen's one cannot strive for excellence while thinking that being excellent doesn't make them better than anyone else. Sad.
2
Obviously Bret has not read and correctly understood what Alexis de Tocqueville wrote when Bret claims democratic politics have conformist tendencies. Has he been living under a rock during extreme Republican conformist tendencies and realities?
The core argument in this piece is that "great universities [sic] are meant to nurture" a "spirit" that "is fundamentally aristocratic." According to the author, "this is necessary ... not only for its own sake, but also as an essential counterweight to the leveling and conformist tendencies of democratic politics."
According to this perspective, democracy is a big problem that requires an "aristocratic" solution. And the role for universities is then to perpetuate the "aristocratic" social order.
Is this really what the New York Times stands for?
And why, exactly, are we supposed to think of Yale as a place of intellectual excellence? This is where George W. Bush got a degree. No wonder the faculty seem a bit confused.
If the "arena for political combat" on campuses is going so badly for all of Stephens' conservative (presumably non-politically-correct) faculty, speakers, etc., how is it that the general level of public discourse in the U.S. today has become a toxic platform for every racist, conspiracy theorist and fake-intellectual (all those think tank mercenaries?), to speak his or her mind? One would think he's making an argument that the whole country has been infected with a "liberal virus" and it's spreading from college campuses throughout the land. Seems to me that conservative voices drown out the (exaggerated) wave of political correctness from college campuses. Anyone paying attention knows that conservatives will brag that "everyone wants to attend U.S. universities because they're the best in the world," so what's the problem? Perhaps they think that colleges should be like Facebook where there are no "identity filters" (a stupid term) and people can spew their nonsense behind a curtain of anonymity.
2
A gunman recently shot an unarmed black man at a convenience store parking lot because the latter had been playing loud rap music on his car radio. The gunman explained to police that he “didn’t feel safe.” Somehow I don’t think that the shooter had learned this sensitivity at Yale Law School.
I’ve taught at an elite undergraduate institution for 41 years. This opinion piece does not take into account the deliberate-provocation-business of career mischief-makers like Milo Yiannopolis, who are sometimes invited by conservative on-campus groups, just so they can complain that their (and his) freedom of speech is being violated when the campus security staff say that they can’t guarantee calm. The purported damage being done to academic elitism is manufactured by aggrieved right-wing pundits who never complain about snowflakes and victims’ rights claimants—unless they can cast themselves as the victims. For people who read such columnists as Stephens without alternative sources of understanding about what goes on on real campuses, a piece like this is damaging and misleading. Higher education is under enough attack in the current political climate without any help needed from Stephens and his ilk.
5
Kids today lack common sense and logic. Parents leave them to their iPads and other devices. Younger parents today also tend to lack the same values and sensibilities of our parents.
Generally, kids today lack critical thinking and curiosity. They don’t work with their hands and don’t know how to change a lightbulb. They know Wikipedia though. They’ve never been to a library, however, and rarely pick up a book. They get their “news”from YouTube and bloggers.
Yale, like other elite Ivy League schools, is insanely elitist. Most American politicians come from these schools.
You want to make America better? Stay away from these schools. Home school your kids. Break the grip of the corrupt and leftist teachers unions. Teach civics and American history, and not by Zinn.
Make it a requirement of HS graduation that kids know the Constitution and a deep understanding of America’s founding.
2
Stephens' case would be much stronger if he extended it to right-wing populist hostility toward intellectual achievement, science, and expertise of any kind. He professes to loathe Trump but fails to see him as a product of the American faith that a dimwitted businessman is omni-competent. Hostility toward aristocracy in Tocqueville's sense is arguably much stronger on the Right than than the Left, witness the Tea Party etc. Mencken is a good start but Sinclair Lewis is the next step.
3
"Master." A single word with multiple meanings. It is remarkable that in the Orwellian world of Republican language use that this word has provoked such concern for Mr. Stephens.
"Calhoun" is a name that has more significance since he was a a devoted advocate of slavery and minority rights (of white Southerners over the more populous Northerners) and strongly supported South Carolina's State Rights to nullify federal laws.
His name, on one of Minneapolis' city lakes has recently been the focus of attention and the name Lake Calhoun was changed to its original Indian name, Bde Maka Ska.
In both the South and the North we have relics of slavery's past. These relics, in names, symbols, and statues, are not to be venerated or whitewashed under the notion of "tradition."
Words and symbols have meanings. As Mr. Stephens might have noticed, the Trump administration has appointed many people to lead Federal agencies whose missions they oppose, like the Environmental Protection Agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and others.
If we Americans want to share reality and together address our nation's serious problems like Climate "Change," Unequal Justice," and "Voter Rights" we must respect words, their meanings, and their effects.
1
"Master." A single word with multiple meanings. It is remarkable that in the Orwellian world of Republican language use that this word has provoked such concern for Mr. Stephens.
"Calhoun" is a name that has more significance since he was a a devoted advocate of slavery and minority rights (of white Southerners over the more populous Northerners) and strongly supported South Carolina's State Rights to nullify federal laws.
His name, on one of Minneapolis' city lakes has recently been the focus of attention and the name Lake Calhoun was changed to its original Indian name, Bde Maka Ska.
In both the South and the North we have relics of slavery's past. These relics, in names, symbols, and statues, are not to be venerated or whitewashed under the notion of "tradition."
Words and symbols have meanings. As Mr. Stephens might have noticed, the Trump administration has appointed many people to lead Federal agencies whose missions they oppose, like the Environmental Protection Agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and others.
If we Americans want to share reality and together address our nation's serious problems like Climate "Change," Unequal Justice," and "Voter Rights" we must respect words, their meanings, and their effects.
2
University professors are largely liberal in their thinking and actions because they are generally well-read and well-traveled. People of a right-wing, let me say fascist, persuasion tend to read less and know less about the world and how it works. Trump is a prime example of this. Why do most Americans think otherwise?
Slogans do not constitute intellectual thought. The National Socialist Party had slogans, the John Birch Society had slogans, the Communist parties of China and the Soviet Union had slogans. The ranting at Trump's rallies are only that. A university is different.
Many people in these comments have correctly noted that these are kids. I was a kid in the Berkeley streets in 1964 when the Regents fashioned the university as a factory--raw material from the high schools in, perfect citizens coming out the other end. We are all a little older now, but we still know that a university is a special place where ideas are free to flow, however repugnant they may be from time to time. I agree with Stephens here, but I think the identity politics and LGBTxyz will pass with time.
12
I would say that Mr. Stephens has a habit of adopting an 'us/them' attitude in his approach to many of the subjects that he chooses to write about and here we have another example.
I have no experience of working in academic institutions but common sense tells me that they are many and varied both in their structure and administrative approach and the way they interface with the many questions that arise when they are faced with decisions about academic freedom, particularly of speech, on campus.
Mr. Stephens' simplistic attitude does not do justice to the complexity of the problem.
3
College professors kowtowing to students caused the pronoun problems were currently subjected to with job applications now asking what pronoun we’d like to be used to refer to each of us. A blank box allows the applicants to create their own pronouns. The gay community meanwhile keeps adding more letters: LGBTQIA . Meanwhile they have the nerve to call straight people cisgender. A term as meaningless as non-binary. What happened to the MLA? Do we have no authority on the language beyond the whims of college kids?
87
They can't even agree on what all of the letters in LGBTQIA stand for. "T" used to be transgender but some say that is not inclusive enough and replaced it with the meaningless 'trans.' Q was used by some as queer and by others as questioning, and now it seems that Q means both of those. And don't forget that many are adding a "+" to the end, a la LGBTQIA+
But heaven help YOU if you don't keep up on all of these things, because you don't want to be a bigot.
2
You clearly don’t know what any of the words you’re maligning mean or why they matter to people who use them. Learn first, criticize second.
1
I find the term cisgender highly offensive.
6
Diversity and inclusion is not about “feelings”. And it is not the death of the meritocracy some think existed in the good old days. It is instead an effort to clear the way for a true meritocracy, where people are judged for the content of their intellect and character and not dismissed because of the color of their skin, their gender, or who they love. Any other view of diversity and inclusion strikes me as superficial and lazy.
213
@J. Cosentino Diversity and inclusion are surely needed for a true meritocracy to exist; but it can't be accomplished if reverse-discrimination exists.
30
@Doug Marcille rebalancing a system that has historically been weighed toward the exclusion of certain groups is not 'reverse discrimination.'
24
@J. Cosentino -
I’d agree with your Comment if you changed “is not”, in your first sentence, to “should not be”, and “is” to “should be” elsewhere.
Bret Stephens’ point is that the ideas of diversity and merit are being corrupted in radical parlance.
9
Meanwhile, the situation at 2nd tier public institutions is remarkably different. We are being quietly asphyxiated by Republican controlled legislatures that neither value or even understand much of what we do. State support has largely dried up and what this means is that while the average taxpayer saves a few dollars a year, students go into greater and greater debt to pay the increased tuition costs. Both the right and the left are promoting and pushing often sub-standard community college educations as the equivalent of the first two years of a four-year institution (again, as a hedge against disappearing state support). States such as Ohio have devised "college credit" programs in the K-12 systems wherein students as young as twelve can earn college credit by taking a "college level" class offered by their high school teachers (another shell game marketed as a cost-saving measure). State schools such as these were created to offer a high quality education to under-served areas of the country and to students who could neither afford nor gain admittance to places such as Yale. They quite literally transform lives and sadly, they are dying. The loss will be devastating to students, communities and regions alike. Still, Mr. Stephens (and others...I'm looking at you, Mr. Bruni), burn endless amounts of ether on issues that affect only a tiny fraction of students. Places like Yale will survive this latest crisis. Others won't be so lucky.
437
@g. harlan--I do the hiring for my medium sized firm and over the past three years the resumes and cover letters that I receive have become almost unreadable. The largest number of these is from the local state college population. In my company, reading and writing are still important proficiencies, but it's more and more difficult to find people who can put a sentence together on paper. It used to be that state colleges could be depended on to graduate students able to step into entry level jobs with ease. No more. Where will America's future workers come from if we allow our educational standards to slip even further?
33
@g. Harlan: The massive defects of liberty to enslave democracy require a very dumbed-down public to persist.
12
@g. harlan
When state schools stop funding 24 hour bias response teams and the legions of noxious diversity bureaucrats who exist only as PC thoughtcrime enforcers, people will start caring about funding for state schools. Until then, they receive more funding than they deserve.
14
The greatest threat to the great universities is the business-ification of academia. Not the students.
608
@Nancy Let's call it financialization, see housing, etc.
6
Check the salaries paid to administrative staff and celebrity profs.
11
@Nancy My state's flagship U's annual price for in-state/resident tuition, room/board and fees is now $45K...more if your major is business or engineering. Even with that absurdly high amount, they still must depend on the mostly cash paying out-of-state students who pay 10K more, and a lot of poverty paid contract adjunct profs, to keep the doors open for the overpaid throngs of administrators and coaches to live their fantasy lives.
14
I hate to say it, but the conservatives are right about this issue.
The anti-excellence movement is no different from Maoism. Under Chairman Mao, professors, doctors, business leaders were all removed from their posts, sent to the countryside for "re-education," and replaced by ordinary citizens. The horrors that followed have been the subject of many movies.
Amazing how quickly the anti-excellence movement has become the new standard.
Identity politics, wokeness, white privilege, safe spaces, the patriarchy, refusal to hear anything that hurts anyone's feelings -- all became mainstream in the past five years. Now we have Kirsten Gillibrand lecturing us about white privilege.
In the interest of diversity and inclusion, it has become fashionable and acceptable to judge people on their skin color and gender--if they are white and male, that is. Now everyone wants to be surrounded by people who "look like me." It's the opposite of the colorblind society that previous generations of civil rights leaders sacrified for.
Brave of Bret Stephens to write this piece, and I applaud him for it.
550
@Unconventional Liberal - It was always acceptable to judge people on their skin color and gender. The gatekeepers of "merit" were largely white and male, and they chose to be surrounded by people who "looked like them." I am old enough to remember segregated-by-gender Help Wanted ads, with the secretarial jobs designated for women, and everything else, literally everything else, restricted to men. And it went without saying, white men. Did this exclusivity result in so much excellence that the human race did not need more? Is there anyone who would seriously try to make that case? The effort to expand the talent pool by expanding opportunity to the excluded has put a lot of people out of joint, it seems. Sure, it's awkward and ham-handed sometimes. But can you actually argue that the old way was better? Bret Stephens is trying, god knows. But alas, dear sirs, that genie is not going back into the bottle.
50
@Unconventional Liberal
Your comment made me think of Donald Trump. He somehow uses identity politics, a weird kind of "wokeness," and seems to judge people based on their skin color and gender. At least his rallies fall back on cheap appeals to the worst impulses.
He is also very sensitive when it comes to his own feelings. It's incredible to me how often his important decisions fall back on someone being "nice" to him. Or on the opposite impulse to undermine policies of those who criticize him.
It's been a long time since I've spent time on college campuses. My exposure to college students is limited to my grandchildren. They don't seem to exhibit the characteristics you and Stephens cite.
36
@Unconventional Liberal
Our economy rewards excellence as does the entire elite university system. Getting into Yale or Yale law likely means a 4.0 in high school and also in college. Even the liberal arts are rewarded, since if you can write or create, you can be a YouTuber .. STEM goes to high paying jobs in the tech world.
Harder to say what the economy is doing to the merely good or heaven forbid the mediocre or the even not so particularly smart or maybe not so particularly hard working ..
Leadership is also important.
Your old privilege, eh, not so important.
Diverse people want diverse leaders and diverse leadership styles.
11
That which does not kill us, makes us stronger.
Safety makes us timid and atrophied.
In comparison to Yale, the University of Chicago in 2016 sent to incoming freshman a book titled “Academic Freedom and the Modern University: The Experience of the University of Chicago" and an accompanying letter notifying them that the school would not adopt "trigger warnings" or "safe spaces" which it viewed as antithetical to both academic freedom and the proper functioning of an institution of higher learning. As stated in that letter: "Our commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so-called 'trigger warnings,' we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual 'safe spaces' where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own."
Just goes to show, not every elite college lacks an informed perspective and a backbone.
1441
I don’t understand the ado about trigger warnings. I went to a small, private liberal arts college and only ever encountered them when reading works that depicted rape, and never as a means of censorship. Trigger warnings have never carried the implication that the triggering material is innately bad or should be skipped, they just acknowledge that some students who carry trauma might better engage intellectually with certain material after emotionally preparing themselves. I’m always a little bewildered by the claim that these warnings are anti-intellectual or forms of censorship.
87
@Res Ipsa Loquitur Thank you for highlighting what the U of C bravely stated and still adheres to. As a graduate, '95, I was proud to see the community and university take this stand. I would not have had the experience nor the discomfort of challenging my own ideas and perspective without that vibrant, open environment. I would not trade that experience, as it was foundational to who I am today and I am better for it.
57
@Corey B In my opinion, one goes to college to immerse oneself in the ferment of ideas, not to avoid offense. People approaching adulthood need to grow a backbone. If they've been so sheltered before entering college that they can't face what the world throws at them, the school isn't doing them a service sheltering them further. This is not to say that they need to adopt views they find offensive. But they are at the age when they should be developing the skills to counter ideas they disagree with. They can't do this if they're allowed not to face them.
88
If you have every operated on the inside of a University faculty setting, as I have, you will quickly understand that Mr. Stephens' idea that our elite universities are the gatekeepers of some noble and aristocratic spirit, is as fallacious as the bogeyman he pits it against, the tyranny of left wing student ideology. Yes, the grand settings are in place and the endowments reach into the billions, but the culture of greed, envy, small-mindedness, incompetence and ruthless ambition permeate university leadership and faculty - including at Harvard and Yale. And when students place themselves as a challenge to the corrosive effects of this dysfunction, they are attacked with the same, tired tropes Mr. Stephens trots out in his essay. As Saul Bellow once said, "University politics are so vicious because the stakes are so small."
6
Here here! The trend is real and disturbing. I think we can more effectively resist this in the sciences where I can and do explain that opinions and feelings don't change evidence and aren't worth much. Truth requires no cultural sensitivity. My non-science students often seem to have been taught (in humanities classes) that opinions and feelings carry the same weight as evidence. They do not.
271
@Sci guy Don't be so sanguine. The sciences are not going to be spared. Population geneticists are already feeling heat from the left, and some self described trans activists are as anti-science as Christian fundamentalists.
16
@Sci guy I am a Phd-level scientist, who taught at the university level for several years before joining industry a decade ago. Of course "feelings and opinions don't change evidence" regarding the subject matter. But it is inarguable that that science is a human endeavor, and aspects of culture and identity absolutely do impact how science is learned, taught, and practiced. The history of academia includes an ugly and commonplace dynamic to deny knowledge and opportunity to certain groups--the chance to develop and display excellence--and then declare those groups incapable. As credentialed intellectuals, we know better than anyone that knowledge is power. People agitating for more diversity and inclusion recognize that the aforementioned dynamic is a tactic for keeping power in the in-group and denying it to the out-group. Sneering at their efforts lessens all of us. Humankind desperately needs to cultivate the strengths and capabilities of all individuals--to benefit from the excellence in any person that might otherwise go unrecognized and undeveloped. I have lived this: I was a girl growing up poor in a collapsing Rust Belt town, with straight As and stratospheric test scores. A generation before, there is no way I would have ended up a PhD scientist. My current company is a titan in scientific innovation and excels, specifically, through diversity and inclusion. We draw from the best talent regardless identity or background. The world needs more of this!
32
@Kaleberg
And climate scientists are denounced by the right as “fake news.”
7
I feel obligated to respond. Like many of the other writers, I have been part of all sorts of academic communities from ivy league institutions, to large public universities, to universities outside of the US, to small private colleges. I am finishing my career in a small faith-based college dedicated to training professionals for the community.
A high percentage of our students are first generation college students, or children of immigrants, or are from very small towns. We have some students with learning disabilities. Many work; others suffer from PTSD. Many are unable to separate themselves from family problems back home (not always the students' fault).
The secret to any classroom is learning enough about the students to meet them where they are. My courses frequently include difficult and delicate topics, including diversity and inclusion. Maintaining an open and welcoming class means that we are able to tackle difficult topics effectively. That is part of any education--learning how to think, research, present analysis and then reevaluate.
Some of my students astound me, surprisingly themselves as well as me. If given half a chance, many thrive. That is what college is supposed to do.
We owe it to the students, wherever they are, NOT to make assumptions about them.
192
@Babs Meeting students where they are? I cringe when I hear colleagues say this. I expect my students to rise above where they are. What is the point otherwise? They can stay home and be met where they are. My students are incredibly diverse and I respect that but at the end of the day, though I care for them as a person, professionally, I only care if they know the subject matter or not. If they have learned critical thinking or not. Their feelings about evidence and objective reality don't change it in any way and I tell them as much. Not all opinions are valid and becoming a critical thinker requires recognizing that some of your own may not be. I will bend over backwards to help them but at the end of the day, as a professor, where they come from and their feelings are irrelevant to me. I mentor and guide and counsel but grades are performance based. I owe them and society no less. Would you want to look up from an operating table and know your surgeon never had their "safe space" challenged by scary truths?
