The aftermath of the nonsense at YaleThe reporter sums this up rather nicely:
Quote:
At Yale, I encountered students and faculty members who supported the Christakises but refused to say so on the record, and others who criticized them, but only anonymously. On both sides, people with perfectly mainstream opinions shared them with a journalist but declined to put their name behind them due to a campus climate where anyone could conceivably be the next object of ire and public shaming. Insufficient tolerance for disagreement is undermining campus discourse.
This is in the context of the female student screaming at Professor Christakis that he was supposed to be creating a home, not an intellectual space. Doing this, while screaming at him to demand to know if he understood, as if he were an 8-year-old defying his mother.
Not an intellectual space.
At Yale University.
I imagine that if one thinks of the pinnacles of higher education in this country, Yale is likely one of the first names that comes to mind. What are people supposed to think about the value of education if out-of-control undergraduates are permitted to run riot about the campus, confronting the faculty as if they owned the place and presuming to lecture said faculty on what their duties supposedly are? A half-educated undergraduate is able to tell a professor, to his face, that the purpose of the school is to be a home rather than a place for education? And do so in a manner that probably made him at least half-wonder if he was about to be physically attacked (to say nothing of what went on in the ensuing months?)
Yale's 2016 tuition is allegedly $47,600 before any financial assistance. Why would anyone pay such a sum - or, for that matter, even half that - to go to an institution where a student is able to unironically object to the creation of an "intellectual space"? Why would anyone seriously consider spending the money to allow their child to go into an environment like this? How can the school continue to justify spending its own money to assist students to be there
who object to having to learn?
Related, also from YaleQuote:
“The reason is that people fear the intense, vicious, personal attacks that seem to come from sincere disagreements in philosophy,” said Kevin Olteanu ’19, who belongs to the William F. Buckley Program, a conservative group that works to promote intellectual diversity on campus. “They are afraid of getting yelled at, losing friends, and jeopardizing their futures by making their opinions known.”
And according to News columnist Cole Aronson ’18, who is in Calhoun, the Battell town hall — where one protester told Salovey, “I have no respect for you” — has left students afraid that voicing their opinions might provoke ad hominem attacks from activists.
“It doesn’t surprise me that students who support keeping the name don’t want to speak up,” Aronson said. “They don’t want that sort of behavior directed their way.”
Aronson added that many of the students protesting the decision view the naming dispute as a litmus test of basic decency, a position that precludes reasoned debate.
Another student, who asked to remain anonymous, spoke of similar concerns.
“I only talk to people who I’m close with about this kind of stuff because in the mainstream it kind of becomes a one-sided, intimidating dialogue,” the student said. “I know standing behind what you say is the right thing to do, but that only works if people who disagree are willing to engage in rational discourse.”
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