223
@Sci guy I appreciate your comments. Meeting the students where they does not compromise quality. It means that it one can build bridges with the students. I also mentor and guide; my grades are also based on performance. We engage in debates; we learn about the world around us. We acknowledge that our opinions, and sometimes feelings, affect how we work. Ignoring them shortchanges the students.
Ironically, you should know that one of our children is an anesthesiologist at a major research hospital; that is how we equipped him to deal with the most brutal training that I have ever seen. We have total confidence in him.
23
@Sci guy
I did not discuss my feelings with my professors.
There were no "safe spaces" or "trigger warnings"
when I was in college.
However, I did feel the need to align my views with that of certain professors in order to succeed in their classes. Some of my professors were socialists, and one had communist leanings, so in order to get good grades, I had to pretend that I shared their views.
While I have no intention of running for office , and it's unlikely that there is any record of my college papers and exam essays ,given that there were no computers when I attended college, if I were running for office, and were those papers accessible, I'd be accused of being a communist, while what I was doing was doing what I needed to do in order to get an "A" in the class.
"Not all opinions are valid and becoming a critical thinker requires recognizing that some of your own may not be. "
What is a student to do when her critical thinking results in the finding that the opinions of some of her professors may not be valid ? I am referring to political views of professors, rather than to objective facts.
6
"today’s student activists don’t want more freedom to act, speak, and think as they please. Usually they want less"
They want less allowed to someone else. For themselves, they reject any limits at all. They speak "truth" and think they have a monopoly on that.
5
As someone with nearly as many years (32) in university education as Kronman, and who, moreover, has not spent my entire career in only one elite institution, I have to caution readers about the inaccuracies in this piece. To paint all universities--private, public, secular, non-secular, technical, liberal arts-based--shows the naivete with which people outside of education are asked to approach colleges and universities. I am not judging Kronman here because I have not yet read his book, but I am questioning Stephens' research and objectivity in the article itself. BYU is about as far from Berkeley, for example, politically, structurally and administratively as could be--so to paint both with one cloddy brushstroke is uninformed. Indeed, this type of article perpetuates the simplistic us/them mentality that is sadly sweeping the nation right now, and is also the very limited and acritical thinking that colleges and universities exist to eradicate. I urge all who are interested in the state and future of higher education to contact those in your local or regional community who are intricately involved with it on a daily basis.
763
Daughter,
I get where you’re coming from, but schools like Berkeley and Yale are in a different league than schools like BYU and Baylor. They’re among the best in the world, cultivating some of the most talented minds. (Ostensibly, anyway.) They’re also standard-bearers of American higher education. When Harvard sneezes, the rest of universities catch a cold.
20
@Daughter
Not intended so much as a reply as an expansion.
You couldn't be more correct in your critique of the flaws in Stephen's argument or in your assessment of the us/them divide it illustrates.
I'd go further. Stephen's simplistic presentation is more than just as exampe of that divide; it and similar Republican simplifications are one of the major causes of the widening, lamentable gulf that afflcts our politics.
The Right always needs an enemy it can label black to their white, evil to their good, and the handiest way to find and identify such (other than in conveniently color-coded human beings, something Republicans are hardly averse to doing) is to make thing simple, especially when they're not. Abortion--bad. Socialism--bad. Taxes--bad. Firearms--good. And now Inclusion and its possible challenges--bad, bad, bad.
There's more, of course, but that's the idea. Keep it simple. Never admit there are shades of gray, that things are complicated.
And each silly presentation, like Mr. Stephens' today, blesses and encourages more of the same.
Especially from the Right.
99
@Daughter
There is the stuff that makes news on campuses. Then there is the real culture, which is mostly concerned with access to courses, bad teaching assistants and social organizations. There are a handful of activists that make news but most just shrug their shoulders.
That said 18 year olds are more like 14 year olds and rather fragile. I remember freshman driving along across the country. Now their parents fly to pick them up. Because of the 21-year old drinking age, they are reminded till they are 20 that they are still not fully responsible.
4
Stevens point is very well made. There is a dark side to what is emanating from the intellectual circles these days. Especially as it gets absorbed by the larger culture. Reason is being overwhelmed by affect, and it shows up in our civic life as well. Ad hominem criticisms are everywhere from Trump's declaration that a Hispanic judge cannot rule fairly on his case, to the critique of males have no relevant views on abortion. The idea matters not, it's the identity that is central. Until we begin to reflect more carefully on our reasoning, this dark side will take us to places we would rather not go.
114
@Hpower The notion that males have no relevant views on abortion stems from a genuine belief that only the person whose womb is involved has any relevant view on that abortion.
5
thanks for writing this. as a professional who works in HR, I view what's happening on campuses as a sign of what we will have to deal with in the workplace within a few years. while I laud many of the shifts in thinking regarding diversity and inclusion, the over-emphasis of feelings is leading to the slowing down of American businesses.
3
My problem with this article is not so much concerned with what Stephens says, as it is with the usual boring NYT focus on the Ivy League. I fully understand that our system as it's currently configured ensures that the higher echelons of our government are populated almost exclusively by graduates of a very small number of universities. Perhaps that might account for the dearth of new ideas and the feckless leadership we see in both political parties.
My point is that the overwhelming majority of young Americans are educated at public universities, many of which are in the very first rank of intellectual productivity and attainment. It baffles me that no one in the national media seems to be interested in what's happening, for example, at the flagship state universities. Yes, we are certainly aware of the teapot tempests on the East Coast, but somehow we manage to keep our universities moving forward, and we continue to educate excellent students from all over the world. An occasional acknowledgment of our work, and our challenges, would be most appreciated out here in flyover country.
10
@Buckeye Hillbilly
If conservatives like Stephens didn’t decry the supposed radicalism of Harvard and Yale then there would no stories to counteract the fact that unqualified mediocrities like Jared Kushner are routinely granted admission on the basis of what conservatives universally recognize as the only true measure of excellence: money.
Censorship, diverse opinions, rebellious students, institutional piety, idealogical warfare amid calls for respect and tolerance have been the staples of campus life for as long as universities have existed. The issues change, but the roles, strategies and tactics that you criticize were a part of campus life when I was an undergraduate as they are today.
I remember the screening of the film Night and Fog. The film and the organization sponsoring the showing were controversial. I was paid to operate the projector but I would have attended just to learn more about the film and the organization. The film was great, the student speakers and the chants from the audience made an impression and were not so different from the student actions you describe.
After the film, I was putting away the film, the extension cords and letting the projector cool before storing it. A janitor came in. He had stood in the back for a part of the film and then turned abruptly and left. I asked what he thought of the film. He showed me his tattoo and told me how he had been forced to clean those cattle cars and how the SS had behaved while he worked.
The controversy over the campus idealogical wars among privileged students and faculty has always seemed to me to be overblown, if not pretentious.
5
@OldBoatMan
An Interesting story and I agree with your summary, but did the man share anymore thoughts about the film other than his experience?
2
“Would an untenured professor have the guts to say what he does?”
As an untenured professor I am not even in a position to publicly acknowledge his arguments without fear of losing my position. There is zero evidence of administrative support for traditional academic freedoms at most institutions.
21
Spot on - but the article doesn't go far enough. While the de facto realities on the college campuses undermine the pursuit of excellence and the free exchange of ideas they are not codified into law.
The real problem is the spillover outside the campus into actual law. This is sorrowfully most manifest in the Dem party. The sentiment espoused is now written into the Democratic charters strong quota systems designed to ensure 'egalitarianism'.
Today by law exactly 50% of the delegates at any Democratic voting convention must be women, and 50% men. There must be special rights given to minorities as delegates as well.
A problem is that not that many women are really interested in politics and the result is you get the reserved voting slots being filled with the most ideological of women; same for minorities.
Imagine if when you went to the voting booth and were told that exactly 50% of the officials elected had to be women and 50% men. What an irrational election it would be.
Yet, that is the farm system of Dems and why no new moderate will ever again get nominated within the Dem party.
That is why you will find a Kamala Harris a viable candidate for President focused on an issue of busing from over 40 years ago.
It is also the reason the only moderate Dem candidates are for the most part so old. A moderate in todays Dem party, is at a codified disadvantage and with each rung experiences the cumulative deliberate skewing of rational views.
13
@Ben Ross: "Universities" were conceived to expose students to everything, and a sampling of everybody.
@Ben Ross
The rules of the Democratic Party are not laws.
And don’t worry, we’ve had 45 male presidents. You likely will never have to worry about being governed by a woman.
@kkseattle
You are too focused on the gender. I could not care less whether its a woman, a black woman or man and so forth.
I care about ability but more about positions taken.
I am in the Dem. party and if you belong to it there are laws - which have ramifications that extend beyond the party. You can be kicked out for example saying you are opposed to abortions, and on and on it goes.
Yes, i believe there are differences between genders in interests and abilities. But i do look upon people as individuals - as do most people which is why Obama won his election.
I recognize the brilliance of CRISPR discoverers Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna.
But I do not believe a Shakespeare, Newton, Einstein achieved what they did because of white privilege - there was something deep within them that propelled them. And none of them would be here without a woman.
Right now we have about a 100 Dem women in congress and mostly what i see coming out of it at least in MA is the criminalization of bad male behavior, along with a cultural meme that seeks to obliterate anything whose origins are tied to white males.
The tragedy is that the new dogma - doesn't permit talking about population (devastating to earth and all inhabitants) and instead of giving credit to the unbelievable sacrifices by whites to help minority groups - they are cast as devils.
These so called best intentions are a road to hell; and begins in the colleges with the elites who look down upon common sense.
Mr. Stephens you have done a masterful job of using a one sided example to support your opinion.
I agree that "the everybody gets a trophy" generation of college student may lack a sense of balance about the world. However, Yale and the other elite colleges, where wealthy kids go to listen to people who never got their heads out of a book may not be the best places to gauge what is happening on most college campuses.
For example, are the campuses were Christians go to the learn how to advance the interests of conservative Christianity at the expense of minorities, the poor, immigrants and the LGBTQ+ communities churning with unrest? Are people with different views welcome to speak on christian campus? No and no.
Question? Are the non-wealthy college students at state and community colleges engaging in the revolt you call "...the mediocre many against the excellent few." They are not. The majority of college students work hard to get and education to help them navigate a rigged economy and the systemic injustice faced by majority. The lawlessness of Trump, Barr, Moscow Mitch, Leningrad Lindsey and conservatives in general is obvious to the most causal observer — including students.
Let's not forget that W. packed the courts, the DoJ and the government with graduates from christian colleges. From where this 70+ white guy sits our divided Nation is a strategy for conservatives to ensure christian white men remain in power. Enough said.
24
@old soldier Your comment is a perfect example of what Bret is saying, the same progressive trope that systemic injustice has held people back as opposed to the objective criteria of merit. And have you been to a Christian college? They allow all opinions and have a faculty more liberal than the population at large. They do, however, preach the Ten Commandments. How dare they indoctrinate people with moral rules from an old, white God! We need to include moral rules from every ethnicity. Hogwash, those rules are universal.
It’s time for university professors and student life professionals to read Anti Intellectualism in American Life, by Richard Hofstadter. We now have the totalitarianism of the left on today’s college campus. Add that to the laughable grade inflation and we have today’s college student who doesn’t know what they don’t know. By removing required courses at so many colleges students aren’t exposed to a broad look at our intellectual traditions from here and around the world. Students take classes that help reinforce their narrow world view. As a student at Brooklyn College in the 1960’s, I complained with the best of them about the required courses ?As a psychologist I became so grateful for the broad education those classes gave me, they helped me develop a much more sophisticated sense of the human condition and made me a better therapist and person. I went on to work in higher education for over thirty years. In that time I watched the changes in higher education. Some changes were long overdue: women entering fields that were closed to them in the past and more diversity on campus. However the grade inflation that came along made college an anti intellectual enterprise. As higher education took in students, of all colors ,who had poor high school preparation for college ,grades began to inflate. After all we couldn’t fail all of those students, especially if we felt their poor academic preparation wasn’t their fault. Academic rigor is often seen as wounding.
11
On a different note...
Stephens, and for his part Dr. Kronman, seem to miss some important elements about campus social dynamics. A 4-year on-campus undergraduate degree typical at high-status schools like Yale is essentially one big experiment in adolescent socialization.
You're mostly talking about 18 or 19 year olds fresh out of high school. They're learning how to interact with peers. Egalitarianism isn't exactly radical when you walk into freshman year orientation. You don't know who will become the future dean of some prestigious university and who will flunk out before junior year. Makes sense to treat everyone equally from the start then, doesn't it?
Youth is about potential, not past. The future is still unknown for these students. Pontificating from the lofty platform of tenure and status is easy. You only have hindsight to deal with. Being young in a time of transition and uncertainty is very hard. Stephens seems to have forgotten this lesson.
6
@Andy
Everything you write was just as true in 1969 or 1919 or 1869, but the incoming student bodies of those years didn't want to tear down the institution in order to have only their immature views reflected by its professors, or to feel 'safe'. Graduating classes are in for a big attitudinal adjustment when they go out into the real world and start meeting people who don't give a bleeding damn whether they feel 'safe' or not and judge them on their qualifications rather than on their feelings.
As a longtime staff member of a liberal arts college, I can say with certainty that Mr. Stephens is conflating two vastly different concepts and practices. Diversity and inclusion for most simply means fostering greater representation of historically absent or marginalized groups of people in admissions, committees, and recognition. On our campus, it has nothing to do with the issues regarding speech/speaker invitation or attitudes towards faculty that Stephen's author describes at Yale. Those issues are not strictly the province of students of color or other underrepresented groups--they are generational. Stephens is equating division and inclusion with low standards of intellectual achievement and questioning of "aristocratic" thinkers. Disturbing and simply not true.
38
@Mary
I believe Bret is using “Ye Olde Dogg Whistle”.
To conservatives have any other guiding principles?
1
@Mary Spot on and very well articulated, unlike Mr. Stephens' piece. I also think that the book he is trumpeting, even from the references given, seems like a classic case of beginning with a strong opinion and then trying to justify it with incongruous and relatively abstract points. Ironically, that is all about "feeling," is it not?
1
It’s not mere politics. It’s the modern, philosophical hatred of man’s independent, focused mind that Ayn Rand warned about in _Atlas Shrugged_. Leftists respect the mind only when it's dependent and unfocused, trapped within itself, abstracting, not from the perception of concrete reality, but from a transcendental ideal. In _The DIM Hypothesis_, Leonard Peikoff says that this nihilist trend may cause a religious dictatorship in two generations. There’s still time to return to Greece and the Enlightenment.
3
@Sammy Azalea Equating anything in Ayn Rand with the wisdom and lack of hubris of the ancient Greeks and the curiosity of the Enlightenment is an affront to decency and logic, sorry.
1
@Sammy Azalea... Spare me the Ayn Rand notion that bad manners are the symptoms of an independent, focused mind!
1
Brilliant article. I am an MIT grad. I miss simple old days of studying, drinking and partying at Wellesley College. My worry is that current climate ultimately leads to diminished quality of education and a grave societal cost of ignoring individual merit.
12
@SK
I like beer.
I worked and studied until age 50 to achieve excellence and knowledge. I was so proud. Now my achievements are put down, my search for excellence is elitist.
This is not right!
Students who believe that the word mastering ( knowledge) should be removed from universities are bringing our country down. If one has personal pain about what a word means to them and only to them, they have choices.
The choice of changing the world is not one of them.
14
The US mediocracy has been growing for decades. One element of this growth is ignorance of the fact that sensitivities and empathy are thoughtful and bidirectional human interactions. History informs us that we suffer, in many cases horribly, the consequences of this ignorance. And we cannot yell away the vicious cycle of thoughtless resentment and anger. This is much bigger than what is happening on campus.
5
Any analysis of these issues is doomed to fail, as this one largely does, unless it understands social and cultural fragmentation in a contemporary postmodern context. What we are seeing is precisely a breakup of the old liberal consensus and mode of analysis that largely cannot explain itself on its own terms, and certainly cannot explain or defend itself on terms that satisfy contemporary critics. In the end it is largely a crisis of authority and domain that is especially difficult for any arena in which these have been (for desirable reasons) loosely defined--the looseness having been built, critics point out, largely on a de facto situation of relative similarity and homogeneity of outlook and worldview, which in turn were a reflection of cultural and social composition. In short, liberal and left-leaning professors are feeling the force, from both left and right and more importantly from new cultural directions, of a more diverse world in which bourgeois liberal consensus is no longer the norm any more than the 'WASP' establishment that preceded and gave rise to it in universities such as Yale. This will continue to be a source of conflict and debate for the foreseeable future.
6
You can’t have inclusion unless you include all, meaning the aristocracy as well, in a frank, rigorous and intellectual process. Intellectual process which is not afraid to explore every aspect, is the standard of excellence.
2
Bret Stephens amazingly fails to give a single example of the behavior he condemns in his op-ed. Let me offer one case, my own, for his and your consideration. I am a 78 year old emeritus professor at the University of Richmond. About two years ago I objected to the university's invitation to Karl Rove to conduct a public discussion of immigration and refugees with the institution's president. I objected on the grounds that as the chairman of George W. Bush's "Iraq Committee," Rove took a leading role in deceiving the US into that illegitimate war. Among the many dire consequences were huge surges in population displacement, increased numbers of refugees, and immigration. Debates on campus are often about real cases like this, not the unnamed ones of Stephens's superficial op-ed.
15
@Gary Shapiro: Academia tends to be a club of mutual back-scratching for credibility and visibility for all participants.
3
Your objection is fine, it’s the universities caving into it! Why, within that forum, couldn’t the president and people in the audience said this directly to the speaker and had a legitimate debate?
@Gary Shapiro. Gary, you seem to want the columnist to cite specific examples of professors being "bullied, denounced, demoted," etc. This is an op-ed not a scholarly article, and it's purpose is to express a viewpooint, not make an academic argument.
I'm your age and also an emeritus professor, and I'm sickened by precisely the kinds of campus events alluded to in this opinion piece. Re your stand against inviting Karl Rove to your campus: I'm no fan of Karl Rove, but disinviting him would have deprived your university community of an opportunity to discuss the important issues he represented. What were you concerned about --that students hearing him would be brainwashed into supporting a war they had previously opposed? Not at any campus I'm familiar with!
What an odd piece! It posits that competence, ingenuity, intelligence, mastery (what the hell is "masterliness"?) are aristocratic. They are middle-class virtues: the virtues of a craftsman. Aristocrats for the most part are insufferable boobies.
Mastery of oneself is a personal virtue, available without a college education. Somehow, very few people avail themselves of it.
The point of a college education is to gain mastery of, in Matthew Arnold's formulation, "the best that has been thought and said," whether by poets, philosophers, mathematicians, physicists, or anyone else who has achieved mastery. We need mastery of the past to build a future on a solid foundation.
This isn't aristocratic or elitist. It's labor. And it isn't just for college students. It's for all of us. Get to work!
40
@Daniel D'Arezzo
Right on.
2
Mr. Stephens implies that students of color are holding the university "hostage" with anti-intellectual rants and demands about their feelings.
Students of all stripes--especially white students who make up the majority of today's univeristy--have and are rebelling because that's what young people do. Mr. Stephens only compares today's students to a single moment in time--the Vietnam era--as if that's the one and only time students have ever pushed back.
While students may not always choose the most effective methods of protest, generations of students across time have zeroed in on biases that have long marked a racist, sexist, homophobic and anti-working class university landscape.
Think the abolition of slavery in the 19th C; think votes for women before 1920; in the 20th C think divestment from apartheid South Africa.
Universities were and still do reflect social and cultural biases of everyday society, because professors who make knowledge are part of everyday society.
For example, all major U.S. universities (including Harvard and Yale) were major proponents of eugenics well into the 20th century!
If Mr. Stephens wants to gripe, how about the commodification of student athletics? What about the fact that universities use football and basketball as fundraising, so that students athletes are no longer valued as students but as a means to more cash flow?
15
@rose If you are right, why then do students demonstrate against the presence of Israeli or Jewish speakers -- think of the centuries of discrimination against them (which continued up to at least 1958 when a a Wall Street law firm "withdrew" a job offer after learning I was a "Semite"); think of the Holocaust, think of the current constant threat of destruction by Iran?
I'm glad the NYT is inclusive and shares diverse view points. This columnists view point is mostly from the white male perspective and although I disagree with most of his views, it's informative to understand the white male perspective just as it is everyone's. What the writer doesn't understand is that excellence is the result of inclusiveness not arrogance.
14
Out of the tens if not hundreds of thousands of speakers invited to the nations 2500 public and private universities last year, student groups only attempted to disinvite forty-three. Only about half that number were actually disinvited.
According to data compiled by Jeffrey Sachs at the center-right Niskanen center, the percentage of college campuses with restrictive speech codes has fallen from 74 percent in 2008 to 28 percent in 2018, and most of those are conservative religious universities.
Professors are more likely to be fired for expressing liberal opinions than conservative ones.
Only about one in fifty students say they would participate in a protest intended to de-platform a speaker, and fewer than one in a hundred would use violence to that end.
I think Stephens is using the most egregious cases to construct an ideologically self-serving narrative about illiberal leftists and rational right wingers, when in most cases, from the campus to the broader culture, it's exactly the opposite.
35
@D.A.
But Stephens and Kronman *know* there’s a problem because they *feel* there’s a problem—regardless of facts.
These opinion pieces could write themselves. They always refer to some terrible thing the multicultural left did that in the end had no terrible consequences. They often make it sound like reasonable requests are made by barbarians. Calhoun so loved slavery that he wanted whites to also be placed into bondage under a new planter aristocracy. Does that really call for a building named after you? They always concern a Left oriented university. When a few years ago a group of students at Liberty College wanted to hold a forum that would suggest Christians should not support Trump they were told not only that they could not hold it on campus but that anyone who allowed them to hold it at their churches would be barred from any further interaction with the school. Of course Brett never wrote about that one. Brett and Ross are not satisfied with a GOP that rules the Courts, the Presidency, the Senate and most states. It causes them agitation that there is still anyplace where there is majority resistence to the Trump dictatorship. They dont just want authoritarianism, they want toltalitarianism.
22
Yale is a good example of the self serving motives of student ideology.
Students demanded that Calhoun be dropped on building because he was connected to slavery. And yet Yale's namesake was a slave trader himself.
It seems the Yale diploma name is too important for principled stand. It's not about inclusion. It's about power.
9
Someday someone will correctly make the argument that this was part of an implicit conspiracy to keep African Americans, Hispanics, and any other minority group that have been deprived of a good education , from achieving the same or higher levels of excellence as the whites. These universities that claim to be more inclusive are in reality creating intellectual segregation — by supporting lowered standards of intellect and knowledge for the minority students. This is undermining the one thing these students seek at universities — a real education.
1
@Pundit Where is your support for the statement that these universities are supporting lowered standards of intellect for the minority students? This is an assumption used to smear Obama, that he had an inferior intellect and only gained access to the elite universities based on his racial background--as opposed to the so-called superior knowledge and intellect of the legacy students?
Would an untenured professor dare to say what he says? Wrong question. Would even a tenured professor dare to do so? No. As the “Nancy Pelosi” of a department populated by “Squad” members, I learned the hard way that I had two choices: raise questions and lose the job I spent my twenties and early thirties in poverty to get, or keep my mouth shut, affirm, affirm, affirm, toe the party line, and continue to make the modest living afforded by my meager college salary. Stark choices, but what else can one do with an English degree?
8
@Mirjam. Indeed, what can one do with many different degrees?
And yet, colleges and universities were not created as trade schools.
I know well educated persons with lackluster careers and con artists who have soared to great economic heights
1
@Mirjam
They can retire.
1
This article is, of course, flawed by its lack of precision. What is Stephens talking about, really?
We all want excellence. So, for example, to imagine a typical campus case, out of the many speakers one can invite to a college campus why invite a clown like Ann Coulter? what are her qualifications? can't we do better than hate speech? is she excellence? What is her merit?
And what's wrong with inclusion, is it wrong for me to think that a young person who grows up in poverty with parents who did not attend college and has a 700 SAT might have greater potential (more merit) that a rich kid from a wealthy suburb who spends thousands of dollars on SAT prep and gets an 800 SAT.
What is Stephens talking about? Why not write about how we should end legacy in admissions. My guess is that 25% to 30% of the Yale entering class are legacies. Let's talk about that. Let's talk about privilege. How is maintaining privilege excellence? How is not a greater problem for Stephens?
18
It must be threatening for individuals who have traditionally been privileged by virtue of having been born (I hate to say it) white, male Protestant Christian, to see that privilege questioned. To be forced to see that people who look different and have different beliefs can also be excellent. To feel they have to actually compete with those people. And to not have their ideas and opinions assumed to be the norm for everyone.
15
@Anon
Not the point at all but a good quote.
"It’s a revolt of the mediocre many against the excellent few."
This one sentence sums up Trump's base of support--and Trump himself.
Nice find, Bret.
13
@FJG
But Hillary received 3 million more votes than Trump.
1. Oh, get over yourselves - there will be 'Excellence' without 'Mastas'.
2. Speaking of Masters, MFA programs, digital photography, and the internet have democratized poetry, photography+++.
3. Yes, there's no draft, but what about income inequality?
4
@LRR
Why would there every be income equality?
Some work is worth more. Some jobs require skills that are less common and/or take significant investment in time and money to develop. Other jobs can be done by anyone with little to no training required.
Yes, bad photography is easy to produce now. Not a poet but I assume the same.
2
@Daphne Re: Income inequality/equality – it's a matter of extent...
Why not write an article entitled, "Diversity, Inclusion, and Excellence"? Those three go quite well together. Diversity does not make "excellence" fail. Diversity often ushers in more rigorous analysis, better critical thinking skills and an ability to get beyond group think. It produces excellence.
10
I hope that at most universities, students are learning not to wildly generalize, as Bret Stephens does here. It leads to poor critical thinking. But apparently Mr. Stephens' assertions much contain some validity. Otherwise, how would esteemed institutions like the New York Times have no choice but to hire writers with such poor critical thinking skills? Apparently, the former dean of the Yale Law School has sounded the alarm to close the barn door long after the horse has left.
6
This is just surfing on the bogus outrage wave generated by right wing talk radio buffoons. Many of these speakers argue positions that pose an real existential threat to people. Dig down under these ‘ideas’ and you find a philosophy that wishes some people should just go away because the speaker finds them unpalatable. In other words not straight, not white and not Christian.
Did you notice how Stephens only uses the male pronoun when referring to students and academics?
"Before a speaker can be invited to campus for the potential interest of what HE might have to say, HE must first pass the test of inoffensiveness. Before a student can think and talk for himself, HE must first announce and represent his purported identity. Before a historical figure can be judged by the standards of his time, HE must first be judged by the standards of our time." [emphasis added]
I can't help but think the offense is intentional. Crafted to draw an outraged response. You don't need to be non-binary to notice Stephens left out half of Yale's student body. Correct English would have you use "he or she." Alternatively, you could rephrase the sentence and refer to students, speakers, and historical figures in the plural with "they" as the accompanying pronoun. As a writer, Stephens knows this. HE did it anyway.
It's not radical to call the gesture out as petty and obnoxious.
10
@Andy
“We love they.”
-Rolling Stones
Diversity promotes excellence and better social outcomes. Let’s take Yale law school as an example. Imagine if Alito Roberts Thomas and Kavanagh had been part of a school that was more diverse inclusive and enlightening. Maybe they would not have spent their careers dedicated to suppressing the votes of black people (see Ari Berman’s book on voting rights). Maybe they’d have more character to not contort themselves to rationalize the decisions they have made.to distort the constitution and harm millions of people, primarily poor, black and brown in this country.
I’m all for merit but it is not a unidimensional construct. When we value only established indicators of merit we tend to perpetuate not only the good, but also the worst of our aoxiety
4
@Bella. Thanks so much. Since we are hell bent on removing the social from American society, aoxiety is a more descriptive term for the United States.
@Bella Justice Ginsburg-- who has long supported wormen's rights-- recently assigned an opinion to Justice Kavanagh and said nice things about him as a colleague. Are you suggesting that her views re Kavanagh reflected the fact that she went to a law school that was not diverse and inclusive (only 10 women in a class of @500). Moreover, noone seemed to have intense criticism of his 10-year performance on the DC Circuit. Could it be that Kavanagh, not his accuser, was being truthful? Could it be that those who approved his nomination to the Court notwithstanding the fact that a woman -- for the first time ever--accused him of committing a violent sexual act more than 2 decades in the past, reflected the better "educated" approach to deciding the question than those who immediately believed the accuser? Note in this connection, recent "regrets" expressed by some who railroaded Sen. Franken out of the Senate.
@Bella Diversity promotes excellence in social, not intellectual, outcomes. Diversity is the product of the multicultural/nihilist attack on objectivity. Diversity is the inclusion of incompetence, ignorance and inherited characteristics as equal to competence, knowledge and chosen values. Minority groups are merely cannon fodder for diversity. See “Multicultural Nihilism” by Peter Schwartz for more.
I appreciate the lectures on the many contexts in which the word "master" is inoffensive. But please don't assume that those who object to the word "master" in the context of people in positions of authority at Yale object because they're ignorant. That's a trifle too smug and self-congratulatory. In addition to inoffensive contexts, quite obviously, there are offensive contexts. "Master" of a college or house at Yale seems closer to "master" of a plantation (and its occupants) than to "master" of a subject, for example, history, or master of a skill, for example, plumbing. And is it always wrong to take steps to avoid seriously offending people even if what offends them does not offend you? Ah, the smug feeling of superiority that emanates from some people.
3
@eb1225 The probability is that Yale adopted the term "Master" in an effort to copy the practice of the British Universities. That would parallel use of the same term for teachers at my prep school some 69 yrs ago. Where my book reports in the English course involved sitting and discussing a book for several hours with my pipe-smoking English Master.
Maybe. And which of our recent leaders have most indulged the anti-intellectuals ? Reagan, Nixon, George W. Bush, George Wallace, Spiro Agnew, and the current thing in the White House. Are/were they liberals ?
4
Unlike some cultures that value education America does not. There is a strong anti intellectual streakand a strong preference of experience limited as it usually is. To me “Huckleberry Finn” is a good
Example even as the book is Highly readable and entertaining.
2
@Elizabeth Wong The attack on US education was institutionalized by Marxist/Pragmatist philosopher John Dewey in 1920. He _explicitly_ opposed knowledge for “social gains.” Prior to that, as Lewis Lapham, in Harper’s Magazine (1990s?) discussed, US high school grads had the equivalent education of today’s M.A. That was the classical education of realism and principles. It was flawed but vastly superior to the concrete-bound, Progressive education of today.
The argument from the right against no-platforming conservative provocateurs like Milo Yiannopoulos, Ann Coulter or Charles Murray has been that doing so is anti-free speech. Now that that unpersuasive argument has mostly failed, some are trying to argue that no-platforming is "anti-excellence". But who defines "excellence"? The most powerful conservative in the world is Donald Trump, and "excellence" is not a word often used to describe him. But his hateful views, ones that are mostly in line with a Coulter or Murray, absolutely do make many students of diverse backgrounds feel unsafe. It's not that students are "snowflakes", it's that there is menace in the concept of "go back to where you came from". And since liberal arts education has always been about what to teach and what not to teach, the value judgement of cancelling a speaker is perfectly acceptable. If far right conservative dogma has led us to our current political climate, where it's near impossible to have a serious conversation about climate change or health care without the word "socialist" being thrown around, then I'm perfectly fine with universities no-platforming speakers.
8
This is eloquent, and interesting, but doesn’t this position ignore the benefit of stimulating thought and conversation? If a liberal arts university community isn’t going to engage in conversation about how “wrong” a controversial speaker is, who will? The opportunity to counter the hateful rhetoric from such demagogues would like;y make those threatened students feel MORE safe, not less, because they’d hear sensible, passionate voices of dissent around them, look left and right and see allies, and expose those voices to more scrutiny.
3
@Markus A Your reduction of education to political indoctrination is noted.
Two fundamental questions repeatedly appears on all writings of American social culture - leftist bias and rigged system. The sad story is very few attempt was made to really understand the underlying forces that drives these evils and understand the subtle distortions of American culture. All these started in early sixties and seventies and it was well captured in the book “ closing of American mind” by Allen Bloom that came out in early eighties. The vitality of American Exceptionalism was lost in the American campuses, when left liberal professors took the paradigm of physical science to social science and divorced the emotional knowledge from the campus. The birth of business schools completely based on operation research, social science of Subaltern and postmodernism and neoliberalism took the human emotions out of American business and discourse. But human life can not separate from its emotional bearing - the replacement came in Reality TV and other TV series’s. Today American business man does not feel any emotional guilt to move jobs to China, keep corporate and personal wealth overseas to avoid tax, deprive labor of its due by dynamic scheduling and outsourcing, sale prescription drugs to addicts and lobby government to eliminate regulations. American heart has to return to American campuses - American mind closed the flowering of American heart. I hope our students can see it.
3
@KB. Or we could simply enforce laws against such unfeeling behaviors. The loss of assets will create feeling where none exists.
I’ll never tire of hearing elitists tell us all who we are or what we’re about without actually listening to us. America’s hypocrisy, inequality, and tyranny should not be denied or ignored. If there is protest there must be conflicts that remain unresolved. The status quo is not the answer. Honestly and evolution is the answer. Good luck.
7
Well said and, in the long run, much scarier than climate change.
5
I live in Berkeley and recent protests about speakers here have been against conservatives that traffic in white supremacy and the panoply of lies that FOX promotes daily. They should be able to speak freely but let’s not think they are contributing to intellectual discourse in any way; to the contrary, they are ruining the possibility for political discourse by filling the heads of students with nonsense and long discredited ideas.
4
But those sessions COULD contribute to social discourse, right? If speaking engagements by such speakers were set up differently, to include rational analysis of what they said, live fact-checking rigor, and a diverse panel of counter voices, wouldn’t better understanding be achieved by the students who’s minds we’re hoping to open?
1
The whole point of the Ivies is to produce and reproduce the elite--social, political, economic, cultural. Reconfiguring them as engines of social change and egalitarian advancement is like making a hot rod--seat of the pants engineering that will never quite work, because the thing you're changing isn't designed to do what you want it to do.
State schools on the other hand were at least intended as a vehicle of social advancement and as the institutions that would train the next generation of competent engineers, farmers, teachers and trades people. They have always been intended as the source of a more egalitarian education. And, interestingly, they have always emphasized more practical courses of study, rather than the liberal arts, which lend themselves more easily to a dogmatic takeover.
6
This is what happens when students are put in charge of their own education: they measure the educators by their own ignorance.
What else should they use for a measure? If you are not coming to college to change from ignorant to knowing, then what are you coming for?
Presumably, one comes to a university to be intellectually challenged and to broaden one's mind, but instead of that happening, students are immediately put in charge of some poor adjunct's career, or worse, told to evaluate the moral fitness of the educator.
Students can certainly object to what they see as problematic or outright wrong and everyone should be listened to with respect. But being heard and being put in charge are two different things.
If we want robust intellectual engagement, we have to end the power of Student Evaluations and the threat of firing for Wrong Speech.
Don't like the class?
Then make your case to the teacher, the class, the school newspaper, the world.
Universities have to stop the madness of lawsuits or firings because someone hurt someone's feelings.
This is not preparation for the real world.
9
@C.L.S.: One attends a "university" to be exposed to everything.
@C.L.S. >If you are not coming to college to change from ignorant to knowing, then what are you coming for?
Politically correct ignorance.
As long as a degree from a prestigious university grants access to the exclusive law school or high-paying job at McKinsey, parents will pay and hold their nose at the new religion espoused on college campuses. The new religion of political correctness is everywhere and completely divorced from merit.
Now Oberlin, that’s another story.
5
The sentence "It’s a revolt of the mediocre many against the excellent few" demonstrates the error in Stephens's argument.
Excellence is achieved when many diverse viewpoints are allowed to battle it out. "Diversity" and "excellence" are not separate goals, in conflict with each other. Instead diversity is a path to excellence.
7
@Dan Styer: The ability of the internet to function in an evolutionary way to bring the best ideas to the fore has not yet been established.
@Paul Britton==What the What? Isn't America Diverse--Isn't America Excellent--no empirical evidence? You live in it
oh, Brett! you're really persistent and coming up with these overly simple explanations lately, creating false dichotomies and boogeymen. yes we must maintain excellence. yes we have a Multicultural Society and we must be inclusive. yes we must be able to have a more than adequate debate about how we can achieve both those goals. but nothing you have said demonstrates that they are mutually exclusive.
10
I agree with the points in the body of the article. But it's inaccurate to saddle it with a title headline insinuating that the callow intolerance and hypersensitivity of the faux-mo campus Left is some direct and inevitable consequence of increasing the ethnic diversity of the student body.
As for "anti-excellence", the question of standards of academic achievement isn't even addressed in that article. But the problems signified by indicators such as endemic grade inflation and widespread aliteracy aren't the result of more inclusive university admissions policies, either. They're arguably more like features of a long American tradition of popular anti-intellectualism.
2
This is exactly how it is an it is a sad state of affairs. A generation, or two, has been brainwashed and irreparably weakened intellectually and psychologically. Why should anyone have to feel safe? That is the opposite of curious, and adventurous, and precludes any stretching of imagination and comprehension.
5
@Daphne: The 1953 legislation that added the words "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance was the opening shot in the modern war on intellect in the US. The whole idea of "God" is a hypothetical that cannot be proven.
@Daphne For four years, my philosophy professors told me that Ayn Rand was incompetent. I felt empowered by their scholarly ignorance.
What a mish-mash of generalizations. One should pause before quoting H.L. Mencken on anything: an ardent devotee of eugenics, his snide put downs of the masses were more than arch humor; he sincerely believed in racial and genetic superiority, and quite dangerously believed in the superiority of his German roots, a belief shared by too many others in Germany at the time.
It is true that current campus agitators conflate feeling uncomfortable with speech that should be prohibited. This is understandable in that they have been taught that they should not have to tolerate sexually harassing speech—the listener’s discomfort should be enough to disqualify such speech. This standard—the listener’s discomfort—should not apply to political discourse, and this is a distinction which the agitators will eventually recognize.
Calhoun House was dedicated at Yale in the 1930’s, not out of any historically contemporaneous honoring of John C. Calhoun’s life, but out of an atavistic longing for the good old days of bondage. Calhoun was a scoundrel who speculated in Georgia gold lands even before the Cherokees were driven out in the Trail of Tears. His espousal of the right to secede was just an artful way of threatening treason to protect slavery. One might as well have named a university college after Benedict Arnold.
And of course Mr. Stephens must use only male pronouns when referring to men and women. Perhaps thee and thou will emerge in his brave defense of traditional pronouns.
6
The question is who has the guts to go into MAGA country and confront the imbedded prejudices that exist there. Poking holes in the snowflake bubble gets the clicks because so many engage in what amounts to intergenerational warfare. How many Trump rallies has Stephens attended to point out the intellectual fallacies embraced by their participants? Conservative, heal thyself.
5
By definition, 100 is the average IQ. The less selective (i.e. exclusive) colleges become, the closer their student population's IQ gets to 100. There are simply too many students who aren't especially curious and cannot handle intellectual arguments.
1
@George >There are simply too many students who aren't especially curious and cannot handle intellectual arguments.
But they can handle political activism.
The basic problem with the 'trigger warning' movement of the last decade is that people confuse the words "safety" and "comfortable."
Students are incredibly safe even though their education might, or rather should make them at times uncomfortable. Shame on universities for not protecting their professors from students who confuse their comfort with their safety. Shame on high schools, middle schools, elementary schools, and parents for raising such fragile children incapable of having their feelings reigned in in order to think differently.
Finally, our educational system has failed (I am an educator of 28 years) to help our students understand why liberal democracy is important to our overcrowded planet. Instead, too many 'liberal minded' people and students have become 'knee jerk liberals' and 'snowflakes' incapable of comprehending what liberalism actually means as they react emotionally and only emotionally to everything.
The reason food has become the most important art form of the 21st century is because it requires little to no formal education; it merely requires one's senses and emotions.
7
Nonsense. Brett takes a phenomenon that is true to some degree at some very elite colleges and universities and makes it into a national catastrophe. Yes, some schools have responded to the political demands of student and faculty activists. Some are also making up for years of insensibiity to inequality. But the vast majority are still almost exclusively devoted to the old-fashioned business of teaching knowledge and skills.
3
Between Trump’s anti-intellectualism, demagoguery and racism and the attacks from the radical left wing and politically correct extremist, American’s future is at risk. We have two extreme wings destroying free thought in America. If we don’t fight these trends, America’s future will be greatly diminished.
Bret Stephens again is bringing very important issues.
2
"Everyone gets a trophy!" This all starts in preschool, or earlier.
3
“Anti-excellence” is hardly an invention of the left, which has recently produced leaders like Barack Obama, whose cabinet was a who's who of expertise and intellect. Now just listen to accomplished newcomers like Pete Buttigieg and Julián Castro and be dazzled.
To Republicans, they’re over-educated “elitists.” Since George HW Bush selected Dan Quayle, the GOP has made a habit of selecting leaders without regard for competence as long as they are ideologically pure. Thus, we’ve had Palin, Bachmann, Roy Moore, Christine O'Donnell, Rick Perry (“oops”), Betsy DeVos, Matt Whitaker and Ben Carson, all failures in their roles. The GOP does not believe in government, so competence is not relevant.
Trump’s most recent nominee, John Ratcliffe, was called “the least-qualified person ever nominated to oversee the country’s intelligence agencies,” according to the Washington Post. George H.W. Bush was the last competent GOP president and the GOP fired him for lack of tax purity.
“It’s a revolt of the mediocre many against the excellent few.”
This concern about the shenanigans of undergraduates is overblown. These people will grow up and join the real world, and many will be embarrassed by their extremism. Though they fuel the fever dreams of conservative writers, they can hardly do serious damage. Meanwhile I await Stephen’s article about the slapstick, lowbrow show that the GOP has become and its effect on “excellence” as the United States shrinks on the world stage.
13
In the common area outside the office of one of my favorite University of Chicago professors, Ralph Lerner, there hung a framed poster. Above the image of a candle whose flame had burned out, were written the words:
"Those of you who think you know everything are annoying those of us who really do."
Brett's treatment of the topic of political correctness on American campuses makes me think of that poster. I'll leave it to the reader to decide in which group Brett falls.
2
The incidents of "unrest" you cite at Yale all happened several years ago. They involved a couple of peaceful protests, a few testy exchanges, and single infamous youtube video that was filmed on private property without the student's consent. The professor who was shouted at has subsequently received Yale's highest faculty honor and has published a bestseller. The guy's doing just fine.
Changing the name of Calhoun College wasn't political correctness run amok but a sensible way to correct a past mistake. The process behind the name change involved a good bit of spirited and polite debate. People actually had their minds changed. If you don't like the result, well, then maybe ask yourself why you think it's so important that a private institution honor one of U.S. history's most prominent defenders of slavery and white supremacy. As for dropping the word "master," that discussion barely registered on campus. Nobody really cared.
Anyhow, please find some new anecdotes to support the assertion that free speech is under assault on college campuses. The Yale examples are tired and overblown. (Did you know Dinesh D'Souza spoke there last year? Of you don't. It generated no outrage.) You might consider exploring the status of free speech at places like Liberty, Bob Jones, Oral Roberts, even the University of Notre Dame. It's possible, even likely,that the free exchange of ideas is more robust at Yale than at any of those places.
13
@Roger Sherman— very well presented counterpoint to which I agree. However, I wonder just how many readers know the name Roger Sherman. (a nom de plume?)
Historical figure who signed all three of the most important documents related to the foundation of America. And a New Haven resident whose home was on Chapel St. directly across from the current site of Yale’s Vanderbilt Hall. A plaque honoring him is on the front of the Union League Cafe.
How many students walk past this everyday, have no knowledge of RS is, and have never paused to read the plaque.
Thank you again for your insightful comment.
1
@Roger Sherman At UMass-Dartmouth, a group of “sustainability” courses is taught in the Dept. Of Politics, not in a physical science department.
I rolled my eyes so many times while reading this article that I had to go back and look at the author... Of course. Bret Stephens at it again.
I'm very suspicious of the narrative that students are running amok on college campuses with their warped sense of entitlement to a "safe space", given that it is so frequently advanced by people like Bret Stephens, who are, at their cores, stodgy conservatives who believe any and all progress is a threat to the "aristocracy" (an unbelievable choice of words - honestly, Bret, could you be more transparent?).
The fact that you're more worried about kids these days and their crazy new ideas (a really tired trope that one would think an intellectual "aristocrat" like Mr. Stephens would be self- aware enough to avoid), than on the far more numerous incidences of actual oppression, violence, and inequality that said students are reacting against really says something unflattering about your priorities.
On a side note, I have always hates the phrase "Ivory Tower" and its connotations as it applies to higher learning institutions, but it has never rung truer to me than while reading this article. I would be appalled at the level of pure, self-satisfied, smug elitism evident in this article if I didn't know who the author was.
3
The earth is on fire and we have an absolute madman running this country into the ground. Good thing that republicans like Stephens are sounding the alarm by calling out world-class universities and college students that will bear the brunt of this generation's mismanagement.
6
@TinnnMann >The earth is on fire
This is your mind on Leftist intellectual crack, including neo-primitive nature worship. In reality, man continues to progress in transforming the dangerous natural environment into a safe, human environment with fossil-fueled tech and prosperity.
Radical true believers have long tried to squash other points of view, on campus and elsewhere. Now the angriest and most outlandish voices are amplified by social media. Just because they are more visible doesn’t mean they’ve become the norm. We must acknowledge a distinction between academic voices, activists, and mere provocateurs. Colleges can foster ideological diversity without providing a platform to every obnoxious loudmouth with a YouTube channel.
1
it deprives the young of the training for independent mindedness that schools like Yale are supposed to provide.
Since when?
2
"Inclusive Excellence," not intellectual excellence, is now the University of Wisconsin system's guiding motto, as it is for many universities across the country. To this end, Orwellian microaggression ("Hate and Bias") reporting systems have been established, encouraging students (we call them "upstanders") to report, anonymously if they wish, absolutely anything their professors say that might seem "problematic," regardless of context or intention. Classrooms have become Foucauldian panopticons, the essential trust between teachers and students is being eroded, and faculty are pitted against each other when it comes to carrying out the necessary disciplinary measures that result. We can't go on like this. Basta!
5
It is interesting that the backlash against students' efforts to bring a level of (I hate the term, but it is the only one that defines it) "wokeness" comes so much from the Right.
Folks, you invented FOX news. Now pay the price.
Because it is FOX, and the right leaning tactics that students are employing. There is only one reason, one truth, one solution, and everyone else is wrong. Every event must be gauged against that truth, and no variation from that truth is tolerated. The Right brought us propaganda writ large; they've morphed into election psy-ops. These students are bright, and can see what works.
People who grow up on Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh will backlash against them, using the same tools.
I don't believe we should get our knickers in a twist over Halloween costumes; I don't believe that sexual justice requires us to believe women automatically and automatically condemn men; I don't believe that our nation is built on such a shaky moral past that it cannot be put right.
But I do believe that we unleashed a monster, and it has come for us. Post modernism tells us that empirical truth is dead, and only the subjective truth survives.
3
@Cathy >Post modernism tells us that empirical truth is dead, and only the subjective truth survives.
Are you ready now for Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism, of the independent, focused mind?
Like Kronman, I have concerns about the use of "master" at Yale, but I find fault with Stephens's treatment of the issue here.
“The word ‘master’ may remind some students of slavery. What it really means is a person who…”
In those sentences, Stephens commits the same error as those “some students” he decries: Failing to recognize that words have multiple meanings; that each connotation of a word has a history, importance, and legitimacy because it can mean and has meant each of those definitions in some given context(s).
Those students argued there’s one relevant definition of master—the slave-related one—that should determine how “master” should be used. They declared its other meanings illegitimate and irrelevant; hence, that the use of “master” in the given context was improper and offensive. They chose that one connotation for their political purposes.
Stephens here asserts his authority to define what master means, just as “some students” did at Yale. Also choosing one connotation for his political purposes.
Both are engaging in political correctness of the shallow, language-type: Focusing on the meaning of a collection of letters in a specific order rather than addressing the underlying merits and substance of the issues and context in question.
What makes Stephens’ definition correct and “some students’” definition incorrect? Stephens can’t explain that other than simply asserting he’s right and they’re wrong. And that’s what some students did at Yale, too.
2
I thought it was Trump supporters who resented elitism. Now I discover it's really students who are at fault. The vast majority of students don't care about any of the nonsense discussed in the article and will become the elites of the future.
Show me the numbers that say “excellence” is declining. You can’t, because people will continue to graduate from these institutions and thrive, or not, depending on a multitude of factors. As it ever was, Bret.
This is a made up concern - unlike the crushing student loan debt that is the real issue with higher education. If I’m paying $50k for a single semester it better be a g-d “safe space,” whatever that means.
2
Gee I thought the whole point of education was to teach people to think for themselves. you know ,break patterns change things up. Sometimes to improve you have to tear down first, this is usually messy and dangerous also necessary. As for feelings , do they not have the constitutional right to express their views on any speaker invited to speak on their campus? They are under no obligation to be a welcome party for those whose views they find offensive or dangerous. As for the long term effects, look at the sixties a large percent of the so called hippies of the day are now some of the biggest corporate DB's on the planet . Whole thing sounds like Koch sponsored propaganda to me.
1
"Emptiness here means rather that they are, in themselves, ambiguous. Again, this is also to say that everything is more than it seems to be, or rather constitutively more than it can seem to be, no matter what angles it is seen from, no matter how thoroughly it is known, no matter how comprehensive a sum of information is gathered about it. It has the character of being a “something” (a cup, a chair, an elephant), with a number of specifiable characteristics, but every “something”, just to be there as something, has the additional characteristic of “moretoitivity”—of always overflowing whatever is determined about it, of being more than what can be seen from any angle." Brook Ziporyn
Since its founding, Yale has applied racism, classism, sexism and numerous other “-isms” on countless occasions to exclude applicants, students, teachers, speakers, vendors, ideas etc. That some students now want to exercise their own exclusions based on feelings is unfortunate but entirely in keeping with the Yale brand.
2
What is telling to me is that the author of the book and the writer of this piece are coming from the perspective of an elite private institution where diversity has historically been in short supply. Go to a school where students of color predominate, and you don't find mediocrity; you find rigorous thought, argument, achievement, incredibly hard work, sacrifice, and an intense striving for excellence and quality. So how is diversity an automatic degrading of academic excellence? For the white males behind this piece (and I'm a white male), it's just assumed that any dilution of white maleness must be a degradation.
225
@Former administrator Yes. And I'd add that students, after all, are stake holders and entitled therefore to express their wishes. Is that not at the root of democratic process?
7
You completely miss the point of the argument. It is not diversity that leads to mediocrity. It is the substitution of identity for inquiry and reasoning.
18
@Former administrator. “Go to a school where students of color predominate, and you don't find mediocrity; you find rigorous thought, argument, achievement, incredibly hard work, sacrifice, and an intense striving for excellence and quality. “ I would love it to be accurate, but is this claim a longing or a fact? Is my skepticism here a reflection of bigotry and racism or is it in the spirit of reasonable inquiry? So much depends on our emotional perspective, no?
13
I am now in agreement with Bret Stephens for two consecutive times. Is this a sign of impending apocalypse?!
5
The leftist bias was evident in my undergraduate years in the decade of the 1970’s.It was too monolithic for my taste-even though I came from a very liberal family. One of my favorite Professors was a self described Conservative who happened to be an atheist and said he was in favor of Democratic Socialism if it could work. Learning argumentation was a phenomenal experience. Also, I was always irked by constant criticism of Israel. But, you know what- I survived. This all changed when I started my Masters Degree work in Middle America. I was enlightened by the fact that conservative thinking was an article of faith to most. I was a little flipped out by Governor Jimmy Carter’s Presidential campaign’s constant invoking of his belief in Christ and his born again experience. When I voiced my concerns to fellow students about the overt use of religion in the campaign ,the nearly universal response was they liked Carter better knowing that he was such a devout Christian. Yes
,so-called liberals may have outsized influence in academia, but Conservatives are in charge of almost all other major sectors. Students should have opinions and express them accordingly-if they are comfortable doing so. A great learning experience.
3
I agree with Bret. Some criticize him in the comments for painting all colleges with a broad brush. This is rather picky. It is clear he is talking about recent cases in the news and his argument is logical, especially contrasting students from the 60’s with wanting more freedoms, to those today wanting less. Or, in the extreme, pointedly contrasting something like anarchy versus communism. Maybe the trick is to want freedom and empathy, like perhaps being a centrist Democrat?
4
Ah, that old "aristocratic spirit!"
Miss you, baby. Ney, master.
The pontificators blathering about the neutering of intellectual discourse, so often seem to be so clueless about what actually is happening on our campuses and on what "intellectual discourse" actually is.
Campus activists demanding political "correctness" (as they define it) in speakers and courses and professors, often seem misguided. But what are they doing? They're engaging in discourse. It is discourse they are initiating because they are impassioned about it. They may be wrong (I think they often are). But those demanding they be silent and, even more so, be silenced, have no idea what the meaning of "intellectual discourse" is. What is happening on our campuses today, is exactly what intellectual discourse is. Warts and all. Sometimes very big warts. But it is people (people from more varied backgrounds than have ever been present at our "elite" campuses) voicing opinions, acting and demanding action on the basis of their opinions.
Are these young men and women in places like Yale, so obtuse, that they will be stuck in one opinion and one passion for life? The answer seems pretty obvious. Not much "intellectual discourse" is required to figure it out. If you disagree with what they're doing? Voice it. Act on it. Don't demand it be silenced. Your demands of silence are the censorship that those with "aristocratic spirit" have demanded and imposed for too many years, centuries, millennia to count.
3
@AJ
OK, let me respond like this:
Does a black Baltimore council member's answer to "where did the $2.3 billion in federal government payments go", that "Baltimore is a victim of 400 years of structural racism" - yup, that was the actual answer, several times ... does that whole exchange qualify as discourse?
That council member likely went to college and this is the "discourse" he is engaging in? Notwithstanding the fact that there may indeed have been 400 years of structural racism - a facile and unprovable charge, by the way, but I digress.
Applying the ever available race lens to a question of who stole the money, if it was stolen, is not “discourse”. It’s a dodge. Some things are just dumb and stupid, and no dishonest anointing as "discourse" will change that.
1
I would have hoped that Bret would have identified this very argument as the underpinning of Nietzsche's most excellent book: On the Genealogy of Morality - when the sheep rise up against the eagles.
"There is nothing very odd about lambs disliking birds of prey... though the birds of prey will look somewhat quizzically and say, 'We have nothing against these good lambs; in fact, we love them; nothing tastes better than a tender lamb.'”
~ On the Genealogy of Morality (1887)
4
Any college campus tends to create an artificial social bubble, in which students are focused on themselves, with little responsibility toward others or their community. Elite college campuses can be especially insular. Being fairly untethered to the day-to-day realities that most adults face, and having little prior adult experience, college students (and their professors) can get caught up in ideas that are narrowly grounded in reality, or spun out of long strings of theory.
So it isn't surprising that they may see themselves as separate and aristocratic. But I am surprised that a Dean of an elite university is advocating for that aristocratic attitude, against students efforts to be more circumspect and consider the value of views from different bases of experience. The dean wrongly interprets seeing potential value in everyone's perspective as seeing all perspectives as equally valuable.
I am encouraged that students at Yale are resisting the aristocratic atmosphere that the dean seeks. We will be better off if graduates from our elite universities stay aware that their own convictions have a relatively narrow base of experience, and should be tempered by the varied experience reflected in the convictions of others.
3
I've long called it "the Oprahfication" of the country, i.e., one's feelings are more important than the facts. And the more right we think we are, the harder our feelings and the less our ability to base them on empirical evidence.
I'm reminded of the 1964 film, "The Third Secret," which I recently caught a glimpse of, a rather dull psychological melodrama. But the theme of the movie resonates in view of our current culture and politics: "The first secret is what we don't tell people, the second secret is what we don't tell ourselves, and the third secret is the truth."
7
@James L.. Yes. Going back a bit before Oprah to the Oprah-like Phil Donahue, i have long thought that Americans—and especially the women who were in so many ways our moral backbone, have been bamboozled and phil-oprahed into believing that tolerance is the greatest virtue. But tolerance not of traditional truths, but of whatever cultural destruction the left lets loose from Pandora’s box.
1
The absence of critical thinking. The sheep-like adherence to fashionable attitudes. These are apparent to anyone from an older generation who spends time on today's college campuses. But one enormous difference between now and then is the presence of so much diversity - racial, cultural, sexual, and so on. Sixty years ago when I was at Yale, we discussed great issues intellectually and philosophically. We were surrounded almost entirely by those of our own kind and therefore free to clash comfortably. The real world was elsewhere. Today's students are confronted face-to-face with the world's differences. It's understandable - if disappointing - that so many react by hiding behind today's conventional liberal (and sometimes conservative) "wisdom."
5
This column is all-too typical of the conservative critique of American education. Inclusion may indeed produce some objectionable effects, including the racialized campus politics of grievance and accommodation, but it is itself the effect of K-12 educational inequality that conservatives ignore in their support of our mythic meritocracy. The "leveling" they decry as a sign of fallen standards is the price of our rigged K-12 system that delivers such indefensibly disparate educations based on zip codes. Level K-12 education, so that tokens don't have to mau-mau college administrators to feel at home at selective colleges. Imagine if all the people...had quality schools where they live.
10
One person's political correctness
is another person's morally just.
So it has always been.
So it shall likely always be.
The choices change.
The framing of them does not.
5
I have worked at a major university for almost 40 years and I do not see evidence of the complaint enunciated in this essay at my campus. We are now expected to ask about personal pronoun preferences which I have resisted. But the biggest change that I see on campus comes from the decision in the late 90's to treat the student as a customer. This apparently salutary change has led to students treating their eventual grade like a consumer transaction. They have paid for the course. Now they want the grade, invariably an A, which they think they have paid for. They fail to understand that earning a grade is not like buying a hamburger. The latter is a simple exchange of money for the desired product. Getting a grade, however, is not passive. It requires the investment of time and effort by the student, the result of which is captured in a grade that is determined by the success of the student in demonstrating that he or she actually learned something. Students have actually sat in my office and told me that they deserve and A because they paid for it. This is a far more consequential change in the nature of academia.
48
@Susan Your comments are spot on. This is the biggest change I have observed as well in a 26 year career in higher education. In the past I would always have a few students challenge grades at the end of semester; now it is a semester long battle from the first quiz onward. Thanks for your comment!
5
@Susan
Ditto. 40 years teaching. Same drift in student understanding of the nature of the process - which has been amplified by administration shift to the customer model. My clearest example of this is a student, enrolled in a difficult science-based major, who consistently failed exams but did not understand why they failed the course. The student noted they did not read the text, nor attend class on a regular basis. They also admitted that they thought the material was far too hard. Yet their “explanation” was that they really wanted to get this degree. - as if that was all that was required. I am sure many others have seen variations on this student, as well as excellent students. But the frequency of the former seems to be increasing.
4
@Susan
To be fair, no one goes into debt to buy a hamburger. Your students rightly observe that they are paying way too much for education that is unlikely to lead to any sort of financial stability or even a respectable job. They know they will be paying off college loans until they are 50, while putting together a string of unstable, low-pay jobs in our new gig economy. The grade grubbing is related to the increased competition for decent jobs. That’s the way scarcity tends to work.
30 years ago, people were not expected to be permanent interns and service workers, obliging and underpaid well into adulthood, and working for bosses who are less educated, less ambitious, and less talented than they are. That fact has also changed, but is not often acknowledged.
2
Welcome back to rational thought, NYT, and thank you, Mr. Stephens. Let's hope this is a positive trend that will awaken university life and society in general from the deep slumber of petty, arbitrary and capricious liberal overlords.
11
@JBC: Actual liberals practice liberty. Americans need to better understand how labels are linked to actions.
1
@Steve Bolger
Fair enough, but those “liberals” who Stephens describes are so far from practicing liberty that being an exact opposite doesn’t begin to describe them. And it isn’t “Americans” who need to better comprehend this label; it’s the world in general.
Everyone who says they believe in equality must specify whether it's equal opportunity or equal outcome they believe in. My heart wants to believe in the latter, but all evidence I have seen so far, even that coming from countries that have been ruled by various flavors of Marxists, tells me that equal opportunity is the best we can hope and strive for.
6
@AT
Equal opportunity to succeed, or fail, should be the goal. What is accomplished with that opportunity should be up to the individual w/o society placing obstacles in the way of success.
8
@AT
I'm a fervent believer in equal outcomes. As in, I fervently believe that you must follow all of society's rules, get educated, and work very hard so that I can consume half of what you produce while still enjoying a carefree lifestyle.
1
Do those with hard-earned “Masters” Degrees now wear them as a badge of oppression and shame? In my long past university days to be “offended” by an idea or argument was often one of the steps of learning and/or defending or refining my own views. To have a professor call one out in class was an opportunity for expanding educational horizons.
Orwell spins!
7
There is always a tug of war between reason and emotion. Imperfect beings that we are, we ALL at times let feelings dictate to our reason.
For example, we may be drawn to a certain candidate for public office, and feel comfortable with her at a "gut" level. Then we justify our choice by pointing to her policy platform. No one is exempt from the influence of feelings, whether malign or benign.
What is different about the new demand for equality at the expense of all other social values? Nothing, as far as I can see. In a different era it was called "ideology," but the emotions were the same.
1
@Ron Cohen: We develop our capacity to reason out of the need to manage emotions.
Well, after what I've seen on my campus in the past few years, I've scrubbed my course materials of assignments that might even have the potential to set off the hairtrigger outrage. Activism is one thing, but it can go too far and morph into bullying. This seems like an extension of the worst of social media culture to me.
13
@Genuine. I wish more articles would explore this idea of social media culture and how it is negatively affecting society. It’s like we’ve become a world addicted to outrage and wokeness where people like AOC and Trump, people generally unqualified, are elevated to positions of authority by the levels of outrage they evoke. It’s pretty scary.
I am having a hard time not seeing this as fear mongering on an intellectual plane. After all, what has modern conservatism become if not a clarion bell against whatever the insufferably superior find offensive?
I remember a great deal about my university years at F&M and Rutgers. Mostly, at 68, I look back and realize how little I knew about life. And I believe it may be better to show empathy for the struggle to become adults. College is a melting pot of hormones, unsupported certainties and excesses removed from parental restraint. We must expect every season to be the silly one.
But here is Brett to protect us from the slack and undisciplined ravages of liberalism on campus. I agree with another responder: this is anecdote gone wild. But it must be truth because one man who spent 40 years at a bastion of privilege called Yale believes. As if from the lips of God.
Perhaps students, fearful of a politics and economy that increasingly serves elites, hoping for a life after college after taking on mindnumbing amounts of debt, are actually clamoring for a system that meets their needs. Brett's conservatism supports the notion that elites embody those sacred values of greed, selfishness and superiority instead of many commendably higher beliefs that have long departed under the modern GOP. Imperfect democractic leanings are not the enemy. Alienation and fear of a world controlled by heirarchy and "personal excellence" that robs the next generation of opportunity is
13
@Tom: Conservation of language was the first thing modern "conservatism" trashed.
@Tom Thank you for you sanity!
@Tom
You may remember your university years well, but you'd be scared to death to try to exist on one anywhere today, and very likely stunned by how scorned and ostracized you'd be.
You quote H.L. Mencken to the effect that those who achieve true excellence are “beyond responsibility to the general masses of men,” but Mencken gets it backward. The truth, at least in a healthy democracy, is that those who achieve excellence must be deeply responsible to others, placing their gifts and achievements at the service of all. This is the true crisis in American education: in the lower grades, we devote far more resources to the underachieving than to the truly gifted, and, at the university level, we have privatized the idea of the good life and detached it from serving the welfare of the community.
13
@Deborah: Patents, copyrights, and trademarks were invented as means for creators to get paid for their ingenuities.
I wonder if abolishing tenure would help end this problem. Tenured faculty have an insurance policy that doesn’t exist in the corporate world and it allows them to say and do things that would bring recrimination if they were not in a protected space, so to speak.
4
Its the students, not the faculty. The students think that the (actually typically quite liberal) faculty are hard right conservatives.
5
@Abbott Hall
No. Firstly, Yale is a private school and can offer tenure if it wishes. It and so many other schools, private and public, do so because tenure protects academic freedom, which is at the heart of an effective educational environment. The "corporate world" is not an appropriate model for every human endeavor.
11
@Laume: Liberals traffic in facts, not faiths.
I work in a university, and it's important to remember that these are controversies about culture, and invited speakers who talk about culture.
The vast overwhelming number of talks on campus have nothing to do with culture (i.e., cancer research, economics, nano-particles, marketing, philosophy of the brain or language, etc.) The talks are lively and well attended and do sometimes result in lively arguments! (in our department, all undergraduate and graduate students must attend talks by invited speakers in the field, faculty strongly encouraged.)
We are encouraged to attend talks outside and well outside our field, and we often do. Sometimes the speaker is famous and gets a wide campus audience. There are also poster sessions for a more casual introduction to new ideas.
The university is still a place for idea exchange.
18
What you are talking about here is an aspect of the cultural phenomenon of being “outraged.” Today, if someone (anyone - even a young student) says they are “outraged” by another’s words, behavior, existence - they can often get attention: the attention of their community (at least) and often the attention of a school’s administration and the media. What does this get the outraged person? Power. It’s all about power.
In many ways, this is what the success of Trump is about. People appreciate him because he is so offensive, yet he just throws it back in the face of the offended and it doesn’t seem to hurt him.
Claiming moral outrage (or as you suggest, hurt feelings) is less about making the world a better place and more about seeking power. It works, but it is also what is fueling anti - liberal sentiment in America.
10
What is most infuriating about these constant calumnies against progressive education is that their authors often hold up an abstracted ideal of "truth" as if it is self-evident what that ideal might contain.
The issue is that what Mr. Stephens and many other conservatives consider the "truth" has little to do with actual objective fact, and more to do with upholding ideas of white, male superiority.
This country was founded upon the genocide of one group and the enslavement of another. That is objective fact-- it's simply that Mr. Stephens and his ilk don't actually care about facts, but they do care about reinforcing their ideology.
10
@T Rees "This country was founded upon the genocide of one group and the enslavement of another."
Objective fact: the United States of America was founded upon the ratification of the Constitution, with the rights enumerated therein. Genocide/slavery as the only story is an essentialist distortion just like many others. Or if you mean the colonies rather than "this country," is it really true that the Pilgrim Fathers sat around Holland thinking "we need a better place for genocide and slavery"?
1
Agree. Stephens like much of the right go crazy when they’re told their ideas are useless and offensive and unwanted - it’s an existential threat. None of these columns ever deal with the substance of the ideas, just the idea of free speech. Pathetic. The right to free speech has never been and will never be absolute. The first sign that someone’s idea is weak is a vehement protest about the right to say it.
@David
One of the rights enumerated in the Constitution was the right to demand the return of fugitive slaves. Without that right, the slaveholding states never would have ratified the Constitution.
Why do you think the Confederacy seceded less than 100 years after the Constitution was ratified? Because the northern states were denying their Constitutional right to have fugitive slaves returned.
Human slaves were by far the largest source of capital in post-Colonial America.
It amazes me that conservatives who whine about the “truth” are incapable of facing it.
This direction of American universities is less a Hayek road to socialism but rather a road to an Orwellian conforming dystopia full of doublespeak,Minisries of Truth and the like. Unlike our public schools which leaves our children without the basics of reading, writing , math ,science and civics our college students will come to lack the skills of critical analysis and the means for informed decision making. On graduation ,they will be I’ll prepared to confront the hard realities of the world as it is.
19
1. In the 60's the students were not bombarded with chatter from social media and 24 hr cable news cycles. It was easier to tune out, at least a bit.
2. This more recent book sounds like some distant echo (or modern update/extension?) of Allan Bloom's "The Closing of the American Mind," written in 1987. There are some historical differences in the setting and Bloom was at the Univ. of Chicago. He taught political philosophy. As with Kronman, Bloom's writing was both at times popular and academic.
2
Although I have not been in a graduate classroom for a while, I found the right-wing students to be particularly aggressive and angry. There were not that many of them because right-wingers generally do not attend graduate school. They see evidence-based knowledge as unnecessary. The few we did have would trumpet some Fox News myth about pulling yourself up from your bootstraps or that America was better in the fifties. The majority of the students were politically moderate, ready to learn, and respectful of a variety of viewpoints, even the case in red America.
People of all types get angry and aggressive when they don't get there way. This is not just a problem on college campuses but all over the world. This is a human condition. The American experiment involves diverse voices making statements that can be respected by others. It is a tough experiment and one that still might fail because humans are innately selfish.
21
@Anthony
Those on the Right reject evidence-based knowledge ? Huh ?
1
@Anthony we’ll I have a J.D. and an M.B.A. (Perfect G.PA.). I find the most ignorant and less tolerant are on the Left. If you doubt this, simply ask them if they believe everyone is equal. Then ask them why some people pay more. Ask them if they want to apply the morals of today to the past how future generations judging liberal policies harshly is acceptable. Ask them to explain why it was acceptable for every large group of people to impose their views on others, except for Americans. Unless you have a diminished intellect you will not be impressed with their reasoning or responses.
1
@Matthew I believe that everyone is equal when it comes to basic human rights. People are not all equal when it comes to intellect and character - a true meritocracy lets the best rise and not be drawn down to the median of mediocrity. This is a formula that helps everyone and everyone should be grateful for it if they live in such a system, and working to foster change if they don't.
All of this stuff appears to me manufactured drama. I've taught at an American university (UCSB) and universities in France, Korea, and China. Students, in the classroom, are generally just that: students. They're there to learn. If something politically distracting comes up, we tend to just roll our eyes and get back to teaching and learning.
There were no examples of how a dispute over the word "master" actually disrupts that process of teaching and learning. Until then, meh, it's just tribal markers being placed.
10
@David I think all drama is manufactured to some extent. In this case though, I agree that the vast majority of students ignore the fringe tribes that the media nurtures and exploits - its all about the clicks and eyeballs.
3
So after a few hundred years (318) of "mastery," Yale University is upset because some of their students are expressing their "feelings." Please. If there has been too much "capitulation" then change course and push back. I'm rather tired of this over focus on these students who come and go, creating "new campus mores" but are out before you know it. The educational system in the United States is still biased from K-Ph.D. and university leaders should be writing books about why we can't seem to solve that problem. If these students don't have "excellent" grades, how do they stay at Yale?
9
As an adjunct professor of classes that are outside the core curriculum, I am always aware that my job next semester can be taken away.
The moment there aren’t enough students to fill the classes for any reason, my employment will end.
As the result, I am constantly aware that I have to keep my audience happy if they are to keep coming back.
As the result, I accidentally used an insensitive trigger word in front of a cis male white student of privilege who is emotionally volatile and demonstrably woke.
His visceral reaction calling me out made me fear for my job. As the result, I gave him perfect marks on his final grade. My reasoning was that if he reported me, it would be harder to claim real world damages if his grade was perfect.
The sad reality is that we are in a customer service business and people are driven by emotional purchase decisions.
The progressive embrace of feelings over reason encourages the weaponization of victimhood and rewards the avoidance of risk over the reward of learning.
69
@sally towbridge in San Diego I doubt the authenticity of your post. Any instructor with classroom experience and subject expertise would have been able to work through this situation without resorting to the unspoken bribery of a high mark. Students bring their emotions to the classroom as part of who they are and as instructors we support their learning by helping them learn and navigate the critical thinking to work through human questions and challenges. Your dean should support your rigor if you have clear grading criteria (such as a rubric) to back you up. Additionally colleges and universities have some type of teaching for excellence center to support continued teaching excellence (usually available for both part time and full time instructors) If your school is not providing professional development in teaching & learning seek out colleagues with experience who mentor instructors in facilitating difficult classroom discussions.
1
@Mr. Montgomery I don't at all doubt the veracity of Sally Trowbridge's post. The elements you describe can be in place, and often are, simultaneously with an unspoken administrative pressure that is easily visited on adjunct faculty, who have no rights, no union, thus, are disposable without consequence or explanation, regardless of credentials or experience.
In that, as per the AAUP, over 70% of university faculty in the US are part-time, the circumstance above affects millions of educators.
To be sure, having a specific and detailed rubric (legally and painstakingly explained in a syllabus) is the "legal" protection for a non-tenured faculty member and would most likely prevail in a grade dispute that went to a dean's office.
But even with that outcome, usually a student's complaint in such a situation as that described causes a number of people a lot of time and paperwork to adjudicate. When course contracts are ready to be disbursed for the next semester, the memory of that extra time and hassle can cause administrators to avoid assigning classes to that particular adjunct faculty member.
Unfortunately, there is a certain kind of student (almost non-existent 20 yrs ago) that has discerned this vulnerability and will exploit it on the thinnest, often-imagined basis. To be sure, this type is in a small minority, but isn't at all rare.
The idea that any instructor with experience and expertise can "work through" such an encounter is an overstatement.
4
@Sally Trowbridge I understand fear for one's job, but giving a student a perfect grade to ensure silence undermines one's integrity. Your duty is to give students the grade you sincerely believe they deserve given the evidence. I notice that you don't share the "insensitive trigger word" that came out of your mouth "accidentally." Hm!
A bright high school student I was tutoring recently used the word feeling when she clearly meant thinking. I called it to her attention and she said, "Aren't those the same thing?" What a world.
46
Anecdote, generalization, anecdote, generalization. As a college prof I would certainly agree that there are profound problems in higher education. Absolutely. But Stephens et al.'s ritualistic and hackneyed denunciation of humanities and social sciences faculty and deans is tiresome.
Would that he focused his ire on other issues: the exorbitant cost of higher education, the student debt crisis (and the small-c corruption that has spawned it), the contingent employment that students are graduating into – a labor market that officially low unemployment figures don’t reveal. He c/should also focus on the failure to participate in collective efforts by big tech to check viral hatred online. Or the need to do better to be sure that dark money strategies of bringing controversial speakers to campuses doesn’t fall into the trap where the reaction/protest proves the commentariat’s point.
There are definitely unfortunate incidents of illiberality that grab headlines, but the fact is that the vast bulk of activities on college campuses continue to strive for open dialogue. And that students and faculty and deans are doing the best they can in a difficult, challenging world.
78
@Bass guitar
As a college professor at a far less illustrious school than Yale, I couldn't agree more. I might add to the list of alternative subjects for Mr. Stephens by suggesting some attention be paid to the dwindling state support for public higher ed; the ill advised movement of community colleges into the four year arena where they are often woefully unprepared; and the red-state sanctioned creep of "college credit plus" type systems into the high schools that empower high school teachers to confer college credit.
40
Exactly @g. harlan. Good points. Mr. Stephens has had several of these op-eds in recent months -- as had Mrs. Brooks, Kristof, etc. Stephens had one about Biden some months ago scolding millennials. It's such an easy target.
My school is also less illustrious than Yale's. Of course, Yale never hesitates to remind all of its illustriousness.... :o)
I agree with you: it's part of a rightwing assault on higher education (and especially non-STEM fields).
And the hyperbole. Unrest, combat, Mao... Ugh.
1
I was one of those students of the 60s, having entered a small elite liberal arts college in 1967 and graduating with a baccalaureate degree in 1971. Much later in life, I served as a Trustee of that College, and resisted the not infrequent Trustee ideas that regarded faculty tenure as too rigid and protective of the status quo, and too often undermining the Administration's flexibility in hiring and promotion. Such arguments were far off the mark of the academy's fundamental reason for existence. It is to provide a safe place -- not for feelings or even creative management of human resources -- but for the unfettered flow of ideas -- even if abhorrent. The antidote to that which offends is to counter with other ideas. The ideal college or university environment would demand free expression of concepts that can be roughed up, fortified, re-shaped, honed by debate. Inclusivity and diversity enhance that process by infusing the debate with more,not less, as Stephens suggests. The enemy of excellence is not diversity or inclusion, it is steadfastly resisting incursions on intellectual freedom.
47
The efforts of Yale students to have the title 'master' banned shows us one thing: even the elite students at this elite institution of learning have a lot to learn. No doubt all took standardized tests during their formative years designed to demonstrate to the dean of admissions their mastery of their subjects. The captain of a ship? Its master, and in the British Navy its master and commander. A carpenter, electrician, plumber, or glazier, proceeds through an age-old system starting as an apprentice (to a master), achieving journeyman status and through dint of hard work, experience, and application, finally achieving mastery of the trade and the title master. Stripping professors of this title is not some poor man's reparations, it demeans the intelligence, talents, dedication and hard work of many who rather than spending their incalculably valuable time at university or trade school protesting, have actually applied themselves. Equally disturbing is the capitulation of the faculty and administration of Yale and its peers who are clearly not equal to their title as masters. Education is truly wasted on the young.
34
It's been about 35 years since I've been on a university campus, coinciding with my graduation from UT Austin. I was somewhat politically aware, but frankly enjoyed the back and forth exchange of arguments and ideas. I think this issue of intolerance and political correctness is largely a bogus one. When conservatives first started nagging about it, it always seemed to me to be mainly whining about people telling them that they really do not have the right to be as boorish and offensive as they wanted to be. That pretty much sums it up. Genuine liberals and leftists were not, are not, and never are proponents of censorship, and use their heads much more than their feelings. So again, I disagree with Bret, my favorite conservative columnist.
41
I can't imagine any university at any time being beyond some intelligent person's criticism.
No matter where you stand as a university, and no matter how you respond, critics left and right, it doesn't matter, will mount their soapboxes and try to ignite a lynch mob. It sells newspapers, it generates excitement, it gives people something to do that seems meaningful.
We humans just can't live, it seems, without conflict. If there is none, we create some; our love of sports seems a good example. Maybe it's how we test our mettle and learn about the world, and is thus necessary.
No matter how this particular matter settles out, argumentation and disagreement and combat, at least intellectual, will continue to be part of the puzzling, frustrating tapestry of humanity.
This, too, shall not pass.
6
If Kronman thinks today’s college students are anti-excellence, he ought to write his next book about the far right that now dominates the White House and the Republican Party.
The goal of right wing extremism is to crush thought that in any way differs from its own. It not only promotes ignorance, it depends upon a low information society to secure and maintain its political and social aims. It despised the concept of academic freedom.
Worse, right wing extremists use the truth and facts not to pursue excellence but to twist reality to support its views on everything from climate change to the rule of law.
College students protesting is part and parcel of the college experience. Right wing extremism is a clear and present danger to our collegial future as a nation.
32
Agree to a certain extent; but my take on it is that whether we're talking about college kids wanting to ban words and discussions or that vast white working class snorting at college professors or black people believing that school is a white thing, we are in deep trouble.
These judgmental students are the children of judgmental parents, who drove them hard to succeed. Their anger at inequality, their obsession with equality, in my view, had its origins in the unequal power between parents and child, especially on the issue of who decides what is right and wrong—the moral component of a child’s upbringing.
This anger at inequality, this obsession with equality, is obviously not limited to a few elite colleges, but can be seen more broadly in left-wing politics today. Whence it comes? Why now? Those are the imponderables of cultural transformations. Perhaps we all have some of this in us, but it has been magnified in young people, today, by the glaring inequities and injustices of our time.
7
@Ron Cohen
Interesting idea about the genesis of anger about inequality Ron ...
This is not just a problem at elite universities. The Unitarian Universalist Church is imploding for this reason also (See The Gadfly papers and the reaction at this year's General Assembly).
I'm wayyyyy on the far left spectrum, went to an Ivy League school, and have now left the Unitarian Church. The far left and the far right are similar in that they cannot countenance any disagreement. I would be a natural ally for these students and the Unitarians but their need for "safe spaces" and belief that one's racial identity trumps humanity leave me cold.
26
"Aristocratic spirit"? Please. The concrete things that put a person "beyond responsibility to the general masses of men" are privilege (ie. wealth) and social position (ie. dominant identity). Both are taken for granted by many tenured professors, and some editorialists. For the health of our dangerously stratified and inequitable society, these must always be challenged. I'd also note that a teacher uninterested in learning from their students has stopped growing.
15
I've taught evening college students and graduating MBA students, both at the same university. If the evening college students couldn't take home meaningful knowledge from me that they could benefit from the very next day in their 'day jobs,' I hadn't properly done my 'night job.' The graduating MBA students felt entitled to simply 'mail it in' by finding then circulating my previous exams from their friends while a few of them even cheated in plain sight during their finals. Perhaps a better path to meritocracy instead of mediocrity rests on the shoulders of smaller community colleges and vocational schools where learning seems to mean more and demand more from its students. Academic life and real life could benefit from a better way to understand each other and work together.
to mean more to th
5
One big difference versus the 1960s is that now campuses are dominated by students majoring in fields where the truth can be whatever one wants it to be. Mario Savio, on the other hand, was a Physics major.
13
@AT Even if one accepts your trivializing description of humanities and social science disciplines, the fact is that those majors have a smaller percentage of students than was true in the 60s, 70s, or 80s
5
@AT The majority of 4-yr college students today are in pre-professional majors --business, nursing, etc. If that is what you meant, I agree that some philosoohy might be useful.
6
You made up your own truth based on your own feelings- liberal arts majors are at an all time low, with departments shuttering. Students currently entering college are flocking to “practical” majors like business.
1
Mr. Stephens: A "radical egalitarianism in which all are included, all are equal, all are special" sounds very much like the message of equality in the eyes of God that underlies most major religions, not a recipe for spiritual and cultural degredation.
16
@pbk3rd Not when he sends them to hell or decides to destroy them in furious anger.
@pbk3rd
All are not equal even in the eyes of God.
1
Beware the self described “elite” bemoaning progress that undermines their iron-fisted hold on the status quo that has served them richly for generations. Like most (all) social evolution the pendulum swing may be over correcting now (temporarily) but in general greater diversity, equity and inclusion will strengthen systems and culture.
Also couldn’t help but notice the author’s lazy use of only male references. Or perhaps he really did mean that this decaying system is only perpetuated BY men ON men. If so, whew-such a relief it won’t impact me.
32
@Julie Stolzer unfortunately, I think the masculine pronoun indicates the former. There is enormous nostalgia for the days when "merit" veiled socio-economic, political, and gender privilege. Note also use of term "aristocracy" here.
6
I cannot speak for Yale, but I can tell you that at MIT the student body is more diverse, inclusive, and excellent than it has ever been. Every year I am astonished anew at the quality of the students in my classes.
When I was a student here 30 years ago the student body was far more white and male than it is today, and I was ranked as one of the top two students in my department. Today I would be firmly in the middle of the pack.
The largest student protests that have taken place at MIT since the Viet Nam era have occurred in the last three years, in reaction to the travel ban and the anti-immigration stance of the current administration.
This is not simply a matter of protesting an unpopular president, these policies directly impact the lives of our students and faculty; many of our foreign students and postdocs are afraid to travel for fear they will not be allowed to return to MIT (a fear that is not unjustified), and it has diminished our ability to recruit the best and the brightest.
154
Colleges and universities who think diversity is important should stop lumping all white students whose ancestors did not speak Spanish into the catchall non-Hispanic white category. Within the non-Hispanic white category, there are students whose ancestors spoke one of the other 449 Indo-European languages, each with it own culture.
Schools could achieve tremendous diversity simply by adding an ethnic checklist to their admission packet. Schools willing to settle for less diversity could categorize their non-Hispanic white students not border categories such as Germanic, Celtic, Italic Slavic, Hellenic, etc.
Colleges and universities can harness the tremendous power of inclusion and diversity without resorting to racial and ethnic preference.
5
@William Case /agree and insightfully noted. Lumping all who are a non-Hispanic White perpetuates the idea that Whites don’t have a race, just like het isn’t a sexual orientation and males don’t have a gender as in gender studies. (And I’m just quoting Katz here) One of the functions of a dominant culture or identity is to go unexamined, uncounted, to be invisible. The idea that gender studies hardly studies Het males because society is already all about them, dominated by them, supports and promotes the dominance. I believe that part of “I’m not racist” is so hard for Whites to get around is partially the result of some dynamic/part of White culture (I suspect the part that doesn’t want to be a problem, raise a fuss, desperately wants to avoid committing a social faux pas). But we can’t know what that is because there is no “White studies” program, and no, that isn’t just history class, I’m speaking about the psychosocial meta aspects of White culture. Moving towards a more egalitarian society demands everyone gets counted, examined, discussed and considered, including considerations for. The current practice of sitting the dominant culture/identity in the corner wearing the pointy hat is not helping.
4
@William Case Universities did not invent the categorization you decry; they adopted out from wider social practice. Since white people (I beg your pardon) are not typically discriminated against in America on the basis of whether their forebears spoke Slavic or Czech, the "diversity" you propose is socially meaningless.
1
@Edward
Nonsense. Hispanic Americans lobbied for and obtained classification as a protected language group in the 1960s. Hispanic Americans can be of any race or combination of races, but most are white They are not darker-skinned then other Americans who have Southern European ancestry. Compare Hispanic American actress Cameron Diaz to Italian American actor Al Pacino.
Active academics find this a very accurate of the current academic climate. This year alone I have had two friends who taught in liberal arts unitversities take early retirement in response to the culture. Fortunately the STEM culture is still protected by the demands of a technical education, and the relative objectivity of the performance metrics.
24
@RG
There's a rude name for faculty members in position and ready to take early retirement due to "the current academic climate": departmental deadwood. Universities at their best as institutions are not quiet places of study and research, but intellectual and cultural battlegrounds. If you can't stand the heat, yes, it's time to get out of the kitchen. Just don't pretend the Ivory Tower is going to hell in a hand-basket because you can't find it in yourself to go on fighting, albeit for a lost cause, as every generation's eventually is. There's no higher nobility, no principled stand, in "early retirement in response to the culture." Just a confession of personal and intellectual exhaustion, which I'm certainly old enough to respect. But, please, keep the confession honest.
The notion that students and student movements privilege "feelings" over excellence of argument is about as tired and old as it gets. That a former dean should write a book toward the end of his career entitled "The Assault on American Excellence" is also about as predictable as it gets. Mr. Stephens imagines untenured professors are simply afraid to speak their minds. Nonsense. Younger faculty are generally in on the assault, spurring it on, covertly if not directly leading it. The savaging of a prior generation's values and convictions is the essential dynamic that makes higher education higher. The specific views students espouse in the process usually don't last, but the ability to articulate and fight for views does. And fighting dirty, fighting unfairly, counts. If Yale were a place where each retiring generation of scholars could calmly lay on hands, anointing the next generation in some placid transmission of accumulated Knowledge, it would not be Yale.
16
Just what are your convictions? Certainly not hard work over self indulgence from what I see of this generation.
For all your ballyhoo why is this generation so reliant on the very people they blame for their lot. It seems to me you prefer to be the victims rather than the innovaters you claim you are. Even your tech savvy engineers and programmers want to create a world of total irresponsible humans right down to driverless cars.
Maybe you ought to focus on some real issues facing humanity - climate change, over population, corporate and political facism. I talk to most of the young people at work, when their heads are not glued to You tube or Facebook. It's sad how little effort they put into "mastery of their trade"(I am a master electrician and technician). There are those who are true leaders among the young. the ones I have seen are not focused on entitlement. They are focused on the same values that their peers so despise.
Keep focusing on the mentality that everyone is entitled to a trophy. You are just like Nero playing his fiddle. While you rail against the machine some of us truly work for change, while others like Trump and McConnell and Ryan and Bezos laugh all the way to the bank.
I don't see how not using the name "master" or renaming a college can anything to do with the search for truth. I think instead they just hurt Mr. Stephens' feelings.
15
@Test Try read what he said again and in context with his article.
A fundamental problem in the US today is the substitution of the word "feel" for the word "think." Initially probably just a semantic substitution, it has resulted in people's assuming that their "feelings" are the most important criterion for judging anything. "How do you feel about Russian interference in American elections?" How you "feel" about such interference is really irrelevant, but how many people who answer "I don't like it," can give cogent, well-thought-out reasons for why it is a bad thing?
Suppose someone had asked Thomas More how he "felt" about being beheaded? He wasn't happy about it. What did he "think" about it? He was clear about that: given Henry VIII's desires for supremacy in the political sphere, his death was the logical result for Henry. More also knew that his own fidelity to what he believed was more important than his feelings about the result of that fidelity.
The inability to think and the resultant preference for "feeling" has infected our society through and through. The fact that those institutions in which young people should be taught to act according to logic, reason, and thought are now kow-towing to how students "feel" about things should cause serious concern among serious-minded people. How we "feel" about anything can be influenced by matters as ephemeral as how much sleep I got last night, or what I ate for dinner, or what's best for me.
Today, feelings trump thought and principles--even in our government.
51
Here’s what’s actually going on.
Kronman has been writing about how offended he is that young people aren’t conservative for over 20 years. This is just the most recent facade he’s erecting over that, trying to justify disliking the politics of students with some objective failing.
Stephens is repeating that because he feels the same way, and he’s thrilled to have his bias confirmed.
Conservative writers have been passing pieces like this back and forth for as long as we’ve had progressive leaning students. Nothing to see here.
34
Blind Adherence to past hierarchies seems a surer path to quash original ideas and movements.
16
Mr. Stephens is presuming that inclusion and diversity are causative of, instead of coincidental to, the current attack on free speach at American universities and colleges.
That presumption suggests that it is diversity and inclusion itself that bothers him.
24
@Celeste They are not coincidental, and it is clear that what bothers him is the attack on excellence and freedom of thought to which the pursuit of inclusion and diversity has led. But it is very typical of the censors to smear the motives of those who question their ideology.
This article has me thinking this - the only thing sillier than the group think of our universities is taking any of this seriously. These students will all be in the real world one day (unless they find some sinecure in the academy) and none of this will matter.
5
@Jack but I wonder if there is a connection to what is happening on college campuses and the online cancel culture of forcing people to apologize for saying something others disagree with (i.e. Mario Lopez for saying parents shouldn’t change the gender of a 3 Year-old), or getting them fired (Kevin Williamson at the Atlantic, or Ronald Sullivan resigning his deanship at Harvard for defending Harvey Weinstein) or boycotting corporations (Media Matters pressuring advertisers in Fox, or Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus for donating to the Trump Campaign- even though he’s no longer affiliated with Home Depot).
1
Anti-intellectual excellence in American life?
Aiming toward and achieving intellectual excellence period is notoriously difficult in any society because it's society struggling to realize it's less visible, more abstract qualities, ones that often take great time, patience, and complex methodology to realize, and to place these of paramount importance to society, more important than the more visible, evident human abilities.
Excellence in sports is much more easily accepted because society in its animal nature naturally gravitates toward the more visible, capable physical specimens among us, the ones which even without training and simply by growing up demonstrate physical excellence, which is to say society much more readily accepts as natural outstanding physical ability and of course physical beauty than intellectual ability and of course resists natural intellectual ability supplanting the former in historical importance.
In America the entire process of determining natural intellectual excellence for development is resisted by the crowd on both the left and right. In rare agreement both left and right in America hold that intellectual excellence is less a matter of natural ability than nurture, and that most anyone can become well educated. In fact society dreams of making physical excellence of all types more egalitarian through scientific means, that people can be modified to be more athletic or beautiful than they actually are.
We want to drown in herd.
6
Another story of “what’s wrong with kids these days, back in my day...”
“ The Assault on American Excellence” begins with places like Yale itself - let’s not give these elite institutions a pass on perpetuating quotas of all types that thwarts it attempt at true excellence.
Did we forget about admissions scandal so soon and how these elite school have basically just brushed it aside without any repercussions.
I guess when an institution has prestige, they can minimize these kinds of scandals but we need to write books about other things - misguided thinking about cultural appropriation and renaming college buildings as the downfall of western civilization and how the kids got it all wrong these days.
10
I happen to be passing through the town where I went to college. It doesn’t seem to have changed so very much. But the Medicare card in my pocket, that’s brand new.
My professors 45 years ago perched and paced. Some spilled cigarette ashes all over the floor. One, a theater critic, delivered exquisite lectures with about 30 years of polish on them - but only out of one side of his mouth. The combover had to be accommodated.
I admired almost all of these men and women, and wanted to be as accomplished as they were. For the most part, they were tremendously encouraging. But not 100 percent of the time by any means.
Only one thing on campus seemed threatening - myself. Inadvertently (or not), I did something fairly typical and traumatic. Blew up the myth that had sustained me for 20 years. But in the libraries and classes I eventually found all the pieces to forge something workable, possibly stronger. Even exciting.
A humdrum story perhaps, but happy enough. Not so fraught.
Looking back 45 years and beyond, I speculate on what may have been different about growing up then. Should I thank my parents for giving me a good leaving alone? Beyond a quirky (failed) desire that I have good teeth, what did they dither over?
Their attitude was: Get out the door. Get on your bike. Go to school, the playground, your friend’s house. Come home for dinner. If we remember, we’ll flip your pork chop over and cook it on both sides this time.
34
@Railbird Its surely was a time when being raised by wolves was just fine; not a reason to call the authorities. How did we ever survive the neglect and abuse? LOL.
2
@Railbird
Thank you.
1
Merit is more valuable than diversity.
All lives matter, but not all cultures (and behaviors) are equal.
53
@Ami
Really? Please define merit. Especially in the context of Yale admissions scandal. Meritocracy is mostly a myth. It sounds good but is mostly an illusion
6
Except that "merit" is measured through the cultural lens of the examiner, which means that all kinds of merit goes unrecognized and undeveloped because of the myopia of that one cultural lens.
When I went to art school in the early 70's, the primary art history text, regarded then as the definitive survey of the history of all art in the world, contained no art by women. As though no woman had ever made art. And, I might add, no art by anyone except European or American males. We have since learned, through the tenacious work of scholars of other genders and cultures, that there was indeed a world of meritorious artwork out there, done by people of enormous talent who were not European or American males, which had somehow escaped the attention of the European or American males who compiled the history books. Is "merit" something that can exist without diversity? I can't believe there are still some people making that argument.
31
@HumplePi
You ask a great question. It's tricky. Should we get rid of "merit" then? Sadly, as I've learned from living, there are always leaders and followers, there are always things culturally in and out of fashion. So "merit" may need diversity, but it also needs to set boundaries and say "x is NOT meritorious." Otherwise we have lost the meaning of the word.
Also, as others have written, who gets to define diversity? Why presume that a textbook full of cisgender white males includes no diversity? Does this mean that Rothko and Pollock are really identical? Should we toss them out of the textbooks simply because they are white men?
3
Disagree with Bret on many former occasions, but he is spot on here. A similar attitude about so-called inclusiveness) comes through loud and clear on Twitter and other social media - fit in (usually with far left views, but also occasionally, far right) or you will be howled down and vilified. Maybe the universities do it in a more " civilised " way.
14
Aristocracy? That's what universities are to uphold? OK, the original Greek meaning of the word was about empowering the most excellent citizens, based on demonstrable talents and skills of public value, but for many centuries now the meaning has shifted to those born into noble titles, regardless of personal merit or achievement--in other words empowering people by bloodlines rather than merit demonstrated through actions. Not only socialists, but capitalists, have opposed the aristocratic model, on the grounds that it's not only unfair, but unproductive. I'm also astonished that Mr. Stephens blames democracy for anti-meritocracy, when it's more arguably a system that offers opportunity to those of merit, regardless of the familial birth lottery. If we're going to discuss these issues, re life on campus or in general society, it would help if people like Mr. Stephens made a better effort to understand the meaning, and the history of the meaning, of key terms being used. That, by the way, is known as "definition of terms" and is one of the foremost principles of discourse taught by liberal arts educators since ancient times (including the age of the aristocracy)--and right down to the AP English courses taken by today's applicants to the universities Mr. Stephens discusses here. Another basic area of rhetorical analysis--the three appeals of logos, pathos and ethos--might also cast light on current campus debate techniques, if Mr. Stephens would care to consider those tools.
23
@V.B. Zarr Since we don't have "noble titles" in the US, the original Greek meaning of the word "aristocracy" is applicable to the American situation.
However, money is clearly a factor to be considered. Insofar as money, in this case an ability to pay college expenses or lack of that ability, influences where a young person "of demonstrable talents and skills of public value" can/does go to college, the notion of "aristocracy" is frequently--but not always--undercut. Good teachers at colleges of varying levels can and do encourage and "empower" their students to grow and develop into persons capable of positively affecting our society and culture.
Would these students have more power and possibility to positively affect this country if they went to colleges like Yale? Maybe. But that "possibility" might have more to do with the monied people they meet at places like Yale than with innate talent or hard work. There is a true aristocracy in this country, but there is also money and what it buys. Sometmes it buys power and possibility for those with less talent, fewer skills, and no demonstrable desire to beneift anyone but themselves, while the true aristocrats are either ignored or left out of national/inter-national level positions. In the end, the true aristocrats may not influence more than their local society/culture, but in that setting they, and their are many of them, demonstrate their talent, their skills, and their dedication to public values.
1
@V.B. Zarr. It is less about definition of terms and way more about affect overcoming reason, ad hominem critique trumping serious debate, and emotional safety as the standard by which culture is evaluated.
6
@Hpower
I take your point, but if we want to unravel what is now looking like a stand-off more than a debate, we need to find some particulars by which we can begin to address each other's arguments. I respectfully suggest that many such mutually deaf conversations often happen because basic issues like finding commonly agreed definitions of terms have been neglected or abandoned, so then we just end up banging our heads against each other's brick walls.
The vast majority of students on campuses are too busy getting to after school jobs or worrying about paying of the loans they're taking to be with this crowd.
This tiny group is given greater voice by pieces like this which use these loud few to condemn the straw man they build around them.
Sorry, campuses still aren't hotbeds of socialism and subversion. Mainly they are places of learning
42
@shrinking food Our daughters are in elite universities and they are aware of fringes on both sides, but they say it is not something that they, or their friends, dwell on. They have classes, homework, community service and other actives that are more important to them.
2
Did Stephens mean to shine light on the beams in his and Kronman's eyes? It appears that Kronman's feelings are hurt that he might not be properly recognized as the intellectual aristocrat he believes himself to be. And Stephens sympathizes. Not being called "master" is apparently monumentally painful for men of such nobility. One thing is clear, however. Humility is not an attribute of "the excellent few".
37
Does the phrase "... all MEN are created equal..." fall in a category similar to "master?"
At some point we must admit to the prejudices of the past and accept the sometimes awkward efforts of trying to right those wrongs in a time when the automobile has replaced the wagon.
The word "person" still has "son" as the second syllable, but it's better than only using "he," "him" or "his."
9
@A Southern Bro
The word "person" still has "son"
No "son" in "person"
"person" derives from the Latin persona, that originally meant theatrical mask. The English word "son" derives from a different Germanic word (Old English sunu, Middle English sone, sune).
1
@A Southern Bro --- The word "man" stems from the German "Mann", meaning one, a person. For example, the rather famous "all men, male and female".
1
@A Southern Bro | The word "person" derives from the Latin "persona," which literally means "mask, character played by an actor." So for you to say that the second syllable of "person … has 'son' as the second syllable" is a wholly meaningless observation. (For the record, the word "son" is of Germanic origin.)
Although it was cleverly useful, some decades ago, to invent the idea of "herstory" in contrast to "history," using false (and stupid) etymology to make a serious point is tiresome and distracting.
He's right. Liberalism today seems to be the embodiment of regressing towards the mean, which is unfortunate because equalizing outcomes is extremely detrimental to society.
44
@Lin
You are also right. But conservatism is also the embodiment of regressing towards the mean. Fraternities filled with the offspring of wealthy parents are a hotbed for it. They have given us Trump (US) and Johnson (UK).
So if you get tired from studying and need to get a break, you can either (1) join a clique of whatever ideology currently in fashion, or (2) take a nap, and continue your study, and remain an individual that thinks for himself, observes the madhouse, and tries to remain unscathed while the cliques are battling it out.
In a democracy, you are at least officially allowed to think for yourself. In autocratic states, and in many institutions of democratic states, lip service is however required: liberalism at the U, conservatism in business.
7
@Lin
Emphasis on equalizing opportunity.
Outcomes do not necessarily reflect merit.
You need to recognize that severe and persistent inequality of outcomes will lead to significant political and social unrest.
10
Fraternities are not what gave us Trump. The people who have been ignored by graduates of elite universities and Hillary Clinton herself (with an assist from James Comey) gave us Trump.
3
Stephens decries the loss of excellence as have all conservative pundits and academics when challenged by youthful idealism necessary to question the received authority of the ‘canon.’ Like others he also fails to explain or address what qualifies as excellence in any specific domain of inquiry as if pitting the mere idea of excellence against the apparent wave of ideological extremism overrunning our campuses constitutes an argument of substance and ‘excellence.’ Please. Enough of this time worn sophistry. And btw a plea for respect of all groups is hardly giving primacy to ‘feelings’ over disciplined and rigorous thought.
It’s a demand for the equal rights presumably inherent in framing of the American experiment.
41
@GRL I started reading Kronman’s book. It’s a short read and addresses the questions you are asking.
1
I am not certain that these radicalized students at these elite universities are representative of college populations in general---I taught at a commuter university in an urban setting, and, yes, I had some far left leaning students, but most were more intent on acquiring a credential and meeting monthly rent and tuition bills. I would also question, whether, these leftists outbursts on these elite campuses is a new phenomena. I went to college in the 60's, when student groups were occupying offices and on some campuses, waking up to tear gas was a daily occurence. Should note, that even in the 60's, most of us, were in college to get a job, not take down society.
14
@Amanda Jones
I'm sorry but the idea that students at colleges were waking up to tear gas as a daily occurrence is the kind of ahistorical "memory" that makes all these critiques of universities today and what college radicals in the sixties were like so disingenuous. Though I do agree that there is nothing going on at college campus today that hasn't been happening in one degree or another for over 50 years.
Thank you! Well said!! In the effort to include, we end up appealing to the lowest common denominator which is always mediocrity and sometimes bigotry. "Higher" education needs to form the mind and teach critical thinking and teach history as history, with all its warts. And Universities must stand up to senseless activism and bigotry and refuse to allow it to damage the goals of higher education.
27
An enabling factor in this mess is the idea of treating students as “customers.” My spouse is a professor, and it’s stunning how many of his students believe they’ve earned an “A” by merely completing all aspects of an assignment. Excellence is only possible when expertise and authority are recognized and respected.
109
"Diversity, Inclusion, and Anti-Excellence"
So Stephens and Kronman are in favor of excellence--and against diversity and inclusion?
I wonder what Ronald Reagan would have said about this article---to Richard Nixon in 1971.
18
@Helvius The goal should be excellence, regardless of race, gender, color, religion. Some place too much emphasis on diversity for the sake of diversity.
1
Most people don’t understand what free speech entails. It really is a radical concept, and an often upsetting one.
64
Excellence is necessary to a complex, well-ordered, competently run society. To fill positions with applicants on the basis of gender, race, or sexual persuasion is backwards. It would also be unfair to competent women, blacks, homosexuals who are also applying for those jobs. They wouldn’t advance on their own merits. Education is a case in point. The curriculum and purpose of education is growing to be the inculcation of inclusivity and identity politics in our students rather than the skill of reading a variety texts, critically analyzing them, and judging their ideas in a somewhat rational, dispassionate way. Students these days in Black, feminist, sexual gender, and anti Western history courses are sorting out Their subjects not by their own mastery but by the prearranged categories of progressive thought. Much of this is driven by a sense of a moral imperative to revolutionize society. Instead of focusing on the thinking of “excellent”, independent thinkers and scholars, it is propelled by group grievances and settling historical scores. De Tocqueville warned us about the tendency to emotionalism and mediocre groupthink in democracies. As we know now, college teachers who buck thiis activist program will pay dearly careerwise.
23
@ Richard, While it is horrifying to see the attack on free speech and “inclusion” of the opposite point of view in some high profiled stories from college campuses, i will respond to your statement that “to fill positions with applicants on the basis of race, gender...is backwards.”
This had been going on for decades. My sister, in 1951 Los Angeles, was invited to attend a merchandising school. Her invitation was withdrawn when they found out she was black. I still have the correspondence between my father and the school. Finally, in the end, the school admitted that her invitation was withdrawn due to her color. They said that the department stores that she would be required to work in, would not hire blacks. It guess they were protecting the “feelings” of their white clientele, who they felt only wanted to see people who looked like them. Sure, this was a long time ago, even before my birth, but imagine how much “excellence” was excluded from American life and how many people were turned away from jobs for which they were well qualified (as in the case of my father and oldest brother) because the prevailing thought of the day was to be exclusive. In case you are tempted to think that it wasn’t due to skin color, my father was told directly to his face “I’d like to hire you, but we don’t hire (whatever word was being used for African Americans) in 1948 Los Angeles. With my brother, it was in telling him he was “overqualified” after he scored highest.
20
@Richard
“To fill positions with applicants on the basis of gender, race, or sexual persuasion is backwards.”
And yet, over four centuries, America became the greatest power humans have ever known doing precisely this.
How does ignoring the past and pretending that it never happened, that it has no impact on today’s conditions—how can such such ignorance serve excellence?
1
@Richard
If so many positions are handed to women, blacks, homosexuals (open ones), then where exactly are all these people. Unless you are a bigot, you can assume that there are plenty of women, blacks and open homosexuals who are competent and quite a few who are actually better than their white counterparts (in strict "excellence" measures). Maybe they are those annoying 5-10% you see at meetings and think took the rightful place of a straight white man (outside of fashion or entertainment, I don't think anyone is actively recruiting gay people).
And only maybe 1% to 5%, depending on how you define it, are excellent at all. Most people range from very good to mediocre or even lower. Must your non-white-male person be excellent to even get an average job doing averagely difficult work?
And .. success at work has a lot to do with soft skills. Maybe these annoying non-white women or gay men actually are better at leading or doing their jobs ? Maybe making it through the gauntlet of challenges of getting to the selection process means they are more resilliant or they are better at getting along with others.
Also diversity in a company means they will match their consumer base and maybe provide a better product. Women can bring a different less hierarchial style to management and maybe make people feel happier at work (this sounds trite, but has been shown to be true, and better social skills that are more enhanced by sociatal pressures certainly don't hurt either).
1
Academia a battlefield between two extremes just like the nation. Ayn Rand vs The Blob. I find both a bit unsettling. Both are destructive of culture. Plato was wiser than we think.
5
Thank you, thank you!!! My observations exactly and it was nice to see these impressions expressed so clearly. I pre-ordered Kronman's book on Amazon, and the little blurb there gives more information about Krnoman's argument. And I do feel the tide turning. Woke is rapidly becoming a joke. Safe spaces and trigger warnings and anyone's feeling being equivalent to fact. And everyone deserving the right to never be offended. Free speech and debate shut down. It's insane! Keep it up and we'll get four more years of Trump, who, I think we can all agree, is not woke.
26
Young people are young people... and no matter how much they act as if they "know everything", no matter how much they protest, no matter how much they "yell louder" so they can get their way, life and consequences will ultimately prevail.
Right now, it's way too easy to find comfort -- and power -- in a big crowd. Technology like Twitter adds a speed of information dissemination "like crazy". Good or bad, it's here to stay.
Students, or the masses in general, can protest global warming to flags on Nike shoes with tremendous speed and ferocity. And sadly, the mainstream media has lost its way; rather than being impartial, unbiased investigators, they mainly provide one-sided opinions, which in turn, just add fuels to the fire.
Our culture has been filled with terms like "safe spaces", "inclusion", "ally", and the like. But worse is the constant victim status that has become "de rigeur", yet there is never, ever, ever, ever any willingness to accept that 1) life is unfair and 2) it is necessary to take responsibility for one's life and move on.
We Americans seem to love all this drama though. I admit that my Adrenalin surges when I read the news (it's like catnip for me). But I also feel like I'm being "milked", emotionally. Problems -- that really are not problems -- are given top news billing. Issues that don't matter that much become number one, including lots of victims and villains. Scary.
13
The biggest threat facing academia is the increasing corporate tentacles that have deepened it heartless claws ever deeper inside the academy, not ideology.
37
@InfinteObserver
I absolutely agree that treating academia as a "profitable non-profit" with ballooning ranks of administrators, a shrinking group of tenured faculty, and a vulnerable class of underpaid adjuncts is the bigger problem. And it won't be talked about in the culture wars...
Still, I can't help thinking that kowtowing to perpetually offended students is related to the "customer is always right" mantra that administrators have adopted.
17
First, Mr. Stephens has read De Tocqueville, for which I give him a lot of credit. As for judging John C Calhoun by our time, let's just judge him by his times. What in his upholding of slavery was not reprehensible then that is not now? Likewise Mitch McConnell in his time. Would you say what is a poor Republican supposed to do when faced with running a very minority party in the face of a Constitution that says majority rule (i.e. cheat at every opportunity), or like Sen. Calhoun, is he just protecting White rights he knew growing up in Kentucky, which would be a return to Jim Crow. Conservative at one time meant sticking with what works, not returning to a reprehensible time of ignoring universal human rights.
22
The administrators are cowardly, like parents afraid of their children, they've abdicated their responsibility. Jordan Peterson seems to be a lone voice of sanity in academia, and he has a following of young people. Believe it or not students deep down want truth and excellence. Even Holden could recognize phonies.
12
When I was a little kid there was a move at Yale to get rid of Calhoun and the stained glass window with slaves on it. My adults said he was a disgusting man and should not be remembered with anything substantial.
We're going to get Harrison Bergeron all over the place. I keep hoping it isn't really this bad, and only a few outrageous cases hit the press, but I wonder...
4
In the summer of 1965 or '66, I was the editor of the New Paltz student newspaper. It was a time of students seizing the administration building, sit ins, and discussions in classrooms, taverns, and the campus quad.
Prof. Richard Greenfield (author of "Ethiopia: A New Political History") and one of my professors in the African Studies program was walking across the grass in front of the administration building (now called Old Main) where we encountered each other.
"It does not matter what these students are advocating for or against. The truth is, colleges and universities exist for and of the faculty. It is we who are here for the long term. Students are only here to learn for four years."
As a 22 year know it all I attempted to discuss with him the merits of students taking over the administration building and making their anti-war sentiments important. Yes, his Cambridge, UK logic overwhelmed my logic.
3
@Harvey Botzman
Greenfield may have been right in '66, but few people could say with a straight face today that the universities exist "for and of the faculty."
Universities exist for the sharp new building campaign...its an arms race of newer swimming pools put in new dorms.
1
I agree that the climate of political correctness on many campuses undermine the sense of safety it's trying to create. Who knows when you might say the wrong thing about race, gender, culture, sexual orientation or gender identity or the history of America? It's a landmine out there. Sure, white fragility is a factor in a lot of the backlash to political correctness...but it's not just white people who may worry about saying the wrong thing about some group of marginalized "other" - whether that's women, LGBTQ people, poor people, or other non-white people.
11
@Syliva
I think they’re being well-prepared for America under Trump. If you disagree with him, he will hate-tweet and incite rallies against you. If your newspaper calls him to account, he will deny your business government contracts.
Students should absolutely learn that saying the wrong thing about Dear Leader will lead to punishment from the government, as Trump has so amply demonstrated.
I am constantly reminded how boneheaded men are.
The issues on college campuses are evidence of what you get then you teach kids about climate change, then tell them we are all doomed because fossil fuel companies put profits before human lives.
UNREST IS THE RESULT.
Mental unrest. It is logical unrest. It is warranted unrest.
It is natural unrest.
13
Hear, hear Mr. Stephens. The phenomenon you discuss -- which is eroding our ability to listen, learn, progess, and, yes, sometimes compromise -- begins with parents who will simply not allow their children to fail or struggle lest anyone (usually the parents) feel bad for a nanosecond. It continues in school with meaningless recognition awards and the minimization of competition (with, yes, actual winners and losers) and culminates in campuses full of "snowflakes" instead of students. Even a society with the most diverse origins must have a common set of standards and tenets in order to advance itself. And that means each of us, even as we argue, wrestle with ideas, and put forth our opinions, must sometimes shut up and conform. When it becomes more important that each of us feel he, she, or they is protected from any hint of discomfort than that we make progress together, I fear our society is doomed.
16
@Oren
Imagine parents who refused to let their mediocre, lazy, boorish sons fail or struggle and sent them to Yale or Penn, despite their poor academic records.
Imagine parents who propped these utterly undeserving sons up in family businesses, despite their repeated catastrophic failures.
Imagine if these worthless scions of privilege became President.
I, too, sometimes fear our society is doomed.
Then I remember that we are capable of electing the brilliant, hardworking sons of single mothers President, and I regain hope.
Masterr can have two meanings. A "Master's Degree" indicates a mastery of the topic above and beyond the bachelor's degree.
But a Dorm Master is something else. It might be a great person, but the imagry is not a good one and the term is not needed. There are plenty of better terms -- Resident Associate for example -- which are friendlier.
I don't know what the author's agenda is, but it seem disingenious to deliberately confuse the two meanings.
Words have meanings. Decent people know what decent behavior is, but sometimes unbalanced people see coded messages in the words that normal people use.
I don't think this is entirely a coincidence....
https://www.wusa9.com/video/news/local/former-st-albans-dorm-master-sentenced-for-transporting-sadistic-child-porn-images/65-bcc20c5a-855f-46af-9ac3-9c1cc543b11f
9
Bret Stephens wrote: "... college campuses over the past few years ... are experiencing forms of unrest unseen since the late 1960s."
^ Since the 1960s? ... The Kent State shooting happened in the 1970s. The Camden 28 raid was in the 1970s. The May Day protests in the 1970s were the largest civil disobedience actions witnessed in Washington, D.C. The Hard Hat Riot and Cambodia Incursion Protest in New York City were in the 1970s. United States v. Snider was in the 1970s.
But, let's face it: Stephens was born in 1973. Hence, he doesn't really have a clear idea of this era at all. To him, it's all ancient history before his time. From his perspective, he might as well be discoursing about ancient Rome.
Furthermore, his underlying implication that current campus unrest remotely approaches the unrest from earlier decades—e.g. when the Ohio national guard massacred college students—is quite risible.
Bret Stephens wrote: "Unlike the campus rebels of the ’60s, today’s student activists don’t want more freedom to act, speak, and think as they please."
^ And yet these same hippie activists fighting for "more freedom to act, speak and think" were excoriated by Stephens in his old Wall Street Journal columns.
In the past, Stephens blasted students for wanting more freedom. Now, he is blasting students for wanting less freedom.
Where is his ideological consistency? His only recurrent philosophical theme is that he hates young people of all eras.
De Tocqueville he sure ain't.
19
@Sándor Or maybe he "blasted" both groups of students not because he hates young people of all eras, but because he thinks that we have the just the right amount of freedom?
@Sándor I re-read Stephens’ piece. Where does he criticize radicals of the 60s wanting more freedom? The way I read it, he was contrasting 60s radicals as justified with today’s radicals as unjustified. I think you purposely misrepresented his “underlining implication”. What Wall Street Journal article are you referring to?
1
Better to give these sheltered adolescents a dose of reality. Re-institute the draft. But everybody this time, no student deferments, males and females, etc. the draft could be for the military, or for whatever service the country needs. These kids are the way they are because most of them have never had to deal with actual life. See what they have to say when their immediate future is not as secure and comfortable. Maybe they’ll turn their attentions from micro-aggressions toward something like the seven wars we are currently fighting.
12
@Cold Eye
It has been my experience that those most commonly in support of a draft are those who are not subject to it.
It is hardly surprising that our young people act like entitled ninnies. After all, that is what their parents raised them to be. Perhaps we should draft the parents?
1
@Cold Eye. Let’s reinstitute the draft in order to pacify and clean up Baltimore and other cities. Good for everyone.
1
Just another attempt by Stephens to equate progressivism with radicalism and antithetical to some false notion of aristocracy. And since when are diversity and inclusion shibboleths?
18
@Alan J. Shaw....since they became pretexts for discriminating against whites.
I have no problem with meritocracy being the norm, but I do take issues with equating it with dominant groups. Those who get in because of family connections or outright bribery (Trumps & Kushners of the world) tell us that inclusion of Obamas of the world is less meritocratic? Give me a break! If you are born on the third base and yet cannot compete with those born miles away, you have no reason to complain. Just look into the mirror and accept your own mediocrity.
19
You say "Before a speaker can be invited to campus for the potential interest of what he might have to say, he must first pass the test of inoffensiveness" I too have grave problems with such a litmus test. On the other hand should not speakers (especially if they are paid absurd amounts of money) also pass at test of "competence and excellence" that you espouse in this article. Why should incompetent right wing provocateurs like Milo Yiannopoulos, Camille Paglia, Steve Bannon or others be paid large fees just to carry out worthless and uninspiring debates. I for one never wanted the state university where I was a professor for 39 years to pay charlatans on the left or right only on the basis of free speech. While this problem is more one of the right wing again there are those on the left like for example Jane Fonda as a so called expert of the Vietnam war. I am sorry but may objection to people like Yiannopoulos or Bannon is not with the politics of what they say only that it is just a bunch of hot air. The inconsistencies of many of your columns sometimes make me thing you may be earning a place in this grouping of incompetents or least far from excellence.
21
@BC, you raise an excellent point. Whenever I read these stories about the radical censorship (apparently) perpetrated against such speakers, I have to laugh. These self-appointed experts are nothing more than brands. They have no particular philosophy they actually believe in. One minute their on FOX news or other outlet spewing nonsense, or the next promoting their new book. Also, Stephens doesn't know diddly about student unrest or radical ideas on campus. There hasn't been a meaningful protest on a college campus since the 70's.
11
@BC Just how is Camille Paglia an "incompetent right-wing provocateur"? Only the final noun applies.
1
"It’s a revolt of the mediocre many against the excellent few."
Nope.
It's a revolt of the meritorious many against the rich, mediocre few.
24
Some people are offended by the word "master."
.
Others are offended when the syllable "man" is included in a word or phrase; i.e. manual, human, man-hours, or "man the torpedoes". And what about woman? How offensive is it to define the female by the action of wooing?
.
Where are the language police when we need them?
2
If I could just add that being willing to listen to ideas you don't agree with might also require a willingness to recognize that you might just be wrong.
It is that unwillingness to listen to reasoned arguments from others that seems to be the problem.
On the other hand it's also worth recognizing that some ideas are simply abhorrent and do not merit toleration. The difficulty is knowing when listening is worthwhile.
Of course, that is part of the mission of a college or university - exposure to people and ideas you aren't familiar with and learn to listen, and learn to express yourself in a way that will encourage others to listen to you.
13
The situation at an institution like Yale is surely more complex than Stephens acknowledges. The vast majority of the students who apply to any ivy league college don't gain admission, so those who do get in form part of this country's intellectual aristocracy. In order to graduate, they have to master a rigorous curriculum, their passport to membership in the American elite.
If administrators emphasize inclusion within that select group of young people, they are hardly advancing the cause of democracy. The students, for their part, may be behaving immaturely (as young people tend to do), but their attitudes don't reflect hostility to excellence, which they had to pursue religiously in order to gain admittance to Yale.
Their discomfort with challenging ideas suggests a different problem. In high school, many of them enrolled in numerous Advanced Placement courses, rigorous but sometimes conventional classes which prepare students to take a tough exam without always forcing them to confront unpopular theories and ideas.
The notion that a hard course automatically qualifies as an intellectually challenging one is obviously not limited to the AP program (and is by no means characteristic of many courses in that curriculum). But the attitudes identified by Stephens (and Professor Kronman) suggest that many very bright students are not graduating from high school properly prepared for the intellectual adventure that college should offer.
13
Intellectuals put way too much stock in "excellence" as they define it. Let's assess, shall we what this kind of "excellence" has done for the world, besides awe and intimidate those of us who aren't quite so excellent. Consider the story David Halberstam told to devastating effect in "The Best and the Brightest" of all the WASP males in the Kennedy administration and the actions they took and lies they told to and on behalf of their president. Consider Winston Churchill, whose rhetorical gifts were astounding but who was so blinded by dreams of honor and glory he couldn't deploy wartime resources effectively. Let's read the last 40 years of Supreme Court decisions, written for the most part by the best legal scholars in the country and yet usually susceptible to devastating criticism by those who don't like their conclusions. Let's tally up the good and the bad that has come from Apple, Microsoft and the big investment banks, and see where they've led us. I don't dispute that the mass of Americans count themselves lucky to be alive in the age of the iPhone, Google, Amazon and Goldman Sachs. Me, I have to wonder.
12
Wow. I find all those incredible achievements and not sure what exactly you’re objecting to. Clearly no one is perfect but I wouldn’t want to live in a world without Churchill, Kennedies or Apple. What is the alternative?
8
@KitKat You and I have very different views of what mankind hath wrought. We must read different history books.
"it is being undertaken for the sake of a radical egalitarianism in which all are included, all are equal, all are special."
So close, but yet so far.
Funny to call egalitarianism radical, when this has been the guiding philosophy of the United States of America and other liberal western democracies that have flourished.
All human persons are equal in fundamental worth or moral status. Every person is special and unique and created by God (in my eyes).
Even using just a scientific lens, every person is a highly improbable survivor of ages of evolution begun from a star's gamma ray burst across the galaxy.
Now, if you are saying the strength that comes from diversity is abandoning the bias that narrows the selection of the best candidates by something other than merit, I agree with you.
Diversity and inclusion are important when they occur the hard way, through the end of racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, religious differences, and any other type of hate and ignorant exclusionary cliques.
Loving your neighbor as yourself is articulated by every religion, but seldom practiced.
We are all special, we all have different talents and skills that lead to different paths in life, and as long as discrimination and bias do not block those with the greatest merit from rising to their full potential, humanity will rise and flourish.
The most important thing universities can teach is the history of civilization, critical thinking and adaptability.
13
@David Parsons
This is true, but it is not the same as saying everyone in a college classroom has contributions to make to an intellectual discussion that are equally insightful, relevant or intelligent. All students in an art class may have equal value as humans, but they don't all produce art of the same quality. Not all learners have the same drive and motivation. We all have equal worth as beings on the planet, but some people achieve excellence while others don't. Bummer, but true.
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@Syliva
I believe I suggested making distinctions according to merit, without boundaries or ceilings for reasons unrelated to merit.
So we don't disagree: everyone should be valued equally, though we will make unequal economic, artistic, sports, societal, etc. contributions.
4
Universities aren’t killing the aristocracy. It was already dead. It killed itself when it turned selfishly inward and abandoned interest in promoting the public good. Now, we build character in an inclusive way. The “muscular exchange of honestly-held views” happens every day, but it does not require us to tolerate demagogues.
10
I'm not entirely convinced that Yale is endangered by a levelling spirit. In 2020, Yale College rejected 29,483 out of 31,455 applicants. That looks pretty "aristocratic" and "pro-excellence" to me.
13
I am a liberal Democrat who left academia many years ago to pursue a wonderful career in business. Your column gets the current situation in universities exactly right. What is front and center now is identity — racial, sexual, and political. Instead of being discussed and debated as they were way back when, ideas must first be filtered through the screens of identity before being deemed acceptable. As a result, real inquiry and exploration are no longer valued and we are producing robots instead of educated students. I recently picked up a leading academic journal with an essay on literature that discussed “speciesism,” a fake concept refers to human beings lording it over the animal world. How far we have fallen.
I still love to read voraciously, though I am sure they are all the wrong books, but I am glad I turned in my cap and gown all those years ago.
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@Mark Siegel
You say:
"I am a liberal Democrat who left academia many years ago to pursue a wonderful career in business. Your column gets the current situation in universities exactly right."
You left academia "many years ago" but you understand "the current situation in universities exactly right"?
I'm wondering how, if you left academia many years ago, you are so sure you understand what it's currently like?
Don't feel bad. I don't think Stephens understands either.
12
@Mark (and others agreeing with Stephens’ piece),
Since you left the university years ago, how could you know what daily inquiry and debate on a campus is like? Just as Bret Stephens makes sweeping and sometimes ludicrous generalizations, so too critics outside higher ed assume the worst based on a small number of hyper-mediated examples. What’s missed is all the creative, meaningful, and purposeful work being done across a range of disciplines in colleges and universities.
Try auditing a course in literature, rhetoric, history, sociology, and so on before making unfounded claims.
10
@Mark Siegel
You do understand that all Ivy League colleges were all-male until relatively recently, and that most had strict quotas based on race.
Racial and sexual identity have been “front and center” in America since its founding.
Please don’t insult us by pretending that these are recent phenomena.
1
Thanks again, Bret Stephens!
10
I do not like equating excellence and openness with an "aristocratic" removal from the fray.
Aside: Somehow some people are surprised that by indulging every whim of the most immature, tantrum-throwing, selfish, divisive people you only embolden them. Appeasement of those who proudly wave the flag of anti-enlightenment is not going to magically transmute itself into something enlightened and intelligent and good.
6
Let's talk about the real political correctness -- the extreme kind that is demanded by our commander in chief. There is no such thing as climate change, no such thing as Russians interfering in our election. It is no fair criticizing him in any way -- mustn't hurt his feelings or he might start a war. Scientific research is politically incorrect so it is hidden.
The stuff in this article is small potatoes. Moreover, Fox News had to search far and wide to locate the very few examples cited, because there aren't many to find.
16
@Eileen Hays I completely agree that the right has its own political correctness that is increasingly totalitarian. The religious right pioneered the elevation of arbitrary beliefs as more important than other authorities, such as, say, the law. It offends their (so-called religious) sensibilities to do their jobs equally for people like them and for those who are not straight. In refusing to serve the not straight they broke the law.
There is a parallel in instances at Yale and Evergreen State College in which students behaved abominably toward very decent professors based on the student's absurd yet still weaponized identity dogma. Those stories are horrifying to read about or watch. The issues of degraded intellectualism in favor of the primacy of identity is a serious problem. If a generation grows up with that lack of understanding and gains power it could possibly result in Pol Pot style leveling.
Many people appear to be credulous and gullible to the promises of leaders who are clearly (to the less credulous) lying to them. Corporatist Democrats, Republicans, Evangelical leaders, (nearly all religious leaders, to be completely fair) all very obviously lie to people, followers, all the time. Yet they are still given the respect of authority.
This issue is one of the most depressing with regard the true nature of humanity. We still don't know how to reliably hew to a moral standard that keeps us from horribly abusing each other. We are still primitive.
3
@trebor
I appreciate your comment, as it largely conforms to my own view of the world. However, your rather sweeping denouncement of religious leaders is, I think, a little over the top. I am pleased to say that I know a number of Christian leaders in my small part of the world who are trying to live lives of honor, love and integrity. That they sometimes fail is a sad fact of life in a tough world, but I find them to be much more honest than the Corporatist Democrats and Republicans to whom you compare them.
That said, there is, no doubt, the appearance of hypocrisy in supporting the forced desegregation of privately owned lunch counters while objecting to requirements that businesses bake cakes or arrange flowers for homosexual couples. I suppose that you would have to subscribe to Christian, Muslim, etc. religious beliefs in order to see the moral distinction between the two circumstances.
In the case of the lunch counters, God has proclaimed that all human beings are to be honored, regardless of color or sex. In the case of the baker and florist, the same God has proclaimed His love for their customers, but also His condemnation of their sexual acts.
By these standards, the unwilling lunch counter owner was forced to do right and the baker and florist were nearly forced to do wrong.
Religious people's efforts to live a righteous, loving, Godly life are often misunderstood or dismissed by those who don't share the faith, but they are not arbitrary in their thinking.
1
@Thomas A. Hall Thanks for your comment. I, too, know Christians who are among the most honorable and decent people I've met. Hindus Muslims and Jews as well. And atheists of course.
But your last sentence is simple not supportable. They Are arbitrary in their thinking on at least three levels. First and foremost, the choice of which religion to abandon your logic to itself is completely arbitrary. No one has to be religious in free societies. Even where having a religion is considered "good" there is a choice of two or more religions or sects. That is as arbitrary as a preference for red.
At the next level, the doctrine of religious people is fundamentally based on myth and vapor. It's premise is flawed so it's conclusions can't be solid. To the extent it ends up guiding people to good behavior, great. But it does not do that frequently enough to avoid understanding it as more of a problem than a help to humanity.
At the next level, the interpretation of religious doctrine by leaders and adherents, especially christian but also substantially in most other religions, is itself highly arbitrary. Many large sects seem to miss the most basic message and focus on whatever weird issue the "leader" finds important. This leads to minor cults of personality rather than deeply held religious belief based on...well, nothing. Deeply held religious belief is simply culturally sanctioned arbitrary preference.
3
The question is where you draw the line on who gets to speak their opinions? No one at most institutions would support having a lecturer speak about the Flat Earth, or Young Earth (the belief that the world is only 6000 years old). Who determines where the line is drawn? Are students really missing out by not hearing certain speakers? In order to deny a speaker access, don't those students have to be familiar enough with what is being espoused to know they don't want to hear about it? Bret just does not like that a lot of his personal views are old, stale, and out of date, and a lot of young people don't want to be indoctrinated!
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@ Cary Clark but you are being indoctrinated. That’s exactly what’s happening. And to answer your question as to where to draw the line, it is certainly not at the point at which the most sensitive person is offended.
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@Cary Clark inviting a flat earther would be incredibly valuable. It is surprisingly hard, and thereby a good exercise, to argue something that is so obviously false. It turns out that most people can only refer to authority (99% scientists agree...) and are at loss for words with the usually well prepared flat earther. Although the earth is obviously a sphere, understanding how difficult it is to make that point is a valuable lesson.
2
Because the phrase " all men are created equal " appears in the US Declaration of Independence, Liberals and Progressives often take that as proof that all people have equal intelligence and abilities. After all, if all are not really equal we can never have complete inclusion and diversity. So in order to have equality in all areas we, as a society, have lowered the standards when measuring abilities and IQs. If we continue with this deception we will have to be satisfied with mediocrity.
10
@Aaron Adams
The last two liberal Presidents were sons of single mothers who worked hard and graduated from elite universities.
The last two conservative Presidents inherited hundreds of millions of dollars and Never would have been admitted to elite universities without family wealth, power, and privilege.
Why do we have to be satisfied with conservative mediocrity?
"The word “master” may remind some students of slavery. What it really means is a person who embodies achievement, refinement, distinction — masterliness — and whose spirit is fundamentally aristocratic. Great universities are meant to nurture that spirit, not only for its own sake, but also as an essential counterweight to the leveling and conformist tendencies of democratic politics that Alexis de Tocqueville diagnosed as the most insidious threats to American civilization."
One of greatest universities in the US, and, indeed, one of the greatest in the world, presents another very different view.
"Crescat scientia, vita excolatur."
2
These judgmental students are the progeny of judgmental parents, who drove them hard to succeed. Their anger rose early in life at the unequal power between them and their parents. It is unequal power defined in moral terms, that is, who is to decide what is right and what is wrong. These elite students are acting out an arrested development. But they are not alone. Their moral outrage derangement syndrome pervades their entire generation, and has already begun to infest our politics.
4
This amplifies a recurring theme of Bill Maher's, whose critique has fair points. Being disinvited from your campus speaking engagement must focus the mind. I already see the pooh-poohing comments claiming the author is a fabulist, but a lot of us know there's something to this.
4
Oh, ha ha. Who gets to say that the Masters are truly excellent and above the distasteful common man? Perhaps they are just old stuffed shirts with out of date opinions of what really matters, and the Yale students see something that they - and Bret Stephens - don't? That what defines excellence for the Masters may just be cultural preference, history written by the winner, as opposed to the actual, moral, truth? There is no pathetic student at Yale after all; they ARE all special.
3
Sounds a lot like Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind.” Even though that book was written over 30 years ago, it managed to make all the same criticisms of the way Americans coddle our youth.
Perhaps this is just another old man telling the kids to get off his lawn.
11
I'm a fully-tenured retiree (Emeritus Professor of Geography), beyond the reach of tenure committees and the purity police. This is my opportunity to take unpopular stands that might cripple the prospects of working academic geographers, were they to speak their own minds. Unhappily, decrepitude carries a discount. My views are often dismissed as those of a pea-brained dinosaur.
4
The feeling has been around for longer.
It is what brought Trump to power.
He understood before most of the intellectual elite.
We are still slow to catch on.
And when the time finally has come, the third row torch bearers of political correctness will slink into the shadows, as cowards always do.
The next generation will benefit from it.
And perhaps the planet will survive as a result.
Thanking Trump for what he did - unwillingly, not for the imbecile he is.
3
When I was growing up, what is being excoriated here, was simply called decency.
5
Hmmm.....I saw the protests of the 1960s.
I was liberal.
I went to segregated schools in the south and knew it was wrong.
Was I protected against "ideas?" at the University of Texas in Austin?
My job was to learn.
No
I graduated and went into the army and then to Vietnam.
That universities are centers of intellectual conflict is the function of the university.
The university should have a student body that represents America.
Heaven knows educational opportunity is distributed by wealth and social class and race.
The elites are rich white places.
But protecting students from ideas? Where did that become a right of students? Protected against triggers?
I deal with triggers from PTSD and Vietnam where people tried to kill me.
So I concur with the dean.
Where is a safe place for the students? Maybe a bunker on a fire base? I don't know
Vietnam Vet
7
The results of "the assault on American excellence" is on full display in the degraded quality of debates and discussions. When I put forth the financial impossibility of the progressive agenda using data points pieced together from Elizabeth Warren's own positions (hers is the only one with enough details), the response is full of ad hominems - I am mean, I have no heart, I am a racists (no matter that I am not white, not born here), etc. I don't even know how to respond to something like that. I just go back to my room dejected and be quiet.
13
@Chatte Cannelle
Trump has doubled the deficit to a trillion a year in a time of peace and prosperity, but the progressive agenda amounts to financial impossibility?
Obama slashed the horrific deficit W. Bush left him. Clinton actually ran a surplus.
1
@Chatte Cannelle, perhaps it isn't your data but your presentation style. Also, just pray there isn't something wrong with you physically. Private Bone Spur might ridicule you in front of millions of people.
1